Saving democracy

Commitment to liberal rules, at home and abroad, takes effort

US President Joe Biden’s Summit for Democracy arranged for over 100 world leaders to speak about the importance of democracy and how important it is to defend it. For Mr Biden, the democracy summit has been a long-cherished ambition — he repeatedly spoke about it when on the campaign trail. It is part of what he says is his attempt to ensure the leadership of the free world regains its centrality in American foreign policy. Prime Minister Narendra Modi spoke at the summit, repeating familiar tropes about the strength of India’s democratic credentials.

Yet few can argue that, in democracies across the world populist tendencies have begun to subvert and undermine democratic institutions. This is a global pattern; multiple watchdog organisations, from Freedom House to the Economist Intelligence Unit, have found a general trend towards democratic backsliding. Freedom House reported earlier this year that civil liberties and political rights had been declining now for 15 consecutive years globally. 

That said, there is no question that a US that takes its role as steward of the rule-based order is essential. Recent tensions in the Indo-Pacific have made it clear that a world in which the US does not aspire to leadership is one that will be unsafe both for democracies and for the global economic system. Beijing’s sabre-rattling across the Taiwan Strait and its intimidation of Australia over the past year have raised fresh questions about how far today’s US is willing to go to defend democratic allies and the global order to which it helped give birth after the Second World War. Two decades ago, there would have been no question that the US would have fought to uphold its treaty obligations to Japan, for example — treaty obligations that have obliged that country to maintain a self-defence force rather than a real military. Yet today influential voices within the United States — and indeed within Mr Biden’s own party — would argue that American lives should not be put on the line for principle. Mr Biden himself has shown considerable sympathy for this viewpoint in the course of his deeply unpopular abandonment of Afghanistan. In the absence of a genuine and bipartisan commitment to upholding the global liberal order, it is hard to argue that events such as the democracy summit will lead to a strengthening of democracies against the rise of authoritarian governments such as Beijing.

The greatest threat to democracies, however, comes from within. A slide towards populism and hyper-nationalism has reduced civil liberties and institutional independences even in the strongest and oldest democracies, from India to the US to the United Kingdom. The European Union is divided internally, with some of its eastern European members strongly rejecting liberal norms. One of these, Hungary, was not even invited to the democracy summit. Mr Biden to his credit has accepted that the US is not in a position to trumpet its democratic example after the past four years. Yet the fact remains that unless the root causes of populism and institutional decay are found and reversed, democracies will continue to be in peril. And authoritarians, whether in Moscow or Beijing, will use these fresh cleavages within their democratic rivals to further undermine them. Saving democracy will take a lot more than a summit.