The left and the right criticized Biden’s democracy summit, but it deserves applause, anyway
Most media pundits concluded that President Biden’s 110country “Summit for Democracy” was marred by mistakes, such as inviting countries that shouldn’t have been there and wrongly excluding others.
That’s all true, but it totally misses the point.
Biden’s two-day online summit deserves applause. It has helped draw attention to the fact that democracy is rapidly losing ground around the world, including — perhaps, most important — in the United States. And unless democracies do something about it, more countries will turn authoritarian. China and Russia are exporting their technological advances in facial recognition and internet censorship, and wannabeautocrats in Latin America, Africa and Asia are happily buying them.
Russia continues fakenews campaigns to weaken public trust in democratic institutions overseas and to further polarize our societies, as we’ve seen in the 2016 presidential race.
And China has launched a propaganda offensive claiming that its one-party dictatorship is more effective in reducing poverty and fighting COVID-19 than Western democracies. China released a document criticizing Biden’s summit, entitled, “China: A democracy that works.”
Many U.S. pundits criticized the summit because of its guest list. They noted that Pakistan, Philippines and Poland, among others, should not have been invited, because they aren’t fully free.
Others lashed out at the exclusion of El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, claiming that not inviting them won’t help improve democratic conditions in those countries, while it may push them to the arms of China and Russia. Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua also were not on the guest list, but with good reason.
But the more important issue is that, as Biden told the summit, democracies are facing “alarming challenges,” and defending freedoms is “the defining challenge of our time.”
According to the ranking of world democracies published annually by Freedom House, a U.S. pro-democracy think tank, 73 countries suffered a decline in democratic freedoms last year, while only 28 countries made gains.
The Sweden-based
International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance (IDEA), an inter-governmental group, says in its 2021 report that, “The number of countries undergoing ‘democratic backsliding’ has never been as high as in the past decade.” It cites Brazil, India and the United States as primary examples.
U.S. democracy suffered a big blow last year, when former President Trump refused to recognize the results of the presidential election. Trump’s efforts to subvert the results and his success in placing loyalists in key state electoral agencies are fueling fears that he may try to rig the 2024 election.
At the summit, Biden pledged $424.4 million to help independent media, fight corruption, bolster democratic reformers and provide technological aid to defend democracies.
Also during the meeting, the United States,
Australia, Denmark and Norway announced an Export Control and Human Rights Initiative to prevent authoritarian regimes from using their technologies. And Panama, Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic vowed to strengthen a newly created alliance to bolster democratic institutions.
U.S. officials said a follow-up summit will be held next year to evaluate progress and plan new joint initiatives.
Daniel Zovatto, head of IDEA’s Latin America department, told me that Biden’s democracy summit was a “very necessary” and timely initiative. But he cautioned that the apparent absence of a concrete plan of action raises questions about whether it will lead to concrete results.
Also, to be more effective, Biden’s summit would benefit from sharing the organization of the next summit with other countries.
“If this is seen as an effort by the United States to expand its influence, it will be doomed from the start,” Zovatto told me. “The best thing Biden could do is to hold next year’s summit in another country.”
Indeed, it could be a great idea to hold the 2022 Summit for Democracy in Uruguay, a highly democratic country in an increasingly authoritarian-ruled region. Uruguay ranks 15th in The Economist magazine’s ranking of democracies, ahead of the United States, which has recently descended to the 25th place.
All told, Biden deserves credit for having drawn world attention to the alarming erosion of democratic freedoms. It’s high time to focus on this existential problem, because, right now, the bad guys are winning.
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