The Promise of Precommitment in Democracy and Human Rights: The Hopeful, Forgotten Failure of the Larreta Doctrine

Abstract

Although international precommitment regimes offer a tool to escape the apparent contradiction between sovereignty and the international protection of democracy and human rights, they raise theoretical and practical questions. This article draws on multinational archival research to explore an overlooked historical episode and suggest new thinking regarding the logjams over sovereignty, incapacity of global decision making, and humanitarian imperialism. In 1945 and 1946, the American states engaged in a debate over the Larreta Doctrine, a Uruguayan proposal about the parallelism between democracy and human rights, and the regional rights and duties to safeguard these values. In the ensuing debate, the Uruguayan foreign minister elaborated a tripartite precommitment mechanism to create a web of national commitments to democratic governance and the domestic protection of human rights, to establish a regional insurance policy against failures to maintain those commitments, and to obligate the great power and neighboring states to precommit to working through the regional system instead of unilaterally. As a proposal that emerged from a weak state—and garnered support from states that faced internal and external threats to democracy and rights—the Larreta Doctrine offers insights on the central tension between state sovereignty and international commitments.

Regional democracy protection

“…The regional commitment to democracy as a core value is as old in the Americas as it is in Europe. An early proposal of equipping the Pan-American Conferences with sanction policies against violations of democracy and human rights was discussed already in 1945 under the initiative of Uruguay and the endorsement of the United States (Long and Friedman, 2020). Yet, Latin American heads of state feared that such a proposal would open a window for US interventions in the region, and the proposal was rejected.…”

Handbook of Regional Cooperation and Integration

“…The regional commitment to democracy as a core value is as old in the Americas as it is in Europe. An early proposal of equipping the Pan-American Conferences with sanction policies against violations of democracy and human rights was discussed already in 1945 under the initiative of Uruguay and the endorsement of the United States (Long and Friedman, 2020). Yet, Latin American heads of state feared that such a proposal would open a window for US interventions in the region, and the proposal was rejected.…”

Republican internationalism: the nineteenth-century roots of Latin American contributions to international order

“…When much of Latin America transitioned to democracy in the 1980s and 1990s, democracy norms became a more explicit element of the region's foreign policy (Feldmann et al 2019;Palestini 2020;Heine and Weiffen 2015). Precedents are often mentioned, such as the 1945 Larreta Doctrine and the Cold War-era Betancourt Doctrine, as well as the earlier 1907 Tobar Doctrine, which called for coordinated regional non-recognition of coup governments (Long and Friedman 2020). Though these concerns about both rights and democracy were evident at the turn of the twentieth century, these diplomatic doctrines are rarely connected to their nineteenth-century origins.…”

“…Though these Latin American diplomatic innovations are rarely linked with debates over the LIO, scholars in IR and International Law have explored Latin America's role in changing prevailing norms of sovereignty (Sikkink 1996); doctrines of non-intervention (Obreg on 2006;Lorca 2014;Scarfi 2016); human rights law and transnational advocacy (Sikkink 2019;Kelly 2018); institutions of international economic development (Helleiner 2014;Thornton 2021); the regional protection of democracy (Heine and Weiffen 2015;Feldmann et al 2019); and inclusive multilateralism (Finnemore and Jurkovich 2014;Gonz alez et al 2015). Except for legal histories, most accounts that uncover Latin America's role in shaping international norms and institutions focus on the interwar and immediate post-war period (McPherson and Wehrli 2015;Long and Friedman 2020). Studies that venture beyond the post-WWII juncture tend to do so through the lens of US-Latin America relations, for example, as a site where Woodrow Wilson hashed out his internationalist views.…”