Berlin, Brussels
Joe Biden chose the title with care: When the US President welcomes the heads of government from around 110 countries to a video conference on Thursday, he does so under the heading: “Summit for Democracy”. On the one hand, this is an indication that dangers to democracy threaten not only from authoritarian powers such as China or Russia, but also from the internal weakness of the USA itself, for example.
On the other hand, Biden wanted to avoid the list of invited people splitting the world into good and bad. Biden missed the second goal even before the two-day mammoth event began. Russia and China, but also Turkey and Hungary protested violently against the fact that they were not invited. Especially since other countries like Pakistan, the Philippines and Poland are included, although they are repeatedly pilloried for violating democratic principles.
But there is also criticism of the credibility of the host himself: “The USA shouldn’t take a leading role here,” says Ian Bremmer, President of the international political consultancy Eurasia Group, “because democracy is battered in America too” US President Trump and his supporters did not accept the 2020 election defeat, which led to a violent assault on the Capitol on January 6th.
“The fact that a mature democracy like the American one, which also claims a special place in history for itself, produces images like the one we saw on January 6th, will have lasting effects far beyond US borders,” says the American Stanford political scientist Francis Fukuyama.
Top jobs of the day
Find the best jobs now and
be notified by email.
Numerous surveys show how miserable the state of democracy is in many regions of the world. According to the Democracy Index of the Economist Intelligence Unit, only 8.4 percent of the world’s population live in fully democratic states. A third of the people, on the other hand, are ruled by authoritarian rulers.
However, the fact that Biden is making the democracy summit a symbol of his foreign policy also has solid interests. “The Americans are not interested in altruism,” says Daniela Schwarzer, Director for Europe and Eurasia at the Open Society Foundations (OSF), “for the USA an alliance of democracies is important in order to maintain and expand its influence in the world. ”
The Ukraine conflict is a good example of this. The country suffers from corruption but holds democratic elections. This is one of the reasons why the US President insisted in his video summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin that only Ukrainians can decide whether to apply for NATO membership. The Americans do not deny, however, that political stability in Eastern Europe is also in their interests.
The new federal government in Berlin has now also noticed that morality is not yet a strategy. It is true that the coalition agreement still says full of fervor: “In the international system competition, our values must be resolutely defended with democratic partners.” Vice-Chancellor and Green Economy Minister Robert Habeck has already announced that one will “have to look closely at the relationship with China where cooperation is in the German interest ”and where not.
Christian Lindner, FDP leader and finance minister, wants to “further develop relations with China”, but also show “commitment to human rights” on “the world stage”. “The special role of the Chinese internal market for the German economy will also be taken into account”. The White House has taken some concrete initiatives to slow the advance of the authoritarian powers.
This includes a proposal for an Internet alliance with the Europeans, which other democracies should join. The aim is to create “a new and better vision” for the Internet, according to a US government strategy paper. It wants to react to the rise of China to a high-tech dictatorship or, as the document says, to “the emergence of an alternative vision of the Internet as an instrument of state control represented by authoritarian powers such as China and Russia”.
On the other hand, the government is reacting to the bitter realization that the promise of freedom that was linked to the networking of the world in the 1990s and 2000s has turned into its opposite. The paper lists a number of “problematic developments”, starting with the “global disinformation epidemic” and the “concentration of power in a small number of dominant technology companies”.
The democracy summit is aimed primarily against authoritarian leaders such as China’s President Xi Jingping (here at a party event in July 2021).
(Photo: AP)
The US has also announced new export restrictions on surveillance technology to authoritarian regimes. Behind this is the realization that without Western know-how, China would not have succeeded in building a digital dictatorship. The Americans also want to fight corruption and money laundering more intensely, in order to deprive the elites of system rivals such as Russia and China from enjoying the freedom and prosperity of the West while suppressing their own people.
The Hungarian Prime Minister was not invited to the Democracy Summit by US President Biden.
(Photo: AP)
The Americans also want to announce new sanctions at the summit. “The Treasury Department will take a variety of measures to identify individuals involved in malicious activities that undermine democracy and democratic institutions in the world, including corruption, repression, organized crime and serious human rights violations,” the US said -Government.
The democratic struggle is made more difficult by the fact that democracy and economic prosperity no longer always go hand in hand. “China in particular has a successful economic model and has also proven that it can fight a pandemic effectively,” says OSF Director Schwarzer. However, this does not yet prove that the future also belongs to Beijing’s digital authoritarianism. “When it comes to innovation and creativity, democratic states have advantages,” believes the scientist.
More: Biden warns Putin of the enormous economic consequences of invading Ukraine