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Constitutional Structures, Sovereignty, and the Emergence of Norms: The Case of International Election Monitoring

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2005

Arturo Santa-Cruz
Arturo Santa-Cruz
Affiliation:
Pacific Studies Department at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico, arturosc@hotmail.com

Abstract

International election monitoring (IEM) has partially redefined sovereignty. In this article I locate the origins of this change in the Americas, claiming that the Western Hemisphere's normative structure, what I call the Western Hemisphere Idea, was particularly conducive to this new understanding of state sovereignty. In the first section, I introduce the continental normative structure, highlighting the way in which it contributed to the eventual emergence of the monitoring practice in the early 1960s, and I discuss methodological issues. In the second section, I briefly review the emergence of IEM, looking at the pioneering work of the Organization of American States (OAS) in election monitoring. In the third section, I review the subsequent appearance of IEM outside the regional organization. The convergence of intergovernmental organizations and international nongovernmental organizations in election monitoring is then considered in the fourth section. Finally, I present the conclusions and theoretical implications of this piece.I would like to thank Peter Katzenstein, Lisa Martin, Valerie Bunce, Mat Evangelista, Aida Hozic, Kathleen O'Neil, Hector Schamis, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on previous versions of this article.

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
International Organization , Volume 59 , Issue 3 , July 2005 , pp. 663 - 693
Copyright
© 2005 The IO Foundation and Cambridge University Press

National elections have become international affairs—and international election monitoring (IEM) has become an institutionalized practice in world politics. Today, the United Nations (UN), the Organization of American States (OAS), the Commonwealth, and the Organization on Security and Cooperation of Europe (OSCE) practice IEM. Election watching, however, is not the monopoly of intergovernmental organizations (IGOs). There are many nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), mostly international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs), that are actively involved in this endeavor as well, such as the Carter Center, the International Human Rights Law Group, and the Washington Office on Latin America.

IEM's institutionalization, however, is fairly recent. Fifteen years ago, none of the IGOs mentioned above systematically observed electoral processes in sovereign states; INGOs, on the other hand, have been watching elections since the late 1970s. But there is an intriguing and little noted precedent here: the OAS started monitoring elections sporadically since the early 1960s. This raises two questions: What is the relevance of the monitoring precedent in the context of the regional organization? How has IEM come to figure so prominently in the international agenda?

These questions are significant because they address the issue of sovereignty. In the modern state system, issues of domestic governance in sovereign states have traditionally been placed out of the realm of international action. Thus in the postwar period national elections have been considered within Article 2 (7) of the UN Charter, which establishes that UN and its member states cannot intervene “in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state.” Thus UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuellar noted in 1988 that the UN “does not send observers to elections” in sovereign states.1

In Stoelting 1992, 372.

It could be argued that because the UN gets involved in domestic elections only if it has been asked to do so by the government of the state holding the election, the international legal sovereignty of that state is not compromised.2 But this begs the question of why these invitations have proliferated only in recent years.

This article examines the process by which national elections have become international events, focusing on the effects of this process on state sovereignty—one of the ordering principles of international relations. Contrary to the conventional wisdom in the discipline, to judge by the neglect of this phenomenon in the international relations (IR) literature, I argue that the study of IEM does not belong (only) in the field of comparative politics. As a systemwide phenomenon, IEM should not be restricted to the study of purely domestic politics or of foreign policy. I argue that sovereignty has been partially transformed by the recent normalization of IEM, and that the precedent set by the Americas was instrumental for its normalization.

Furthermore, I claim that the Western Hemisphere's normative structure, which I call the Western Hemisphere Idea (WHI), was particularly conducive to this new understanding of state sovereignty. I thus conceive of IEM as the actualization of the idea of sovereignty implicit in the continental normative structure. From a moderate constructivist standpoint, using a narrative explanatory protocol, I present an overview of IEM's development, distinguishing three phases: one in which IEM was a states-only affair; a second in which INGOs became involved in monitoring elections, and a third in which INGOs and IGOs converged. The case I present here should be of broader interest because similar processes of what is now called “constructive intervention” have taken place elsewhere, most notably in Europe, after the Cold War.

With norms and ideas figuring so prominently, my argument might sound ethereal—and irrefutable. However, my thesis can be tested empirically. The narrative I present below would be falsified if, for instance, it was shown that IEM in Latin America was simply a U.S. instrument of command. If this had been the case, the United States would have been the main promoter—by coercive or softer means—of IEM. Furthermore, the United States would have conducted the monitoring directly—as indeed it did in Nicaragua in the late 1920s and early 1930s.3

But as the account below demonstrates, what transpired was more complicated than that. First, there was the internalization of the hemispheric discourse on the part of the states that started to request that the regional organization—not the United States—send election observers. Second, these foundational experiences were followed by the pioneering work of INGOs that—making a principled and strategic use of the hemispheric discourse on human rights and democracy—started to monitor elections in the late 1970s. Third, the states of the Americas came to accept and push for the institutionalization of this practice both in the regional organization and in the UN.

In tracing the development of IEM, I organize this article as follows. In the first section, I introduce the continental normative structure, highlighting the way in which it contributed to the eventual emergence of the monitoring practice in the early 1960s, and I discuss methodological issues. In the second section, I briefly review the emergence of IEM, looking at the pioneering work of the OAS in election monitoring. In the third section, I review the subsequent appearance of IEM outside the regional organization. The fourth section considers the convergence of IGOs and INGOs in election monitoring. Finally, I present the conclusions and theoretical implications of this piece.

The Western Hemisphere Idea as Constitutional Structure

In this section I present a theoretical, methodological, and historical discussion of the WHI. I make the case for the analytical and historical links between the norms underpinning regional interaction and the specific practice of election monitoring. This section lays the groundwork for my subsequent argument that something deeper than a mere “elective affinity” existed between the WHI and IEM. My approach is an “analytical statement” about IEM's implications for state sovereignty; it aims to be sensitive to historical structure, while capturing agent-driven change.4

Accordingly, the narrative below allows me to draw constitutive inferences and highlight the way actors “engage in discourse that helps demonstrate the validity of their arguments.”5

Adler 2002, 102.

In the first subsection I present a general statement on the WHI, IEM, and state sovereignty; in the second I specify the methodology I use; and in the third I characterize the specifics of my argument that provide a link to the empirical discussion. This theoretically informed, methodologically reconstructive, and historically sensitive approach allows one to identify long-term, incremental change in one of the international system's fundamental ordering principles: sovereignty.

General Statement and Literature Review

The WHI represents the “ideational convergence” of the states of the Americas.6

It is the continental normative structure in the Americas and, more specifically, the milieu in which IEM emerged before anywhere else in the world. The monitoring practice, however, arose in one specific area of the Americas: Latin America. This is not to suggest that the region was self-contained in this respect. North America, and specifically the United States, played a key role in the emergence of IEM in Latin America. Hence, my inquiry considers the interaction between these two main regions of the hemisphere. I am not saying that these subcontinents are two naturally independent regions. In fact, during the nineteenth century the United States often served as a “role model” for the nascent Latin American and Caribbean states, which were frequently ready to follow the republican institutions of the regional hegemon.7 My emphasis is on the factors that might have created a unique international (sub)system in the Americas, and on the interaction that created two distinguishable regions within the hemisphere. These two issues—the Americas as a region, and Latin America within the Americas—constitute the historical structure or background that made the emergence of IEM possible.8

Ibid., 47.

