Authors
Mikulas Fabry
Publication date
2009/5
Journal
Millennium
Volume
37
Issue
3
Pages
721-741
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Description
The end of the cold war brought with it arguments in favour of international institutional and legal mechanisms that would protect democracy worldwide. These arguments have by no means been confined to the academic departments of international law or political science: in the aftermath of extensive democratisation in the 1980s and early 1990s, a growing number of global and regional organisations have, in fact, come to regard democracy as the only acceptable system of domestic rule within their domains and sought to implement measures to delegitimise non-democratic regimes as well as to defend democratic regimes against major internal threats. This article questions this trend. Drawing on the classical liberal approach to international relations, it argues that democracy, as a system of domestic government, must ultimately be the choice and responsibility of those who live within its bounds, and not of …
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