Prospect carries an exchange of views between Philip Bobbitt and David Hannay on the idea of a league of democracies. For reasons I've set out before, it's an idea towards which I'm favourably disposed. Philip Bobbitt puts the case for it:
Would the formation of such an alliance undermine the UN? My judgment, such as it is - I am much aware that I am corresponding with a greatly-admired former ambassador to the UN - is that this alliance would be the salvation of the UN. Support for the UN will continue to ebb so long as it is simply missing in action during the great crises of the day... This is compounded by the fact that the membership of the security council is a relic of the second world war and excludes so many great states. It is no good to say that some day we will get action on these problems, or that some day membership will be expanded. "Some day" is a temporising claim that inevitably stretches into "never."
One of David Hannay's points by which I was left puzzled is this:
Your reply [i.e. Bobbit's] simply did not address what I regard as a major conversation-stopper to the alliance project - the visceral dislike of most of the developing world's great democracies (India, Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia, for example) for any form of intervention, even when regimes as odious as those in Burma and Zimbabwe are involved.
It's not clear to me why he sees this as a clinching issue: as if the league of democracies must provide a ready-made solution to every problem, rather than being, merely, a way to concert common interests and explore priorities and differences amongst democratic countries. If the democracies named by Hannay have a visceral dislike of any form of intervention and in any circumstances, then that is a fact; but it is also an obstacle - additional to the several other obstacles there are - to forms of justified intervention when there is an emergency somewhere and the conditions of life of very large numbers of people have become dire. Unless, of course, one thinks no intervention is ever justified, however terrible the circumstances. David Hannay's would-be conversation-stopper is only that if one accepts it as a final and unalterable fact and despairs of the possibility that a league of democracies might be able to wield some - beneficial - influence in this regard and others.