The first of these two issues, the Americas as a region, is closely related to what has traditionally been referred to as the WHI. As early as 1813, Thomas Jefferson wrote that the governments to be formed in the nascent states, “will be American governments, no longer to be involved in the never-ceasing broils of Europe. The European nations constitute a separate division of the globe; their localities make them a part of a distinct system…. America has a hemisphere to itself. It must have a separate system of interest which must not be subordinated to those of Europe.”9

In Callcott 1968, 14.

According to Whitaker, Jefferson's statement was “the first flowering” of the WHI.10 By WHI, Whitaker means “the proposition that the peoples of this Hemisphere stand in a special relationship to one another which sets them apart from the rest of the world.”11

Ibid., 1.

Interestingly, the perception of being “apart from the rest of the world” does not necessarily imply the existence of a community of interests among the states of the Americas. In effect, implicit in this “special relationship” is the interplay not only of the new world's states, but also of its two main subregions—a relationship that most of the times has been a contentious one. It is important to note this because it is common to equate Western Hemispherism with regional cooperation.12

But as Whitaker himself made clear in his seminal text, “the distinction between the idea and its various political expressions … should be constantly kept in mind.”13 The precision is significant because it makes clear that the “Idea” refers to patterned interaction per se, not to cooperation. It is the “Idea” as a normative structure producing order in the sociological sense, more than as its institutional manifestations producing cooperation, that interests me.14

Wendt 1999, 251.

Whitaker's work is important because it highlights the distinctiveness of the collective representation that emerged in the Americas. He emphasizes the separateness of the “new world” from the “old,” as well as the new system's cohesiveness, at the expense of the interaction of its two constitutive regions. However, this interplay was a fundamental element in the construction of the new hemispheric ethos; I argue that the tension-ridden subregional interaction was part and parcel of the WHI. Using Whitaker's work as a theoretical foil, I define the WHI to be the normative structure of the Americas as a separate system of interests—with the caveat that it is one made of two sharply contrasting regions (more on this below). By producing and reproducing the fundamental values and social order among the member states of the hemisphere, the WHI enabled a distinctive idea of state sovereignty.

I conceive of sovereignty as a structural component of the international system, one that has been produced and reproduced in tandem by the practice of state and nonstate actors.15

Santa-Cruz 2000, 132–33.

As Ashley wrote twenty years ago, “sovereignty is a practical category whose empirical contents are not fixed but evolve in a way reflecting the active practical consensus among coreflecive statesmen who are ever struggling to negotiate internal and external pressures and constraints.”16 Being a structural element, sovereignty does not dictate behavior, but rather shapes the identity and interests of the actors; that is, it produces behavioral dispositions, not particular actions.17 Furthermore, sovereignty has no grounding in itself. It is what the normative structure underpinning the existence of the states makes of it; without this grounding, sovereignty is an empty vessel, incapable of providing a basis for state interaction.

The WHI can thus be conceived of as a kind of “constitutional structure.”18

Constitutional structures are created by the practice of the relevant actors, whose interaction is guided by intersubjective understandings, for the purpose of solving the basic problem of international politics: orderly coexistence in an anarchical system.19 Reus-Smit defines constitutional structures as “ensembles of three deep constitutive values: a shared belief about the moral purpose of centralized political organization; an organizing principle of sovereignty, and a norm of pure procedural justice.”20 The moral purpose of the state lies at the core of the constitutional structures, as it “provides the foundations for both the principle of sovereignty and the norm of procedural justice, thus determining the standards of legitimate statehood and rightful state action.”21

Ibid.

It is in this sense that sovereignty both as a concept and as an organizing principle mediates, as Kratochwil has suggested, “between the realm of the ‘is’ and the realm of ‘ought.’”22 At bottom, sovereignty is about legitimacy—and states care about it because it is a precious wellspring from which they derive authority.23 The basic tenets of the constitutional structures, in my case the WHI, set the guidelines for state interaction, determining not only who is a legitimate actor and what constitutes appropriate behavior, but also what counts as a valid argument. Hence, individuals draw on linguistic and argumentative resources according to the structure in which their action takes place.24

Wight 2004, 280.

Constitutional structures can thus be thought of as communicative structures, as Habermas posits in his work. In his approach, the existence of a common “lifeworld” makes the existence of communicative action possible in the first place. By lifeworld Habermas means “a culturally transmitted and linguistically organized stock of interpretive patterns.”25

The lifeworld has three structural components. The first element is culture, which Habermas defines as “the stock of knowledge from which participants in communication supply themselves with interpretations as they come to an understanding about something in the world.” Society, the second element, concerns “the legitimate orders through which participants regulate their membership in social groups and thereby secure solidarity.” Personality, the third structural component, refers to “the competences that make a subject capable of speaking and acting, that put him in a position to take part in processes of reaching understanding and thereby to assert his own identity.”26

Ibid., 138.

Thus going back to the case in question, I argue that the states of the Americas have developed not only a shared stock of knowledge and distinct and recognized personalities, but also a sense of belonging to a distinct society, the one demarcated by the WHI. Communicative action is thus possible because the existence of a “background consensus” means that it is possible to reach an agreement on the validity of intersubjective claims.27 One implication of the “intersubjectiveness” of the lifeworld is that the boundaries of the self—that is, sovereignty—are at stake in social interaction.28

See Wendt 1999, 317.

As with communicative structures, constitutional ones are not permanent—they do not establish once and for all what is allowed and what is not. As communicative structures, they are constituted and enacted by reasons. Not all reasons, though, have the same validity; some are more fundamental than others. Those reasons that are more closely related to the fundamental values of the constitutional structure resonate louder. For in addition to universally held norms, there are region-specific ones, which create what could be conceived of as subsytemic “sovereignty regimes.”29

See Raymond 1997, 226; and Reus-Smit 2001, 163.

Only actors that conform to the discourse of the constitutional structure in question are deemed legitimate. In this sense sovereignty is also context-specific, with states enacting a discursively bound identity that constitutes them as social objects.30

States as social objects are partially the crystallization of discursive patterns in the international domain. I say partially because states also are constituted by social arrangements at the domestic level, which for reasons of space I leave out in this account. But each of these patterns has different levels, or layers. As Ruggie points out, the sovereign character of states, as far as their international interaction is concerned, belongs to the structure of the international system itself, as it concerns the terms of differentiation of the units, not the units themselves. Sovereignty is thus an intrinsically social feature of the state system.31

The nonhierarchical nature of sovereignty, or rather the terms of differentiation of the modern state system, can then be considered analogous to the equality of citizens in ancient Greece. As Arendt put it, “The equality of the Greek polis … was an attribute of the polis and not of men, who received their equality by virtue of citizenship, not by virtue of birth.”32 One cannot be a citizen without a polis and its associated constitutive practices.33 Analogously, sovereign states might be conceived of as the “citizens” of modern international society.

But the terms of differentiation that distinguish state sovereignty are just one “layer” in the discursive pattern that shapes the international system. Sovereignty, as noted, is not self-referential. According to Reus-Smit, “Unless embedded within a larger complex of values, the principle of sovereignty cannot alone provide that state with a coherent social identity … sovereignty has no purposive content…. Furthermore, it provides an inadequate justificatory basis for action.”34

Indeed, in the case of Latin American states at least, the idea of human rights goes back to the colonial period.35 Likewise, human rights and representative government have been fundamental in validating the claim to sovereign statehood since the emergence of the “system of interest” in the Americas; they have been the “nodal points” around which the discourse on state sovereignty in the hemisphere has coalesced.36 The WHI, as the continental “ideational convergence,” thus infused states with a social collective identity that made the emergence of IEM in the Americas logically possible.

