A Concert of Democracies or League of Democracies is an alternative international organization proposed by Ivo Daalder and James Lindsay in a May 2004 Washington Post op-ed. The concept is broader than a military organization, hence “concert” instead of “alliance.” In a subsequent article in The American Interest, they affirm that roughly 60 countries would qualify for membership under these criteria. G. John Ikenberry and Anne-Marie Slaughter have also called for the creation of a “Concert of Democracies” in the final report of the Princeton Project on National Security, Forging a World Under Liberty and Law: U.S. National Security in the 21st Century (September 2006). Most recently the concept has been supported by former United States Presidential candidate John McCain.
According to the Princeton Project's final report released on September 27, 2006, this alternative body's purpose would be to strengthen security cooperation among the world’s liberal democracies and to provide a framework in which they can work together to effectively tackle common challenges - ideally within existing regional and global institutions, but if those institutions fail, then independently, functioning as a focal point for efforts to strengthen liberty under law around the world. It would serve as the institutional embodiment and ratification of the "democratic peace".
On September 16, 2006, Anne Bayefsky at the Hudson Institute, published a nearly identical proposal to establish an organization called the United Democratic Nations in The Jerusalem Post. Unlike the Princeton Project scholars, Bayefsky and other conservative scholars view the institution as a replacement for the United Nations, which they view as illegitimate and ineffective.
Read more about Concert Of Democracies: Possible Membership
Famous quotes containing the words concert of, concert and/or democracies:
“Proportion ... You can’t help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn’t exist.... It’s like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way.... A concert of Brobdingnagian cats. Order has been turned into a disgusting chaos. We need no barbarians from outside; they’re on the premises, all the time.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Proportion ... You can’t help thinking about it in these London streets, where it doesn’t exist.... It’s like listening to a symphony of cats to walk along them. Senseless discords and a horrible disorder all the way.... A concert of Brobdingnagian cats. Order has been turned into a disgusting chaos. We need no barbarians from outside; they’re on the premises, all the time.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“Democracies are notorious for a tendency to obey the feelings rather than the mind; thus the nature of democracies often makes it difficult to conclude a peace after a hard-won war. Generous victors are rare.”
—Amos Elon (b. 1926)