The importance of form

  The heat is turning up on Honduras’s new government.  Ambassadors are leaving, the borders are closed, World Bank money is gone, as are the U.S. military’s training programs.  Meanwhile, the hemisphere is united against the new government.

There would seem to be three lessons here.  (Note my weasel phrasing!  It isn’t accidental, as all three regular readers know by now.)  First, form matters.  Steven Taylor alluded to this point, and I think he’s correct.  Now, I don’t think that he’s correct about the underlying legality.  The Honduran constitution makes no provision for calling a second constitutional convention.  The Supreme Court, therefore, was completely within reason to tell Zelaya to knock it off with the referendum. 

Nor (given the facts so far) am I sure that Taylor is right as a matter of domestic political strategy.  If it was simply a matter of domestic calculus, a Supreme Court order followed by a quick bundling of the president out of the country might have been the best way to avoid worse conflict.

But Professor Taylor is completely right that hustling the President out of bed at 3am looks terrible. In retrospect, it was certain to produce a bad international reaction, even though I wouldn’t’ve predicted how bad beforehand.  (Hey, I was wrong.  Yes Bernard, I’ll get to Ecuador one of these days.) 

What the Honduran military and Supreme Court and I missed was the reverse Chávez effect.  Once Hugo (inevitably) started tub-thumping and threatening war, the best way for the United States to undercut him was to walk back its initial position and bandwagon on the international opprobrium.  And man, has the United States been successful.  Nobody seems to note that Washington was behind the international curve. 

In short, Honduras has gotten itself into a pickle.  The Supreme Court and military should have thought more about the politics.  The confused messages about resignations and drug-dealing and all the rest did not help; it was propaganda aimed at five-year olds, people who watch Glen Beck, not serious observers.  Now, it would have been damned risky for the Court to issue an order removing and arresting the President, but it would have been much better to have done that (preferably with a concurring Congressional vote ) and hope that Zelaya would be a little slow in mobilizing support, giving you time to bundle him off to Costa Rica after having crossed all the constitutional T’s ... or at least having seemed to. 

Form matters, even when the substance is uncertain and impossible to determine.  Perhaps especially so.  And that goes double in a hemisphere where electoral democracy enjoys the contradictory status of being simultaneously hegemonic and fragile. 

Comments

[Mike D]

This is a very specious line of reasoning. I posted at poliblog about why alternative manners of removal don't suggest any improvement in imagery or 'form'.

And I'm not sure the US got on the international bandwagon. They certainly and oddly (at least with respect to recent relations) echoed the clamor from the left governments in South and Central America. But the strength of the President's initial statement (which contrasted with Clinton initial seeming equivocation) was very strong for any non Chavez allied gov't and we really saw a domino of reaction from the rest of the world after that. That is now putting pressure on a government which may have in fact acted democratically but didn't do so with the best 'form' to accept an already removed president whose reinstatement may destabilize Honduras to a more tragic state. It seems like the president jumped the gun here and could have also moderated his form in terms of his initial statement. One can mention how wary the Americas are of military led depositions of presidents and still leave room to decide on the legality of the action.

Undercutting Chavez as good strategy is laughable. We really should not be in the business of playing games with Chavez. That doesn't mean we shouldn't recognize his influence in the region and how our dynamics with him may effect issues, but we should not be basing our actions on his and his allies' words/actions. Its a poor analogy but can you imagine getting behind Ahmadinejad after the elections and then pulling out the rug from him by later saying he's using violent methods to put down protestors? Almost immediately such actions, while politically expedient, may irreparably damage the side that is right. At this point that may be where we are headed as such pressure is being put on Honduras because of supposed 'form' problems that we might see a Zelaya return with potentially tragic consequences.