This is not to suggest that this hemispheric ethos evolved harmoniously, or that power was not at work during its construction. Norms do not exclude power and self-interest as pervasive elements in social interaction.37

Wendt 1999, 253.

It is for this reason that the core values of constitutional structures often come from dominant states. Nevertheless, as Reus-Smit notes: “Once embedded in the practices of states … the values that make up constitutional structures condition the behavior of strong and weak states alike, facilitating both domination and resistance.”38 Hegemony, both in its material and Gramscian sense, matter in regional relations.39

Cox 1989, 42.

But the point here is precisely that U.S. hegemony became internalized by Latin American states, which in turn used it for their own purposes.

Methodological Issues

I now turn to a narrative explanatory protocol, linking the events I analyze to concrete precursors “that most plausibly had causal relevance within the social collectivity.”40

My starting point is the present, in which IEM has become commonplace, but my objective is to “explain the formation of this present in terms of its past … to describe how the present became logically possible.”41 Furthermore, as with genealogical narratives, my narrative is episodical, focusing “only on those aspects of the past which are crucial to our understanding of what was singled out as problematic in the present.”42

Ibid., 8.

In this account, historical contingency is important: the practice of (state and nonstate) agents is not reducible to either the purported essential properties of the actors, or to the structures in which they interact.43

The connection between the normative structure and the actual practice of election watching, though, is internal; that is, the relationship between them is conceptual, not causal in the sense of the covering law. My research is a constitutive inquiry, in which I try “to account for the properties of things by reference to the structures in virtue of which they exist”; therefore, the prevailing independent/dependent variable distinction is not useful.44

Wendt 1998, 105.

Working within the positivist framework, I follow a “particularizing” strategy; that is, I attempt to explain an outcome (international election monitoring) by giving a detailed account of the events that led up to it.

Like other constructivists in IR, I “argue for understanding parts [IEM] … in terms of wholes [the WHI].”45

This is one reason why this study should be of broader interest for a general audience. I present a structuationist argument “about the distribution of interests in the system, not about the foreign policy preferences and choices of individual states.”46

Wendt 1999, 107.

In the analytical statement I develop, the WHI is a cause in the sense of it being a standing condition, with the actual triggering of the monitoring practice being a contingent factor.

Following Miller and Searle, I conceive of a cause as the condition or background necessary for the triggering of an event, not as the trigger itself.47

See Miller 1987, 61–64; and Searle 1995, 127–47.

This conception of causality is particularly germane when dealing, as I do here, with normative aspects. After all, as Kratochwil has noted, “norms are not ‘causes’ for behavior but are part of the deliberation necessary to make a choice.”48 In order to understand the choosing process, it is crucial to make sense first of the rules that inform it, for the mere possibility of choice is intimately linked to its underlying structure.49

There is of course some overlap between this approach and the more conventional causal ones. As Dessler states, “Like any sound positivist explanation, reconstructive accounts explain by showing that the event in question was to be expected in the circumstances in which it occurred.”50

That is why I said there was something deeper than a mere elective affinity, that is, an adequacy on the level of meaning, between the WHI and IEM. Following Weber, I conceive of the relationship between the practice and the normative structure as one of “adequate causation”; this term, unlike elective affinity, does imply causality, although in a socio-historical context.51

Buss 1999. It is worth remembering that at least since Hume, there is more than one view of causality.

My analytical statement has “history ‘built in.’ ”52

Adler 2002, 102.

My reconstructive account is intended solely to elucidate how IEM emerged, rather than to inquire into how this norm subsequently spread.53

For constructivist discussions of this process see Checkel 1997; and Cortell and Davis 2000.

This is not because a genealogical account is ill-suited for explaining norm diffusion. The reason for this methodological choice is twofold: (1) my focus is the origin of a normative order, a subject matter on which not much research has been done; (2) tracing the spread of the monitoring norm would require me to look at other regions of the world at length, which for reasons of space I cannot do here.

The Inter-American Background Consensus

The WHI is the “deep institution” in which the historical legacy and agency of actors is played out. Going back to the continental conferences initiated in the early nineteenth century, and to the establishment in 1889–90 of the Commercial Bureau of the American Republics (later known as the Pan-American Union), the modern institutionalization of the hemispheric understanding took place at the 1948 Bogotá Conference, with the creation of the OAS—an organization endowed with a much clearer political agenda than its predecessor. By agreeing to the creation of the regional body as the forum where nonintervention and representative government issues were to be sorted out, the Latin American and Caribbean countries enacted their dialectic, composite understanding of sovereignty—an understanding that was one of the outcomes of the protracted process of collective identity formation in the Americas.

This hemispheric understanding had two constitutive elements: representative government (and later human rights broadly speaking) and nonintervention. Thus for instance, Article 5 of the 1948 OAS Charter noted, “The solidarity of the American States and the high aims which are sought through it require the political organization of those States on the basis of the effective exercise of representative democracy,” while also stating that “International order consists essentially of respect for the personality, sovereignty and independence of States.” A manifest tension exists between these two constitutive elements of the founding document—and its drafters were well aware of it. But it is a tension that transcends and predates the founding of the regional organization.

Both human rights cum representative government and nonintervention have been a constant in hemispheric discourse. Thus for instance, although Theodore Roosevelt had warned against basing U.S. policy “not on the firm ground of national interest but on the treacherous sands of international democratic propagandism,” in 1914 President Woodrow Wilson proposed a Pan-American Pact by which, among other things, the signatories would mutually guarantee their republican forms of government.54

Roosevelt quoted in Hartz 1983, 290.

Fittingly, early in his administration Wilson refused to recognize the government of Victoriano Huerta in Mexico, who had overthrown the democratically elected government of Francisco Madero in 1913. In order to grant its recognition, his administration demanded that a popularly elected government be installed, and that Huerta was not a candidate in the electoral process.55

Weber 1992, 320.

During the next decade, at the 1928 Havana Pan-American Conference, the Cuban representative warned: “[If] we declare in absolute terms that intervention is under no circumstance possible, we will be sanctioning all the inhuman acts committed within determined frontiers.”56

In Sikkink 1997, 708.

In a similar vein, Uruguayan Foreign Minister Alberto Rodríguez Larreta wrote in 1945 that “[t]he purest respect for the principle of non-intervention of one state in the affairs on another … does not protect unlimitedly the notorious and repeated violation by any republic of elementary rights of man.” Additionally, Rodríguez stated that in the relations among the states of the Western Hemisphere “the parallelism between peace and democracy” should be “an indeclinable norm of action.”57

In Ronning 1963, 68.

A society in the Habermasian sense was being built in the hemispheric state practice.

Thus it is not surprising to find several references to representative democracy as the only legitimate form of government in the OAS Charter. Its preamble, for instance, states that the “true significance of American solidarity and good neighborliness can only mean the consolidation on this continent, within the framework of democratic institutions, of a system of individual liberty and social justice based on respect for the essential rights of man.” But the nonintervention principle is just the obverse, usually neglected, side of the WHI's most conspicuous one: the idea of a compact of republican states separated from Europe. That is, by virtue of the fault line dividing the United States from its southern neighbors, the latter made nonintervention an integral part of the WHI. Thus while representative government was closely associated with the “compact” component of the WHI, more forcefully pushed by the United States, nonintervention came to be associated with the fault line separating the two regions, with Latin America being its main proponent.58

This is the second part of the historical background that I delineate: Latin America within the Americas.

