The Making of an Agenda for Democratization: A Speechwriter's View

In December 1996 the United Nations ("UN") published An Agenda for Democratization, a highly controversial position paper of its then-Secretary General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali.1 The agenda has received little public or academic attention. Yet, although not a legal document, it remains of considerable interest to scholars and practitioners of international law. The agenda confronts the traditionally taboo question of UN support for national democratization processes in areas such as holding and monitoring elections, creating independent judicial systems, and strengthening respect for human rights and the rule of law-all of interest to international lawyers. The agenda also confronts the even more controversial question of UN support for "democratization internationally," an area, according to BoutrosGhali, in which international law has a major role to play. Beyond the substantive content of An Agenda for Democratization, the story of its creation offers an unusually revealing view into the policy-making process at the United Nations and, especially, the role of its Secretary General during a fascinating period in the organization's history. The post-Cold War acceleration of democratization within states coincided with new demands for UN action across the spectrum of its work, often in unprecedented ways or unfamiliar operational environments. In that context of opportunity, uncertainty, and change, Boutros-Ghali as Secretary General frequently put forward political statements designed to stimulate policy debate and decisions from the UN member states. In playing this political role, he applied his understanding of how international law originates and functions. He used the drafting process itself to develop his own policy positions, to clarify the questions at hand, to test his ideas, and to anticipate their reception in various quarters. Writing for Boutros-Ghali, as I did in the mid-1990s, thus required an approach simultaneously intellectual, anthropological, and tactical. In this essay, I attempt to elaborate this drafting approach and the unusual vantage point it affords into the United Nations, while providing political background and an analytical perspective on one of the most important UN documents produced in the past decade. My role as principal drafter of An Agenda for Democratization developed more by happenstance than design. I joined the executive office of the Secretary General in June 1994 as a policy consultant and speechwriter. I was not an international civil servant nor formally part of the UN staff. Yet I served on the Secretary General's small speechwriting team, which doubled as the policy-planning unit, responsible for drafting most of his policy statements, position papers, and contributions to periodicals and academic journals. As the youngest and least experienced member of the team, I initially received rather minor assignments: statements marking days of international observation, messages to conferences (including a seemingly endless series of Model UN competitions), and forewords to books and other publications. But these were precisely the vehicles that the Secretary General often selected to develop and test his thoughts on a particular issue and perhaps also with a particular audience. Such was the case with his thoughts on democratization. I could not fail to see this when Boutros-Ghali gave me his comments on the first "Secretary General's Foreword" that I had prepared, this one for the European Parliamentary Yearbook. Once drafted, vetted by our unit and cleared by the chief-of-- staff, such texts would be sent to the Secretary General for approval. Only rarely did they return with substantive comments; an inky black signature was the norm. This text, however, returned with a thick black line alongside a single sentence on the role of parliamentarians in "promoting democratization internationally." Having modeled the sentence on one found in Boutros-Ghali's previous statements to parliamentarians, I could not understand why he would mark it. …