« A senior U.S. diplomat says a Venezuelan law granting sweeping decree powers to President Hugo Chavez violates a decade-old agreement of North and South American countries to respect democracy. »
This sentence immediately caught my attention. First, on a theoretical point of view I imagined the definition of democracy that was underlying it. Democracy is not only a democratically elected government, but also a democratic way of governing. Therefore there is a need to define what democracy is in the ‘post-voting’ period, as Dahl does. But how can we measure if a president is governing in a democratic fashion? Chief executives must have sufficient authority to govern while also establishing checks on their power. What if the people grant them the right to increase their power? If we consider, as Joseph Schumpeter does, that “the primary function of the elector’s vote is to produce government” (273), and not to produce a ‘will’, then the question is how to limit the authority of the government, once produced? What is the role of morality? Do we only need to define the format of the democratic institutions or also their potential content?
Secondly, I always have an irritated reaction when I read that North America encourages South America to respect democracy. Historically, the interventions of the United States in South America have rarely been encouraging and supporting democracy. In the particular case of Hugo Chavez it is known that the U.S government does not appreciate him and there are serious doubts concerning a potential U.S support of the attempted coup against him in April 2002. It seems to me that the U.S government supports democracy only when democracy supports its own interests. This is however something that needs to be explored more in depth, as it is only an unproved opinion of mine.
In any case, the fact that there are agreements on what is democracy is very interesting as it implies a common definition and a will to have binding decisions about it, which I doubt there is. It forces us to think about the right of nations to breach into other nations’ sovereignty, which is a very actual and captivating debate at the international level, with for example the emergence of the new norm called “the responsibility to protect”. It can start by one country affirming that a country is undemocratic and end up in a mission like “Iraqi Freedom”, therefore the agreement on a definition of democracy is critical.
2 responses to “Undemocratic governance in Venezuela”