Shortly after attaining independence, Latin American states expressed concern over the hegemonic aspirations of their northern neighbor. The 1823 Monroe Doctrine and the U.S. annexation of more than half of the Mexican territory during the next two decades were just two instances of the tutelary and expansionist ambitions of the United States. This anxiety was somewhat ameliorated on the eve of World War II, when the United States finally accepted without reservations the doctrine of nonintervention at the 1936 Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Peace. But the subsequent rise of the United States to superpower status only reinforced in the Latin American states the need to obtain an explicit guarantee from their northern neighbor. It was in this context that the above-cited article stating the importance of both representative democracy and the respect for the sovereignty and independence of member states was included in the OAS Charter. But Article 15 of the same document states still more forcefully that “[n]o State or group of States has the right to intervene, directly or indirectly, for any reason whatever, in the internal or external affairs of any other State. The foregoing principle prohibits not only armed force but also any other form of interference or attempted threat against the personality of the State or against its political, economic and cultural elements.”

Significantly, however, by the mid-twentieth century representative government in particular, and human rights more broadly, had become an integral part of Latin American diplomatic discourse, not only in the hemispheric affairs, but also in world politics. Thus for instance, Brazil and Uruguay strove to include some sort of democratic clause in the OAS Charter.59

Moreover, Latin American diplomats were instrumental in the drafting and passing of the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man, before the UN passed the Universal Declaration—in whose creation, not accidentally, they played an active role.60

Sikkink 1997, 720–21.

In what now seems a prophetic statement, the Chilean representative told the General Assembly: “no one could infringe upon the rights proclaimed in it [the Universal Declaration] without becoming an outcast of the community of states.”61

In Reus-Smit 2001, 532.

Actually, human rights would become, according to Forsythe, “the bright spot on OAS history.”62 There was thus an indelible republican template informing the discourse of the Latin American states by the mid-twentieth century.

But Latin America's sacrosanct nonintervention principle had also left an imprint on U.S. hemispheric discourse. The “Good Neighbor Policy,” which in some respects continued after the Franklin Roosevelt's administrations, is an instance of this. I am not suggesting that the United States suddenly converted to the principle of nonintervention in 1936 (the historical record promptly contradicts this assertion), nor that Latin American leaders have always been concerned about human rights and democracy (the historical record is again clear that this has not been the case). What I am arguing is that once the discourse on nonintervention and human rights and representative government was adopted, it was bound to have real effects—intended or otherwise. The effects I am concerned with here are not those related to the political regime adopted by the states, but rather those affecting their terms of differentiation: sovereignty.

In the hemispheric understanding, sovereignty was conceived of as a discursive bundle, containing “clauses” on both nonintervention and representative government. Hence, in the same way that the nonintervention principle generally constrained and came to inform U.S. behavior and interests in the hemisphere, the emphasis on human rights and representative government affected the identity and foreign relations of Latin American states. This is why, as noted above, the latter recognized that human rights principles were above an absolute interpretation of nonintervention. There is of course a paradox here: the nonintervention principle was shot through and through with a universalistic human rights discourse. Accordingly, at the Eight Meeting of consultation the Venezuelan foreign minister stated that although the four principles of nonintervention, human rights, representative democracy, and self-determination have equal legal standing in the OAS Charter, the second one, human rights, would be at the top of the hierarchy.63

In Ball 1969, 493.

The moral purpose of the state, embodying a dialectic understanding of sovereignty, loomed large in the regional organization.

The OAS as a manifestation of the WHI has thus been simply an instantiation of patterned interaction. As Alberto Lleras Camargo, the first secretary general of the regional body put it, “The Organization in itself is neither good nor bad … it is what the member governments want it to be and nothing else.”64

It was the OAS as the institutional manifestation of the continental normative structure that allowed the states of the hemisphere to become the pioneers in the IEM field. Not incidentally, Whitaker noted that the WHI was “a laboratory and proving ground for policies, institutions, and experiences that were later applied with advantage in the broader field of world affairs.”65

As noted earlier, my approach allows one to identify long-term, incremental change in one of the international system's fundamental ordering principles. Thus the WHI as the constitutional structure of the Americas has grounded the hemispheric understanding of sovereignty, an understanding that has been produced and reproduced by both state and nonstate actors. This deep institution was the “adequate cause” for the emergence of IEM; it is therefore useful for understanding how election monitoring became possible at the time it did in the Americas—and arguably useful as well for making sense of subsequent cases of constructive intervention.66

Adler 2002, 109.

The built-in tension in the continental conception of sovereignty allowed the hemisphere's states to embark in IEM as early as 1962—almost two decades before the practice was perfected by a myriad of American INGOs, and almost three decades before its adoption by the UN. In the next section, I spell out the first part of this intricate story.

The Emergence of IEM

In this part I present a narrative explanatory protocol of the emergence of IEM in the Americas. As I noted in the introduction, the OAS monitoring precedent has not been widely acknowledged. Thus both specialists in this practice and practitioners have largely tended to ignore this foundational experience.67

In addition to the existing literature on the matter, the neglect of the early experience was made clear in author interviews with the following analysts and practitioners: Sergio Aguayo, Mexico City, 16 August 2000; Thomas Carothers, Washington, D.C., 7 December 2001; Jennifer McCoy, Atlanta, Ga., 8 September 2000; and Robert Pastor, Atlanta, Ga., 5 September 2000. See McCoy 1998.

But as Elizabeth Spehar, head of the OAS electoral assistance office states, the organization's previous practice in this field was important because “the fact that … a country allowed that an outside organization came to witness the elections that were taking place, and to form an opinion and make it public at the international level” was significant in setting a precedent.68

Author interview with Elizabeth Spehar, Washington, D.C., 6 December 2001.

My purpose in this article is to contextualize the emergence of IEM using history for analytics to make the case that the appearance of this practice in the continent was attributable neither to mere coincidence, sheer voluntarism, or U.S. imposition. I show how the early cases of IEM were adequately caused by the WHI.

The origins of IEM can be traced back to the late 1950s. A speech given by Venezuelan President Arnoldo Betancourt in 1958 illustrates the mood in the hemisphere at the time. In his inaugural address he suggested: “Regimes which do not respect human rights, which violate the liberties of their citizens and tyrannize them with political police ought to be subjected to a rigorous cordon sanitarie and eradicated by the collective peaceful action of the Inter-American juridical community.”69

In Pastor 1989, 149.

The next year, Betancourt, drawing on the hemispheric “stock of interpretative patterns,” proposed that the OAS recognize only “regimes born of free elections and respecting human rights.”70

Ibid., 150.

Along the same lines, at the 1959 Fifth Meeting of Consultation, the “Declaration of Santiago” stated that “The governments of the American republics should result of free elections.”71

Fittingly, at that meeting Nicaragua presented a project on the use of international electoral observers. Also at the 1959 meeting, the Council of Jurists of the organization was asked to study the “possible juridical relationship between respect for human rights and the effective exercise of representative democracy, and the right to set in motion the machinery of American international law in force.”72

In Ball 1969, 488.

