The Human Right to Democracy

A Critical Evaluation

Anita Horn

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9783110629101
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

The Human Right to Democracy is the first major study to offer a comprehensive and up-to-date account of the debate. It reconstructs the relevant positions in that debate, identifies the key points of disagreement, and proposes an understanding of the human right to democracy that might form the basis of a wide consensus. The book rejects the idea of a comprehensive right to democratic institutions, and instead argues for a minimal "human right to democracy" which is best understood as an individual's right to voice. The human right to voice is a right, enjoyed by any individual independently of his or her place of residence or nationality, to be heard and supported in cases of severe injustice that is tolerated or condoned by the political community or polity of which the individual is a member. By bringing together human rights discourse and democratic theory, as well as taking into account practical politics, this study broadens the scope of the debatefrom a sometimes overly-narrow focus. The book is of interest not only to political philosophers, but also to international lawyers, diplomats, representatives of civil society, human rights activists, and specialists in development economics.

1 Mapping the debate

1.1 Interdisciplinary scope

This chapter presents the crucial controversies within the HRD-debate. It introduces the specific cleavage between practical and moral philosophical reasoning. Further, the current state of implementation of democratic rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) is discussed. Finally, providing the reference theory for most authors of the HRD-debate, John Rawls’ most relevant contributions from the A Theory of Justice¹ and his human rights account from The Law of Peoples² are outlined.

In order to obtain an overview of the different positions, one must keep in mind that the question “Is there a Human Right to Democracy?” has a positive, a legal, and a normative dimension.³ Comparing the different approaches that provide answers to the HRD-question requires, first, that we take into account, not only the final insights of the diverging approaches, but also the diverging premises. I argue that certain hot button issues of the interdisciplinary debate can be defused by redrawing the boundaries of moral and political conceptions.⁴ For example, while many legal or political theories restrict their normative claims from the outset to the political realm and the possibility of practical implementation, others operate at a rather abstract level and tend to neglect common human rights practice. The two different emphases seem to imply an insurmountable rift between the moral and the political rationales. The task is to show that these two perspectives—one practical and political, the other abstract—are the two necessary sides of a more adequate concept of human rights, one that keeps its substance and applicability if and only if both, its ideal-theoretic normative foundation and its political implementations are combined. In other words, if human rights are understood as mere political concepts, they are bound to be empty, and if they are understood in a merely moral way, they are blind. The differences between the moral and the political readings are visible from the start in the varying definitions of the very concepts of “human rights” and of “democracy.” For this reason, I begin with common work definitions of these notions that can be compared to the definitions used by the later reviewed authors. Democracy is understood as a constitution based form of government that guarantees general personal and political rights. It further guarantees fair elections and independent courts.⁵ Human rights are defined as rights antecedent to the state, which are assigned to every human individual against organized collective unities such as the state.⁶ The claim for a human right to democracy must not necessarily equal the right to democratic government. In a minimal sense, the HRD is defined as a universal individual right to political participation. As will become apparent, the reviewed authors represent each different readings of the HRD claim.

1.2 The forking paths of the human right to democracy

In theory, there are a number of minimal democratic claims already embedded in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Articles 21 and 25 of the UDHR⁷ demonstrate the degree to which the international community acknowledges citizens’ right to political participation—in contrast to non-citizens— as a cornerstone of a hypothetical HRD. The specific wordings—for example in article 21.2: “[e]veryone has the right of equal access to public service in his country” (emphasis added)—already raise the question of the role of citizenship and state sovereignty in the implementation of the principle of universal equality as claimed by the UDHR preamble. What is often overlooked in advocating the universal application of rights⁸ entrenched in the UDHR, is the fact that these rights—even if not restricted by race, color, sex, language, religion, birth, and social status—are bound up with the condition of citizenship. The interest of national sovereignty seems to take precedence, and it precludes human rights from universally protecting individual human interests (also acts as a protection against the state authority one is subjected, whether as a citizen or a non-citizen).⁹

From a practical point of view, the following questions can be raised: How would a legal HRD impinge on how the receiving countries deal with non-citizens? What political authority would enforce the HRD, and by what means? Could the HRD be legitimately based on national, cultural, or political identity, or should it not rather be granted to every individual that is subjected to and affected by (any) political community in which she or he lives.¹⁰ The answers to these questions seem to presuppose a general position regarding whether, and under what social and political circumstances, democratic rights and democratic institutions can be claimed as universal values that prove to be beneficial to every human being in every kind of society. Thus, the normative form of the HRD question becomes paramount. Asking whether there should be an HRD helps refine the more controversial, normative dimension at the heart of discussions in political philosophy. Which arguments are most expedient in supporting or rejecting the claim for a moral HRD? Does the

(dis‐)approval of a moral HRD necessarily amount to rejecting a claim for a political, legal human right to democracy?

Obviously, the debate about whether an HRD should be claimed opens up a number controversies in political philosophy: namely, concerning the relation between (i) individual rights and popular sovereignty, (ii) majoritarian decision-making and protection of minorities, and (iii) legitimate authority and the responsibility of supranational organizations (particularly dominated by Western, liberal democratic views) towards sovereign states with different governmental systems. The formulation and practical implementation of the various answers provided by philosophers and political scientists to the HRD question requires an awareness of the underlying different human rights rationales.

1.3 Rawls’s long shadow

John Rawls’s contribution to political theory has become a cornerstone for the current debate around the right to democracy. In his seminal Theory of Justice, Rawls conducts an ideal–theoretical thought experiment of the veil of ignorance,¹¹ before presenting the basic argument for moral equality and distributive justice. Rawls claims that a modern democratic constitutional state must uphold two principles of justice: the principle of equal liberty and the principle of difference, which set a standard for establishing political rights and for political conduct). A condensed version of Rawls’s liberal account of a modern constitutional democracy is given in The Law of Peoples,¹² which extends the social contract theory into an international arena primarily on the basis of the concept of public reason. The aim of the text is to propose a political model, a “law of peoples,” that reasonable liberal and non-liberal states and citizens could regard as legitimate and adopt. Public debate on political questions is meant to facilitate agreement under conditions of reasonable pluralism in contemporary societies, without presupposing a shared comprehensive doctrine of the good life on religious, philosophical, or moral grounds.¹³

The Rawlsian ideal-theoretical model—now extended into the international domain—provides a conceptualization of human rights that presupposes public agreement on minimal political (but not moral) values in the international community. According to Rawls, human rights “express a special class of urgent rights, such as freedom from slavery and serfdom, liberty (but not equal liberty) of conscience, and security of ethnic groups from mass murder and genocide.”¹⁴ Rawls explicitly d...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Mapping the debate
• 2 Political conceptions: top down
• 3 Moral conceptions: bottom up
• 4 An alternative perspective on the human right to democracy
• References
• Person Index