Breaking out of the echo chamber

Coming from 11 countries, our group of students from the Global Liberal Arts Alliance brought a diverse set of educational experiences and prior knowledge about democratic systems to the Athens Democracy Forum from October 9-11. At the end of the week, we all agreed that our best learning experiences at the Forum came from the moments in which panelists and speakers from perspectives outside of Europe and the USA were able to share with delegates their unique experiences in developing democracies. If we are looking for novel solutions to democratic challenges, rather than an echo chamber, it is essential to draw lessons from democracies outside of Europe and the US, many of which are younger (both in terms of population and their duration as democracies) and bring distinct ideas and perspectives to the table. For us youth, the Athens Democracy Forum was most enlightening when it took the opportunity to showcase the voices of thinkers from Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.

The Forum began with an insightful panel at the Zappeion which discussed the underlying factors that affect democracy around the world. Ory Okolloh, formerly an Africa policy manager for Google and a lawyer in Kenya, refuted the common notion that the shift to populism in the US stems from the fall of a model democracy. She pointed out that populism and racism are not new in the world and were not created by President Donald Trump, and that the United States has many anti-democratic episodes in its history which the Western world is only beginning to acknowledge. Many of us students are from the US and are constantly encouraged to believe that what happens in our democracy is the harbinger of fate for the rest of the democratic world. By emphasizing the stories of those that have been historically marginalized within the world’s democracies, Ms Okolloh essentially told us not to flatter ourselves; to learn from African resiliency, and to be both hopeful and vigilant.

The panel addressing multiculturalism and nationalism challenged those of us from the West to reconsider the roles our democracies have played in the world and demanded that we acknowledge the ramifications of the post-World War Two system. It featured two powerful speakers from places without the protections of electoral democracy: Kassam Eid, a Syrian rebel, and Nathan Law, an activist from Hong Kong. Both men lamented the impotence and unresponsiveness of the international community, particularly the United Nations Security Council’s inability to offer help in the fight against regimes backed by Russia and China. As members of industrialized superpower nations, it is easy to imagine that multilateral organizations have achieved a kind of cooperative utopia; it is important to listen to people from less powerful nations to remember the imperfections of the international system and our responsibilities to the people it puts at risk.

The difference between the echo chamber and learning from other cultures was particularly evident in the discussions concerning Facebook and technology’s role in electoral integrity. It is easy, if not very useful, to talk about the 2016 and 2020 elections in the United States, which have been exhaustively covered by Western media. However, Laura Chinchilla (the former president of Costa Rica) and Stephen Stedman, who both have worked for the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy (Ms Chinchilla served as head observer on the electoral commission for the Brazilian elections in 2016 and 2018), shed light on the dilemma that WhatsApp poses to fragile democracies. WhatsApp is an encrypted service and is hugely popular in Latin America: This means that it can be used to spread misinformation with very little oversight. Understanding the factors that lead to the rise of populists and authoritarians in other parts of the world will help us in the industrial world to recognize and respond to the same patterns in our societies, and hopefully a more diverse dialogue will yield solutions beneficial to all.

Alvin Carpio, in the panel titled “The Echo Chamber and the Agora,” summed up our viewpoint when he addressed elitism and its failure to include marginalized groups in democracies. Calling for a “reality check,” Carpio reminded the audience that Western democracy has always been an echo chamber which magnifies the voice of the few, even since ancient Athens, a society which excluded women and slaves from voting. He charged that embedded elitist traditions began to change only recently, and still account for a lot of disillusionment and disengagement in Western democracies. From him, we learned that including the viewpoint of minorities improves the quality of the entire democratic process. The stories of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the theories of European philosophers are valuable, but they are theories developed at a very different time in world history. To continue to focus only on traditional political philosophy, while ignoring the democracies developing and changing in the Global South, is reminiscent of the popular definition of insanity: doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results.

Our group of 20 students represented 11 countries from Europe, the Americas, Asia, and Africa. In this sense, we were a highly diverse group. However, four additional students were invited to the forum but were denied visas to visit Greece: they live in Ghana, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Ivory Coast. We felt their absence acutely in our discussions during and prior to the Forum. Our understanding of democracy was challenged by the ideas of students from Hong Kong, Morocco, and Bangladesh, Ecuador, and Ukraine, among others. We didn’t get the opportunity to learn other potentially formative lessons from Ghana, Rwanda, Venezuela, or Nigeria. The power of democracies comes from the collective intelligence of all voices being heard, from the mosaic of cultural perspectives and ideas which come together to be something greater than the sum of their parts: a free and democratic community. Our democracies will continue to decline if we do not make the effort to learn from the experiences of all types of democracies, from cultures and societies which challenge the definitions and traditions of democracies, and from communities which have historically been silenced, overwritten and ignored, across the globe. * Meghan Edwards is a student at Ohio Wesleyan University, Delaware, and Cameron Voss is at Albion College, Michigan.