The Council in turn asked the Inter-American Judicial Committee to consider the matter, which ruled by majority that the Bogotá Charter did not allow collective action to take place in support of democracy.73

But the issue of democracy as a legitimate concern for the organization did not vanish from the agenda after the 1959 Santiago meeting. The next year, at the Seventh Meeting in San José, Costa Rica, an Argentine draft called for the creation of an OAS Council committee “to consider the request of any government that, with a view to fitting its political life into the active operation of American democratic principles, may for that purpose wish to be advised, or to demonstrate to international public opinion that those principles are effective within its jurisdiction.”74

Ball 1969, 494.

It is clear that the logic or argumentative rationality was at work in this instance, in which a new issue was being placed in the Inter-American agenda.75 In a similar manner, the United States at the meeting submitted a draft calling for the introduction of international observers. Thus considering the 1959 Nicaraguan initiative, there were three proposals on the subject of international election monitoring by 1960 in the OAS agenda.

The first instance of a regional organization carrying out IEM occurred in 1962, when the Costa Rican government in January requested the secretary general to send observers to the 4 February presidential elections. A three-member mission produced a report in which it considered the “previous conditions,” “concurrent conditions,” and “subsequent conditions” for a democratic election. It noted that “the Constitution, the legislation, and the current electoral practices in Costa Rica meet all the requirements of an democratic electoral regime.”76

The observers visited several polling places in the country's capital, San José, and in several other towns. The report mentions the consensus among all contending political parties in that the government was acting impartially in the electoral process.77

Ibid. The report does not specify how many polling places were visited.

The observers concluded: “[T]he electoral act that took place on Sunday 4 February 1962 was carried out with the utmost order and without any incident worth mentioning in all the territory of the republic.”78

Ibid.

The day after the elections, the members of the OAS team met with President Mario Echandi to thank him for “the trust deposited by the Government of Costa Rica in the OAS, as shown by its request for an electoral observation mission.”79

Ibid.

The mission acknowledged the opportunity it was given “to penetrate into the heart of such a transcendental election.”80

Ibid.

In its conclusions, the observers' report notes that “it would be convenient to suggest to extend to other countries that request it, the endeavor of technical assistance by OAS observers that has been put in practice in this opportunity.”81

Ibid.

Perhaps because the request of the Costa Rican government was sent directly to the secretary general, and because its political regime was widely recognized as democratic, this foundational IEM experience passed practically unnoticed in the hemisphere.

The regional organization's second venture into IEM, though, was rather different. The same year the Costa Rican monitoring took place came a second request, this one from the government of the Dominican Republic. In contrast to the previous case, the issue of sending observers to the Antillean country was more contentious. At the 1960 San José Conference, OAS foreign ministers had rejected an offer by the Dominican Republic to accept electoral observers, on the basis that “this would constitute OAS intervention in the internal affairs of a member state.”82

In Slater 1967, 213.

Nevertheless, following President Leónidas Trujillo's assassination in May 1961, President Joaquín Balaguer, the new head of state, started introducing democratic reforms and appealed to the OAS for assistance on electoral matters once again.

The OAS responded positively to this second petition and sent a three-member technical assistance mission. After the Dominican government asked for further services, the mission suggested that foreign observers attend the December elections, to which the government agreed. On this occasion, the OAS mission was composed of almost fifty “distinguished individuals” from throughout the Americas.83

Beigbeder 1994, 232–33. According to an internal OAS document on early monitoring missions (on file with author), the team was composed of thirty-six observers. Perhaps some of the “distinguished individuals” of the OAS mission included in Beigbeder's account were not observers strictly speaking. In any case, the number of observers was significant.

As Slater observed, “In view of the long tradition of non-intervention, the deep involvement of the OAS in Dominican internal matters was remarkable.”84

Concurrently with the December elections, the First Symposium on Representative Democracy took place in Santo Domingo within the OAS framework. Two of the topics on which the event focused were self-determination and nonintervention. The symposium concluded that: “self-determination does not mean the violent destruction of the principles and standards that constitute the basis of the regional organization, instead of adherence to established procedures,” and that “the idea of nonintervention is a projection into the sphere of international relations of the ideas of freedom and equality in relations between individuals in a given state.” Furthermore, the symposium cited among the actions that “cannot be described as intervention … [those taken] by the authorities of the regional organization in fulfillment of international standards freely consented to by the state towards which they are directed.”85

OAS 1962a, 80.

In trying to establish a new norm, actors acting in the discursive context of the regional body couched their prescriptions in terms accepted as valid in the Inter-American speech community.86 Nonintervention was not considered a self-referential value, but rather part and parcel of the hemispheric constitutional structure. As the representatives of the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Honduras, and Costa Rica stated at the 30 July 1962 Council of Foreign Ministers meeting, “The exercise of representative democracy and respect for human rights has ceased to be an internal matter of each state but has become an international obligation.”87

The next year, the OAS sent two electoral assistance missions to Central America: one to Nicaragua to observe the 3 February presidential elections, and another one to Honduras to provide technical assistance for the 13 October general elections. The former endeavor was composed of three observers, and it produced no final report. The latter, also consisting of only three members, delivered a comprehensive report—more than sixty pages long—on the Honduran electoral system that included suggestions for the then forthcoming elections. In preparing the report, the mission visited the Central American country for an unusually long period—sixty days.88

OAS 1963, vii.

In presenting their observations to the Honduran government, the members of the mission noted that their suggestions “would imply comprehensive reforms that impact beyond the sphere of the vote.”89

Ibid., viii.

Thus for instance, the OAS envoys suggested changes in the relationship between the Army and the Civil Guard, and in the voting method.90

Ibid.

The observers, tellingly, praised the Honduran government for “voluntarily putting at the consideration of the American commonwealth its political performance,” and remarked that the Honduran electoral process was “a common cause of the continental democracy.”91

Ibid.

Thus IEM was not just a practice imposed by the United States on its weak neighbors. Furthermore, it is important to note that although by the late 1960s the United States had for all practical purposes lost effective control of the regional organization,92

Farer 1993, 337.

IEM continued at about the same pace during the following years, with eleven missions between 1965 and 1978.93

Baena Soares 1994. The OAS monitoring missions, though, were generally quite small. Thus for instance, in 1968 the Ecuadorian government requested the secretary general to designate “three high ranking figures of the American continent” to serve as observers. Not surprisingly, the mission's report points out that “it was not possible to cover the national territory in its entirety, as in the case of several similar missions that have serve [sic] as a precedent for this one.” OAS 1968, 2.

For instance, the report from the Preparatory Commission for the Consultative Meeting of Ministers of Foreign Affairs on Representative Democracy, submitted to the OAS Council in February 1965, stated that “the existence of antidemocratic regimes constitutes a violation of the founding principles of the Organization of American States, and a danger for the solidarity and peaceful interaction in the Hemisphere,” reaffirming that the “governments of the American Republics should emanate from free elections.”94 Seven years later, in 1972, Secretary General Galo Plaza wrote to the Chairman of the Permanent Council on the advisability of standards being established by the Council for the appointment of election observers.95 Although the OAS did not specify those standards for a long time (until the late 1990s), it continued to send observers to member states on an ad hoc basis through the 1970 and 1980s. Being a bona fide member of the inter-American community continued to be a relevant matter for member states.

