The Importance of Being Earnest. The United Nations and Democracy-Promotion

Abstract

Democracy has become a concept readily identifiable with the United Nations (UN) in relatively recent times. As in the case of other international organizations, it was only at the end of the Cold War that democracy-promotion became part of the UN-driven global activities and distinctive agenda. The UN institutional and legal framework remained, instead, fundamentally unaffected by the post 1989 events, creating a problematic discrepancy between the unchanged organization’s founding values, membership requirements, and general structures, and its progressively more intense pro-democratic global projection. This chapter argues that the UN adopted an essentially instrumental view of democracy in order to remedy this discrepancy. This undisclosed choice aimed to present democracy mostly as a tool for pursuing the organization’s fundamental values and institutional goals of promoting peace, human rights and development. These contemporary dimensions of the UN action raise nonetheless a number of questions: to what extent should the instrumental approach be considered legitimate and effective? Are its underlying assumptions, particularly the existence of causal relationships linking democracy to the UN Charter’s goals so uncontroversial, both in the academic literature and in the global actors’ general experience? The chapter firstly analyzes the approach of the UN towards democracy before and after 1989. It then focuses on the view of democracy both as an autonomous and “universal value” to be promoted in itself (democracy as an ‘end’) and on the view of democracy as an instrument for pursuing UN institutional goals (democracy as a ‘means’). The three basic axioms supporting this perspective—democracy for peace, democracy for human rights, and democracy for development—will be analyzed from both a theoretical and empirical point of view. In the conclusion attention will be payed to the “importance of being earnest” for the UN, drawing on comparative law experiences and lessons learned.