Pro-Democratic Interventions: Protecting and Creating Democracy.

The last twenty years have seen the most dramatic extension of democracy so that democratic states now comprise half of the United Nations. The inaugural Ministerial Conference of the Community of Democracies (CD) resolved jointly to cooperate to discourage and resist the threat to democracy posed by the overthrow of constitutionally elected governments. A Council on Foreign Relations Task Force on Responding to Threats to Democracy reported to the second Community of Democracies of the wide range of measures that democracies can legitimately take to prevent and even reverse coups in other democracies. Some such actions have contributed significantly to the reversal of coups ? as seen over the last decade in Haiti, Fiji and Venezuela. Interventions to create new democracies rather than protect existing ones are generally seen as far more problematic. This paper will compare the legal and ethical arguments for these different kinds of pro-democratic intervention and apply them to recent cases. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]