Hence, in 1980 the Guatemalan government requested that the regional organization to observe its municipal elections as a “demonstration to the international community” of the democratic nature of its political regime.96

OAS 1980. By this time the OAS had sent sixteen monitoring missions; it was only at this point—December 1980—that a second IGO, the British Commonwealth, first monitored an election in a sovereign country: Uganda. However, the next Commonwealth mission would not take place until a decade later, in Malaysia. Beigbeder 1994, 242–44.

Four years later, another Guatemalan request mentioned that the government “has committed itself, both domestically and internationally, to hold a pure and honest election.”97 Similarly, that same year the Salvadoran government requested observers to the regional body so that they could be “eyewitnesses to the progress El Salvador has made along the paths of the democratic system of government.”98 With missions also to Bolivia, Ecuador, and Grenada, among others, by 1984 the OAS had observed twenty-three elections in member states.99

See Web site 〈http://upd.oas.org/lab/special/eoms62_89.html〉. Accessed 10 March 2005.

In the midst of the wave of democratic transitions initiated in the late 1970s in Latin America, the OAS updated its founding documents.100

In 1985 in Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, the OAS amended its Charter, endowing the organization with a new mission, the promotion of democracy. The 1985 Protocol of Amendment, as a posterior OAS document setting the standards for its observers notes, “provides the general principle for the new kind of election monitoring by the Organization.”101

In this section, I have contextualized the emergence of election monitoring, highlighting the importance of the WHI in its appearance. This normative milieu evinces that OAS monitoring was attributable neither to mere coincidence, sheer voluntarism, or U.S. imposition; the continent's constitutional structure, instead, was its adequate cause.

INGOs Start Monitoring Elections

In this section, I show how INGOs built on the hemispheric discourse and practice to engage in IEM. It thus becomes clear that previous OAS monitoring was not inconsequential for its spillover to nongovernmental actors. Furthermore, I also argue that by conducting a much more independent and thorough job, monitoring INGOs virtually changed the character of the practice—even for the regional organization. IEM thus stopped being a largely symbolic endeavor.

Just as state-sponsored IEM in the Americas was becoming more systematic in the late 1970s and early 1980s, INGOs entered the scene, often interacting with domestic monitoring groups. The arrival of INGOs into this arena was an intrinsic component of the development of the democratic discourse in the hemisphere. Those states of the hemisphere with the strongest civil societies were, not surprisingly, the ones with more active citizen organizations. Here again, the fault line between the United States and the rest of the hemisphere was pronounced. The United States has historically had the most articulated and independent civil society in the Americas, of which Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America is early evidence. In addition, the hegemonic position of the United States put the INGOs of this country in a privileged position vis-à-vis its counterparts in the hemisphere.

As the U.S. INGOs began to broaden their scope of activities, which had traditionally focused on conventional human rights issues, the convergence with domestic groups in Latin America working on political rights issues came readily. Thus the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) started monitoring elections in 1978, sending observers to Bolivia. It observed the Guyana elections in 1980 and the electoral process in Honduras in 1981. In 1983 WOLA observers monitored the elections in Argentina. That same year the International Human Rights Law Group (henceforth the Law Group) established its Election Observer Project, working with activists of the target states. In 1984 the Law Group published Guidelines for International Election Observing by its project director, Larry Garber, which would become the standard for election observing both for INGOs and IGOs.102

Jason 1992, 1802.

In 1984 WOLA and the Law Group jointly observed the elections in Nicaragua and Uruguay.103 The Law Group also observed the electoral process in Grenada that year, and in 1985 the ones that took place in El Salvador and Guatemala. By 1990 the Law Group had organized twenty-five election monitoring missions, mostly in Latin America, but also in Asia and Africa.

The Carter Center, established in 1982, is likewise an INGO, but it has manifest links to the U.S. government. Headed by former President Jimmy Carter, in 1986 it hosted a conference on democracy in the Americas, which renown politicians from around the continent attended. As a result of the conference, twelve former and current heads of government from the Americas established the Council of Freely Elected Heads of Government, which was to be based at the Carter Center.104

The Center's staff, and President Carter in particular, became the core of the council. Among the council's founding goals was “to promote multilateral democratic transitions and to reinforce the consolidation of new and re-emerging democracies in the region.”105

Ibid., 7.

Its first monitoring mission was to Haiti in 1987, at the request of the transitional government. Earlier that year, the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI), and the International Republican Institute (IRI) had sent a joint mission, of which Garber of the Law Group was a member, to observe the constitutional referendum. The Carter Center played a prominent role in the 1989 Panamanian elections, with Carter denouncing the electoral fraud carried out by the government of Manuel Noriega.

The year after the founding of the Carter Center, the U.S. Congress established the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) to “promote United States nongovernmental participation … in democratic training programs and democratic institution building abroad” and “to strengthen democratic electoral processes abroad through timely measures in cooperation with indigenous democratic forces.”106

In Jason 1992, 1827.

Despite its links to the U.S. government, NED was created as a private, nonprofit, bipartisan organization. It is primarily a grant-making institution, and the majority of the programs on democracy promotion funded by it are carried out by the NDI, and the IRI, both established as NED's offshoots in 1983, and affiliated with the Democratic and Republican Parties, respectively. These institutes, but NDI more aggressively, have been active in monitoring elections worldwide.

INGOs have been instrumental in the success of cases that proved crucial to the institutionalization of electoral observation. Thus, for instance, the Carter Center played a crucial role in the 1990 Nicaraguan elections. Former President Carter acted as a mediator between the Sandinista government and the opposition to solve some problems that arose in the electoral process, and he pushed for the organization of quick counts.107

Pastor 1990, 18–19.

Moreover, prominent INGO members, such as Garber, joined the OAS team in Nicaragua. Garber also drafted the OAS Observers Guide used by the regional organization in Nicaragua.108

Jason 1992, 1817.

INGOs contributed to create the synergy that made the initial informal involvement of IGOs in electoral observation possible. As Garber notes, the monitoring activities of INGOs in the early 1980s were “essential” for its later institutionalization in fora such as the UN.109

Larry Garber, E-mail communication, 15 November 2001.

It is thus not surprising that when the issue of creating a specialized electoral unit emerged at the UN in the early 1990s, it was welcomed by INGOs.110

Jason 1992, 1817.

INGOs have also been instrumental in the emergence and consolidation of an international network of electoral observation. The monitoring by INGOs of the 1988 Chilean plebiscite became a milestone for the emergence of this network in the Americas, because this highly visible event—in which the fate of one of the most despised dictatorships in the world was at stake—was not observed by the Inter-American body. But the Law Group, which along with NDI was one of the most seriously engaged monitoring organizations present in the Andean country, drew on previous state practice to justify its activities. Thus, for instance, it mentioned explicitly the monitoring practice in Latin America as a reason why the Chilean government “should permit international observation of the upcoming electoral exercise and of the environment in which the process occurs.”111

Likewise, the example set by United States and U.S.-supported citizen organizations on the field of election monitoring greatly contributed to the emergence of a strong network of this kind in Mexico.112

Author interview with Robert Pastor, Atlanta, Ga., 5 September 2000, and with Sergio Aguayo, Mexico City, 8 May 2002.

But again, U.S. NGOs are not all-powerful entities that by their mere presence in the target state make the emergence of a robust observation network possible. It takes two mature civil societies to create an effective monitoring network in a country. In this sense, the interaction that took place between domestic and foreign observers in Haiti in 1987 is different from that of Chile in 1988, or in Mexico in 1994, because the former country lacks the more consolidated civil society the other two posses.

