Anne-Marie Slaughter on a League of Democracies | Big Think

Anne-Marie Slaughter on a League of Democracies

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Anne-Marie Slaughter says no to a specific league.

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Anne-Marie Slaughter:

Anne-Marie Slaughter, is the Bert G. Kerstetter '66 University Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. She is presently on leave, serving as Director of Policy Planning for the United States Department of State. She was Dean of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University from 2002-2009.

Slaughter came to the Wilson School from Harvard Law School where she was the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law and Director of the International Legal Studies Program. She is also the former President of the American Society of International Law, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has served on the board of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Drawing from this rich interdisciplinary expertise, Slaughter has written and taught broadly on global governance, international criminal law, and American foreign policy. Her most recent book is The Idea that Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World, published in 2007 by Basic Books. She is also the author of A New World Order, in which she identified transnational networks of government officials as an increasingly important component of global governance. Slaughter has been a frequent commentator on foreign affairs in newspapers, radio, and television. She was also the convener and academic co-chair of the Princeton Project on National Security, a multi-year research project aimed at developing a new, bipartisan national security strategy for the United States, and was a member of the National War Powers Commission

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TRANSCRIPT:

Slaughter: No. Obama should not seek a League of Democracies, and the way the McCain camp put out the League of Democracies, it was pretty clearly intended as an alternative to the United Nations. I and John Ikenberry and other Democrats had also talked about a Concert of Democracies, a Caucus of Democracy, some group that engage democracies beyond the West, because our point was right now we talk about democracies, we think about the EU, Japan, the US. But India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Chile, Mexico, these are counties that are all democracies and it shouldn’t be seen as the West versus the rest. This should be seen as countries from every part of the world, with every culture, religion in the world have been able to govern themselves. That’s a very important message to send. Slaughter: No. Obama should not seek a League of Democracies, and the way the McCain camp put out the League of Democracies, it was pretty clearly intended as an alternative to the United Nations. I and John Ikenberry and other Democrats had also talked about a Concert of Democracies, a Caucus of Democracy, some group that engage democracies beyond the West, because our point was right now we talk about democracies, we think about the EU, Japan, the US. But India, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, Chile, Mexico, these are counties that are all democracies and it shouldn’t be seen as the West versus the rest. This should be seen as countries from every part of the world, with every culture, religion in the world have been able to govern themselves. That’s a very important message to send.