© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved
Promoting Democracy without Starting a New Cold War?
Correspondence: * Professor of International Law, King's College, London; Marco Polo Fellow of the Silk Road Institute, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an; member of the Institut de droit international (email: rein.mullerson{at}kcl.ac.uk). This paper was completed on 20 December 2007.
Spread of market economy and promotion of democracy are twin components of globalization. Both are generally positive phenomena that are taken by many to be something as obvious as God, motherhood and apple-pie. However, there is too much naivety and hypocrisy, especially in the process of promotion of democracy. In the case of societies that lack elementary preconditions for the introduction of democracy, the remedy may be worse than the illness. The end of the Cold War did not end the attempts to use concepts, such as democracy and human rights, as ideological tools to undermine other States. Attempts to change domestic social and political systems, especially those of great powers or their allies and neighbours, may lead to a new era of great power confrontation that would be especially dangerous because of common threats such as terrorism, spread of weapons of mass destruction, environmental crisis and so on.