It was the constitutional structure created by state practice that made the emergence of this network of INGOs possible. Because INGOs have different interests and identities from states or IGOs, the birth of this network in the hemisphere in the 1980s gave rise to a interesting dynamic in this arena. Thus there have been occasions in which IGOs have not been present at some electoral processes (either because they declined to send a mission, or because they were not invited by the national government), while INGOs were present. In the Americas, this happened, in addition to the Chilean and Panamanian cases already mentioned, in Haiti in 1987.113

Jason 1992, 1843.

The work of INGOs during the 1980s can thus be considered a second phase in the history of IEM in the continent, a phase in which the monitoring of elections became much more substantial, as the teams sent by INGO tended to do a much more exhaustive job than the token delegations traditionally sent by the OAS. The INGOs, however, were building on the state practice that preceded them within the OAS—and more generally, on the WHI as constitutional structure.

The Convergence of IGOs and INGOs

In this section I discuss the third and final phase in the development of IEM in the Western Hemisphere, in which IGOs and INGOs started to work in tandem. The significance of this stage is that it represents the actualization of the WHI, because it was only at this point that states openly recognized that what was earlier conceived of as their domestic realm was now a matter of state and nonstate actors' interest—regardless of their geographical location. The idea of sovereignty implicit in the WHI had been realized. Thus, paraphrasing Hegel on the relationship between buds and trees, one could say that the WHI has the practice of state sovereignty as instantiated by the normalization of IEM within it and contains its entire strength, although it has not yet become this practice itself.114

IEM's third phase started in 1989–90, when INGOs, the OAS, and the UN, converged their monitoring activity in the Nicaraguan election in 1990. On election day, 2,578 accredited foreign observers from 279 organizations were present in Nicaragua.115

The UN and the OAS established the largest and most comprehensive electoral observation missions ever in a sovereign country. This was a watershed in IEM's history. As Pastor noted, by inviting international monitoring missions the Nicaraguan government was “crossing [the] Rubicon of sovereignty…. Up until that moment, most governments … viewed elections as internal matters….With the official invitations [to the OAS, the UN, and the Carter Center], the Nicaraguans transcended conventional definitions of sovereignty.”116

Nevertheless, the UN was reluctant to participate. It did not want to set the precedent of intervening in what was still considered a purely domestic issue. As UN Secretary-General Pérez de Cuellar noted after receiving the Nicaraguan request to observe the elections, going to a sovereign country to embark on this task was “an exceptional undertaking which breaks new ground in our [the UN's] 44-year history.”117

Ibid., 250.

A few months after it agreed to send a mission to Nicaragua, the UN's unease with IEM was demonstrated when it declined a request by the Romanian government to monitor its first post-Communist elections: “the United Nations does not monitor internal elections in a country.”118

Fox 1995, 1661.

The OAS, in contrast, had no qualms about monitoring the 1990 Nicaraguan electoral process. As Mariano Fiallos, head of the Nicaraguan Supreme Electoral Council at the time noted, this was because the regional organization “was used to monitoring elections.”119

Author interview with Mariano Fiallos, León, Nicaragua, 5 October 2001.

But this experience was unquestionably substantially different. As OAS's Spehar remarks, the organization's pre-Nicaragua 1990 missions were “made within very clear parameters,” and they were “limited in time, limited in objectives, limited in capacity, in technical terms.”120

Author interview with Spehar, Washington, D.C., 6 December 2001.

However, on this occasion in 1990, the OAS sent a vast team, composed of 433 observers, which supervised the whole electoral process in detail. The end of the Cold War, and the wave of democratic transitions in Latin America reinvigorated the Inter-American body. It was in this new context that the “promotion of democracy” became a central objective of the organization, both declaratively and in practice.

Moreover, in November 1989, before the Nicaraguan elections, the OAS General Assembly recommended sending observation missions to member states that requested it.121

Resolution of the OAS General Assembly AG/RES. 993 (XIX-0/89).

Seven months later, at the Eight Plenary Session, the OAS General Assembly passed a resolution calling for the creation of the “Unit for Democratic Development” to “respond promptly and effectively to member states which, in the full exercise of their sovereignty, request advice or assistance to preserve or strengthen their political institutions and democratic procedures.”122

Resolution of the OAS General Assembly AG/RES. 1063 (XX-0/90).

Significantly, the resolution notes “with appreciation” the role the secretary general and member states played in the still recent Nicaraguan experience. The Unit for the Promotion of Democracy (UPD), as it was finally called, was established in October 1990—and the monitoring norm was formally institutionalized. In IEM in particular, as in democratic governance in general, then, a customary hemispheric norm had preceded legalization.123

Furthermore, on 4 June 1991, at the 21st regular session of the OAS General Assembly, the foreign ministers of the regional body issued a declaration entitled the “Santiago Commitment to Democracy and the Renewal of the Interamerican System.” Noting that the end of the Cold War had brought “new opportunities and responsibilities,” the member states declared their renewed and expanded commitment to the promotion and defense of representative democracy and human rights. Going further, the next day the organization passed Resolution 1080, which creates a mechanism to react to “the sudden or irregular interruption of the democratic political institutional process” in any member state.124

Resolution of the OAS General Assembly AG/RES. 1080; XXI-0/91.

With the 1991 Santiago Commitment and Resolution 1080, as Acevedo has noted, “For the first time, an international organization has explicitly ruled that governments should be held internationally accountable to the regional community for the means by which they have taken and secure power.”125

The same year it was created, this ground-breaking mechanism was triggered by the military forces that ousted Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide on 30 September (whose election in 1990, incidentally, had been monitored by the regional body). The OAS stepped in and took several ostracizing measures against the junta. Subsequently, when on 5 April 1992 Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori dissolved Peru's congress, intervened in the judiciary, and suspended some basic civil rights, the mechanism established in Resolution 1080 was activated for the second time. International pressure forced Fujimori to attend the OAS meeting in Barbados the next month and to accept specific steps to restore democracy in its country.126

From that moment on, the OAS would become a permanent fixture in Peruvian politics, monitoring all the national—and some municipal—electoral processes of the decade. In 2000, eight years after the self-coup, Fujimori sought his second reelection in an unfair electoral race. Tellingly, when the head of the mission announced the withdrawal of the OAS observers from the Andean country after the first round—not only criticizing the software program the National Office for Electoral Processes was going to use for the runoff elections, but also calling for the postponement of the voting day—President Fujimori praised the OAS for “respecting the principle of nonintervention.”127

Público (Guadalajara), 8 June 2000, 32.

In all these cases, INGOs such as the Carter Center and NDI played an active role as well.

The transition from the first to the third phase was neither linear nor smooth; there were no preestablished “stages” or unidirectional sense of progress leading to a “definitive” condition. The fact that some countries within the hemisphere began to call for international observers did not mean that there was a consensus around this issue. Mexico, for instance, consistently opposed international observers until 1994.128

Furthermore, the advent of monitoring INGOs in the early 1980s was not fortuitous. Hemispheric interaction had indeed created the normative setting that made their intervention to defend democracy possible. Previous OAS practice was thus a necessary condition for the emergence of election watching INGOs. Interestingly, their arrival took place in an environment in which the decaying authoritarian governments of many Latin American states were openly hostile to them, not only because they regarded their activities an undue interference in their domestic affairs, but also because their practice was not sanctioned by an IGO. As Foucault once noted: “People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they don't know is what what they do does.”129

In Guzzini 1993, 474.

