President Joe Biden is hosting a Summit for Democracy, a virtual conference starting Thursday with more than 100 nations participating, which the U.S. leader hopes will assist in renewing democracy in the United States and around the world, and one that will send a message of resolve to Moscow and Beijing.
According to the State Department, the summit on December 9-10 is meant to focus on three things: defending against authoritarianism, addressing and fighting corruption, and promoting respect for human rights.
Biden said on September 15, the International Day of Democracy, “No democracy is perfect, and no democracy is ever final. Every gain made, every barrier broken, is the result of determined, unceasing work.”
Biden will host the first of two summit meetings, which will bring together leaders from government, civil society, and the private sector to set forth an affirmative agenda for democratic renewal and to tackle the greatest threats faced by democracies today through collective action.
China’s Communist Party, sharply criticized the global summit and extolled the virtues of its system of governance, questioning how a deeply polarized democratic country that botched its response to COVID-19 was in any position to lecture the rest of the world.
Communists said that efforts to force others to copy the Western democratic model are “doomed to fail.”
Meanwhile, glaring inconsistencies present challenges to the legitimacy of America’s call for freedom and
The gathering is part of an effort to reassert the United States’ role on the global stage as a leader of Democratic nations — echoing Biden’s assertion that “America is back.”
During four years of Republican Donald Trump’s administration, the United States largely retreated from its traditional international role as leader of the free world.
The Biden administration hopes to position the United States and its democratic allies so they may better counter the increasingly aggressive authoritarian governments in the world, particularly China and Russia.
However, the summit comes at a time when democratic institutions in the United States remain under assault by Republicans who would prevent from voting groups of citizens who don’t like their style of government.
Among the 110 other countries represented at Biden’s two-day summit, convened with the goal of rallying the nations of the world against the forces of authoritarianism, is Pakistan, a nation that the State Department says has more than a dozen serious human rights problems, from “extrajudicial killings” to “forced disappearance by the government or its agents” to “political prisoners” to “severe restrictions of religious freedom” to “trafficking in persons.”
Countries that human rights groups have identified as trending away from democratic liberalism have complicated by a guest list, including India, the Philippines and Poland.
During the Cold War battle between ideologies, African, Asian, and South American countries that cannot clearly be defined as democracies supported the United States and Western Europe, leading countries with non-democratic governments to be considered ‘free’
By the State Department’s own account, the governments of both Pakistan and the Philippines, another invitee, are responsible for “unlawful or arbitrary killings.”
Not making the cut are Hungary, a member of the European Union, and Turkey, a NATO ally, both of which have seen their democratic safeguards crumble in recent years.
The White House has been less than clear about how it made such calls for the event, which is being overseen by Shanthi Kalathil, coordinator for democracy and human rights at the National Security Council.
Asked about the criteria, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Monday, “Inclusion or an invitation is not a stamp of approval on their approach to democracy — nor is exclusion a stamp of the opposite of that, of disapproval,”
Some of the excluded countries aren’t buying that, however; leaders of Hungary, for one, complain that they are being penalized for their closeness to the former president.
For the United States, the summit will offer an opportunity to listen, learn, and engage with a diverse range of actors whose support and commitment is critical for global democratic renewal.
It will also showcase one of democracy’s unique strengths: the ability to acknowledge its imperfections and confront them openly and transparently, so that we may, as the United States Constitution puts it, “form a more perfect union.”
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