Both of these books explore the nexus between the international and domestic realms, albeit from different perspectives and with different methods.

The edited volume, Promoting Democracy in the Americas, follows up on the earlier Beyond Sovereignty: Collectively Defending Democracy in the Americas, edited by Tom Farer (1996). Promoting Democracy employs a constructivist approach to examine the creation, evolution, dissemination, and enforcement of the international norm of democracy. More specifically, the book describes how democracy has become the prevalent expectation in the Western Hemisphere, and how the region has approved multilateral intervention by external actors in domestic affairs to safeguard democratic practices, something the editors implicitly support. At the same time, it also describes how the interventionist politics of democracy promotion conflicts with the still-powerful norms of national sovereignty and nonintervention. These norms have been particularly resilient because of the long history of European and U.S. intervention in Latin America, which has meant that international and domestic actors have long been involved in a complicated negotiation at the border between norms. The book illustrates this interaction through case studies of election monitoring and interruption of democracy throughout Latin America, with particular attention to crises in Venezuela, Ecuador, and Haiti.

In contrast, Jeffrey Jackson, in The Globalizers: Development Workers in Action, finds no negotiation between international and domestic actors. Rather, the relationship that he describes is entirely one-sided. His assessment is framed by an explicitly Marxian perspective on globalization (pp. 134–35). He asserts that development workers (“globalizers”) are the agents of globalization who pursue globalizing objectives in developing countries, with only a veneer of “beneficence” to cover their self-interested actions. While providing a broad theoretical context, the book focuses exclusively on one country, Honduras. Through interviews with international and Honduran development workers, Jackson examines a huge dam project (which failed miserably), maquiladoras, and the relief effort after Hurricane Mitch.

This critical perspective is almost absent from Promoting Democracy. Yasmine Shamsie's contribution, the penultimate chapter of the collection, does describe the counterproductive effect of the “global economic policy environment” that has been particularly “hostile” to attempts at building democratic practices (p. 249). While the editors do a better than usual job at presenting a unified volume, this piece sits uneasily in comparison with the rest. While it presents an important part of the whole picture, it is not clearly integrated into the overall tome, which tends to treat democracy promotion in a generally uncritical fashion.

Promoting Democracy, however, makes a good case that international norms are shaped not just by powerful countries but by weaker countries despite their disadvantages. Latin American countries were strong supporters of the legalization of the democracy promotion norm, even in the face of opposition by the United States. The book presents evidence that newly democratized states hoped to “lock in” support for their democratic regimes (p. 29), as suggested by Andrew Moravcsik (“The Origins of Human Rights Regimes: Democratic Delegation in Postwar Europe,” International Organization 2 [Spring 2000]: 217–52). The book's contributors provide valuable descriptions of norm promotion and the legalization of norms through insertion into international agreements. Contributions include a strong empirical review of the success and failures of the Organization of American States in enforcing the democracy norm, as well as cogent descriptions of recent crises. The volume also deals in depth with election monitoring—an example of external actors contravening the sovereignty of states. Of interest is how election monitoring was born in and shaped by the Western Hemisphere (the first election monitoring took place in 1962 in Costa Rica, though with a token observation team of three officials).

The authors acknowledge the self-interested motivations of more powerful states, which enforce the norms when it is in their interest to do so, but ignore them when the norms conflict with their goals. While the United States is clearly the most important power in the region to behave in this way, the volume also includes chapters on Canada and Brazil. Yet while noting these power dynamics, its contributors by and large expect that powerful countries will become constrained by their commitment to democratic norms, sometimes even in spite of themselves.

Ultimately, the shortcomings of the volume are not surprising. Norms are permissive rather than deterministic (e.g., see Martha Finnemore, “Constructing Norms of Humanitarian Intervention,” in Peter J. Katzenstein, ed., The Culture of National Security, 1996); and when exactly norms trump self-interest remains unclear. Furthermore, the norms under discussion remain underspecified, and Thomas Legler, Sharon F. Lean, and Dexter S. Boniface acknowledge continuing disagreement about what constitutes truly democratic practices and what constitutes a threat to them. With military coups, the threat to democracy is straightforward. However, the removal of presidents because of citizen mobilization or disagreements between government branches creates an ambiguous situation resulting in limited responses from international agents. The implications of this ambiguity for the future remain unclear.

As mentioned above, The Globalizers focuses on one country. The in-depth information on Honduras provides a window into the world of development workers, as well as examples of what often goes wrong in the provision of development aid—particularly as international agencies think they know better than “locals” and ignore dissenting opinions. Less has been written on the actual mechanics of globalization (through human agents) than on the overall globalizing process, and Jackson interviewed a large sample of workers from many organizations operating in Honduras. He provides specific information on the unequal resources of domestic and international actors. Unfortunately, the broader theoretical implications are weakened by the inherent limitations of a single case study. The author acknowledges that Honduras is an “extreme case” (p. 5). While studies of extreme cases can be useful, in this instance the vulnerability of an exceptionally small and poor country makes it a most likely case for being overwhelmed by external actors. Other developing countries may not be so powerless in the face of international influence. That the foreign education of the Honduran workers in Jackson's sample includes universities in Mexico, Colombia, and Venezuela as much as the United States and Europe indicates uneven influence among Latin American countries (p. 100). This lack of generalizability does not disprove Jackson's thesis, but does leave it unsubstantiated.

Also, more could be done to present the data from the interviews systematically in order to corroborate the claims made. As an example, while the allegation that there is a “glass ceiling” limiting the advancement of Honduran workers in international agencies is highly plausible, direct evidence in the interviews is lacking. Nor is it clear that development workers are as self-interested as the author implies. For example, one subject explicitly rejected the wishes of her parents to attend a university in the United States—undoubtedly a more lucrative career choice—to return to Honduras to “be in my own country and study the problems here” (p. 101).

Both books make thoughtful and important contributions to the understanding of new global realities. Both have consciously moved away from approaches that overly emphasize the agency of domestic actors. But domestic politics still matter, and more consideration of how domestic actors push to create norms and international linkages for their own purposes would enhance these works. One tantalizing mention in The Globalizers: Reform-minded Hondurans felt less likely to be persecuted by military regimes when working for international agencies. Furthermore, the failure of the dam at El Cajón shows the unwillingness by international experts to heed warnings by Hondurans (and perhaps negligence and corruption), but could also demonstrate the effects of a military government insulated from public oversight.

Similarly, Promoting Democracy at times treats external actors as the rescuers of democratic ideals without regard to the actual view of the domestic forces presumably being rescued. Some domestic actors may not agree with the democracy promotion project, and without their acquiescence external pressure simply may not matter. The case of Venezuela highlights this. International mediators cannot mediate when the two sides are irreconcilable. Furthermore, in his poignant account, Legler wonders whether external actors' promotion of democracy through validating elections has actually hurt Venezuelan democracy in the long run, by validating the rule of a president who explicitly disagrees with the common procedural definition of democracy.

Finally, regardless of the influence of norms and globalization, these contributions suggest that traditional power politics remain significant. States promote, follow, and enforce norms that they agree with, but not always—states often shirk when norms run counter to their own interests. Not surprisingly, the multilateral democracy promotion norm had its greatest success after the Cold War, when the United States supported it. With the U.S. turn toward unilateralism after 2001 and its implicit support of coups in Venezuela (2002) and Haiti (2004), the norm similarly has suffered. When power politics trump norms, and when the opposite occurs, remains a key puzzle for constructivist approaches. In addition, as The Globalizers makes very clear, rich states continue to exploit poor ones. In many ways the world is a different place because of globalization. But in other ways, the new world that these books examine retains much of the old.