Rethinking democracy promotion

Despite the fact that democracy promotion is a major part of liberal foreign policies, the discipline of International Relations has not paid much systematic attention to it. Conversely, the study of democracy promotion is dominated by comparative politics and pays hardly any attention to the international system. This mutual neglect signifies a core weakness in the theory and practice of democracy promotion: its failure to comprehend the development of liberal democracy as an international process. This article argues that a thorough engagement with John Locke explains the failures of democracy promotion policies and provides a more comprehensive understanding of the development of liberal democracy. Beate Jahn is Professor of International Relations at the University of Sussex. She is the author of The Cultural Construction of International Relations (Palgrave, 2000); ‘Liberal Internationalism: from ideology to empirical theory – and back again’ in International Theory (2009), and the editor of Classical Theory in International Relations (Cambridge University Press, 2006). She is interested in liberal internationalism and in the use of classical theory for the analysis of International Relations.