INTRODUCTION

In 1989, both the UN General Assembly and the OAS voted overwhelmingly to condemn the US invasion of Panama, even though it was common knowledge that the advent of democracy in Panama had been frustrated by General Manuel Noriega's refusal to seat the government of President-elect Guillermo Endara, and even though Endara and most other Panamanians appeared to welcome the invasion. Most States rejected the notion that foreign actors could legitimately employ armed force or other measures of coercion to seat a democratically elected government against the will of an indigenous political elite in effective control of the State. Indeed, many States questioned the propriety of any attempt by foreign States to influence domestic political processes.

But much has changed since 1989. A variety of developments, chronicled in detail elsewhere in this volume, make the idea of an international legal right to democratic governance much closer to reality than it was when Thomas Franck first heralded the notion of a “democratic entitlement” in 1992. Perhaps most significant, for purposes of this chapter, is the international reaction to recent military coups in Haiti and Sierra Leone. In both cases, virtually the entire international community not only condemned the coups and demanded the immediate reinstatement of the elected governments, but also accepted the use of force as a legitimate means to restore democracy at the request of those ousted governments.