Advancing Democracy by Law: A Foucauldian View on the Democratizing Power in International Relations

• Autores: Doris Wydra
• Localización: Il politico: rivista italiana di scienze politiche, ISSN 0032-325X, Nº. 231, 2012, págs. 206-230
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Although states, according to international law, are free in choosing their political system, a sort of �obligation� to develop democratic structures becomes more and more visible. This is closely interlinked with a growing focus of the international legal system on individual rights since the middle of the century. The discourse on state and nation building shifted from elitist projects towards public engagement, putting an emphasis on individual political rights. This article aims at showing how a normative understanding of good governance translates into legal acts in international law, thus providing a regime of �truth� with an emphasis on �liberal democracy� and translated into legal language. Under this �democracy dispositive� a disciplining institutional setting submits states to a regime of transparency with reporting practices and comparison, as mechanisms develop to measure democracy. Supported by a powerful discourse on legitimacy a division between �good� and �deviant� states constructs non-democratic states as a threat to the democratic stability of the international system and makes them a target of transformation by tools of democracy promotion. This article critically examines the power structures behind the �democracy discourse� informing international law and asks the question whether this push for international democracy (within states) is in any way accompanied by a call for stronger cosmopolitan democracy (among states) and how these two concepts relate to each other.