The unintended emergence, from the point of view of the states, of a network of INGOs involved in IEM thus contributed to the partial redefinition of these states' national interests. A redefinition that finally led to the convergence of the third phase (see Table 1).

Evolution of IEM in the Americas

Conclusions

In addition to the emergence of IEM in the Americas, there have been two important innovations to the constitutional structure represented by the WHI. The first one came about because of the involvement of INGOs. This innovation does not refer to state behavior per se, but to the mere set of actors involved in IEM. For the states of the Americas this development meant two things: the unexpected arrival of a new player, and the nature of IEM ceasing to be merely a symbolic practice.

The second innovation to the constitutional structure was the internalization by the states of the hemisphere, of this renewed, reinvigorated conception of IEM. At this point the states became INGOs' partners. IEM had not only become “the only game in the hemisphere,” but the states had stopped being the only legitimate players. The normalization of IEM in this third phase brought with it a veritable change in state identity and interests—and a concomitant redefinition of sovereignty. That is why I noted before that the intersubjective character of the lifeworld, in which the boundaries of the self are at stake in social interaction, is important for my argument.

The fact that IEM appeared first in the Americas was no accident. In the Americas, state and nonstate actors made both principled and strategic use of the discursive resources that the hemispheric constitutional structure had endowed them with. The logic of argumentative rationality figured prominently in the changes achieved in the continental normative structure and in the actualized notion of sovereignty. Absent this hemispheric understanding, IEM would have most likely not emerged in the Americas earlier than anywhere else. This is not to suggest that without the WHI, IEM would have never taken place in the Western Hemisphere. After all, activists, states, and IGOs in other latitudes also got in the habit of monitoring elections in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the same way that IEM became an “export” commodity of the new “system of interests” (that is, the Americas), it could have as well have been imported by this region had it emerged elsewhere.

But it did not—and that is my point: the particular constitutional structure that is capable of accounting for the emergence of IEM at the time it did is the WHI and not other. Only in the Western Hemisphere was there not an “ontological gap” between this practice and the wider normative structure. IEM did not occur first where the WHI was absent.130

It is in this sense that the WHI was a necessary condition for the development of IEM; the practice is indeed contextually linked to it. My argument is not deterministic, it does not claim that the hemispheric normative structure was a sufficient condition for the appearance of international watching: that was contingent on the actions of a myriad of actors. Furthermore, I do not argue that other factors, such as strategic calculations on the part of the leaders of states, might have also contributed to the emergence of this practice.131 Yet, the fact remains that once international election observing emerged and became normalized in the Americas, it began its worldwide institutionalization. Whitaker's fifty-year old remark on the WHI being a “laboratory” for novel practices later tried somewhere else does indeed seem prescient.

IEM's transition to other settings was not automatic, of course. As noted, the UN became for the first time involved—not without hesitancy—in IEM in the 1990 Nicaraguan elections. But the next year the UN secretary-general designated the under-secretary-general for political affairs as the Focal Point for Electoral Assistance Activities. In 1992 the UN General Assembly agreed to the establishment of the Electoral Assistance Unit by 141 votes for, none against, and 20 abstentions.132

In 1994 the Unit was upgraded to Division, and the next year UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali asserted that “the promotion of democracy is both an end in itself and part of the responsibility of the United Nations to maintain peace and security.”133 There is no doubt about that. The Division has been actively involved providing electoral assistance, attending more than 100 requests from member states around the world.134

See Web site 〈http://www.un.org/Depts/dpa/ead/assistance_by_country/ea_assistance.htm〉. Accessed 4 April 2005.

Furthermore, IEM was also embraced by European states after the Cold War. As Flynn and Farrell noted, in 1992 Europeans set up novel institutional mechanisms within the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). These mechanisms were intended to defuse substate conflict in member states (mainly in those of the former Soviet bloc), an approach called “constructive intervention.”135

Flynn and Farrell 1999, 509. Effective January 1995, the CSCE became the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

But as Flynn and Farrell note, the foundational moment of the post–Cold war Europe took place in November 1990, with the signing of the Charter of Paris. In it, the contracting parties committed themselves “to co-operate and support each other with the aim of making democratic gains irreversible.”136

Ibid., 516.

An earlier text, the Copenhagen Document, which had been drafted a few months after the watershed Nicaraguan experience, noted the value of electoral monitors and stated the commitment of the signatories to “invite observers from any other CSCE participating States and any appropriate private institutions and organizations who may wish to do so to observe the course of their national election proceedings.”137

See Web site 〈http://www.legislationline.org/view.php?document=54367&ref=true〉. Accessed 10 March 2005.

Suitably, the next year, the CSCE created an “Office for Free Elections.”138

The office was renamed “Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights” in January 1992.

As Flynn and Farrell rightly observe, “The recognition of democracy as the only legitimate form of governance in Europe had profound implications for the conception of sovereignty.”139

As they note, an “altered sense of sovereignty” now allows for “constructive intervention” in what used to considered domestic affairs.140

Ibid., 528.

However, as the narrative explanatory protocol presented above shows, the authors' claim that “The Charter of Paris modified this understanding,” is not quite accurate.141

Ibid., 524.

The WHI had produced that change in the Americas since the early 1960s and had made it evident worldwide at least since 1989, when the monitoring effort for the 1990 Nicaraguan elections started. Furthermore, whereas in the early 1990s attention in the new Europe was “focused on how democracy might promote peace between states,” this discussion, as noted, had already taken place in the Americas.

In Europe during the late twentieth century there was an ideational divide that simply did not exist in the WHI. Thus, for instance, as Flynn and Farrell note, the concluding document of the March–April 1990 CSCE Bonn Conference “saw the former socialist states embracing traditional Western values, including multiparty democracy based on free elections”—a commitment that had already been undertaken by the states of the Americas (even if many of them paid only lip service to it).142

Ibid., 515. As noted, the effect international commitments might have had on the political regime of the American states is immaterial for my argument, which is about sovereignty in international relations.

But regardless of what region can claim authorship to this “altered sense of sovereignty,” by making issues that had been traditionally considered as internal matters an integral part of state sovereignty in its external dimension, the fact remains that, as Flynn and Farrell point out, this broadening has meant an important change for the normative structure of Europe.143

Ibid., 512.

IEM in the Americas appears to have been just an early instance of constructive intervention. Hence, although I suggested before that IEM had been exported from the Western Hemisphere, perhaps this is not the best way to think about its diffusion. As Pastor, one of the foremost authorities on the matter on both the academic and applied fronts notes, “the power of [the IEM] idea is not a question of exporting but of the ways people embrace good ideas.”144

Author interview with Robert Pastor, Washington, D.C., 1 July 2004.

As the now vast constructivist literature on norm diffusion has shown, as ideas spread, they are embraced and transformed by local actors. More precisely, norms undergo a process of “localization.”145

As this article makes clear, by the twentieth century's end many IGOs and INGOs had recognized without argument the right to democratic governance as a human right.146

The early cases reviewed in this article constitute the prolegomena of such an entitlement—and to what is now considered “constructive intervention.” The case of IEM in the Americas has been pioneering and well established. Looking at the different regional and institutional instantiations of IEM and similar practices is another reason why the argument presented here should be of broader interest for international relations scholars. Looking at how actors draw on linguistic and argumentative resources according to the particular structure in which their practice takes place is one way to elucidate change and continuity in the fundamental principles of international relations.

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Figure 0

Evolution of IEM in the Americas