International Imposition and Transmission of Democracy and the Rule of Law: Lessons from Central America.

I argue that the rule of law is only possible once a state has made an ideological commitment to the norm of the rule of law, to which they are driven by the actions of domestic and international activists. This paper gives consideration to the international movement of the norm of the rule of law. In so doing, I consider both global trends in the adoption of the norm of the rule of law as well as domestic progress within both Guatemala and Nicaragua. The first section of this paper addresses one way of looking at the spread of a norm of the rule of law, the idea of a trend towards the judicialization of politics around the world. The second section of this paper examines the international transmission of norms in general, using the literature on human rights norms as a model, and defines the norm of the rule of law. The third section of this paper discusses the norm of the rule of law. The final section catalogues the adoption of the norm of the rule of law in Guatemala and Nicaragua following the model adopted from the human rights context. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]