| | |  Editorials | Opinions | July 2009 
A Coup for Democracy
 Edward Schumacher - The News
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July 06, 2009
 |  | Small countries are easy to punish in order to send messages. |  | | |
Honduras is guilty of two sins: impatience and size. The rest of the world is committing two more: hubris and hypocrisy.
It is now clear that if the Honduran Supreme Court or Congress had used legal means such as impeachment before asking the army to remove President Manuel Zelaya, we would be calling events there a constitutional crisis rather than a coup d'etat.
This would be especially true if Honduras were a larger country such as Brazil or Pakistan and its court, Congress, attorney general, human rights ombudsman and electoral commission were all saying afterward, as they do in Tegucigalpa, that the army moved legally in alliance with them. The Honduran army never took political control.
Perhaps the Honduran leaders were constitutionally "lazy," as Chilean political scientist Patricio Navia mused. Certainly, they were being forced to act quickly by a president pushing to carry out an illegal referendum in defiance of those constitutional institutions and his own party.
But small countries are easy to punish in order to send messages. The U.N. General Assembly voted unanimously to condemn the overthrow of Honduras' democratically elected president. Many Latin American presidents, such as Argentina's Cristina Fernández de Kirchner and Ecuador's Rafael Correa, have gone further, recalling ambassadors and pledging to personally accompany Zelaya back to Honduras. But hypocrisy has always been a part of politics and diplomacy, sometimes even for good reasons.
The deeper and more troubling error in the current rush to judgment on poor Honduras has to do with the philosophical nature of democracy itself. The democracy fundamentalists have become so fanatical in their moralism that they have lost sight of the fact that democracy is not the same as legitimacy.
Venezuela is the poster case in which a president, Hugo Chávez, is democratically elected and then goes about, through democratic referendums and Congress, constraining freedom by changing laws and institutions. Chávez and others like him create the "tyranny of the majority" that theorists behind the American Constitution warned was the weakness of democracy by itself.
Brodi Kemp, a researcher at Harvard's Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, says: "You could argue that Zelaya gave up his claim to moral legitimacy when he went outside the constitution. If you accept that, then what do the other political actors do? . . . Sometimes an act is legitimate even though it proceeded illegitimately."
President Obama was correct in calling Zelaya's ouster illegal, while Hillary Clinton declined to call the action a coup - in hopes of bringing Zelaya back into government but with wings clipped. In this instance, the U.S. government played the morally right hand. |
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