12 December 2021, NIICE Commentary 7532
Sourav Dahal
On 9th and 10th December, President Biden hosted the first “Summit for Democracy”. The virtual summit was attended by leaders from more than a hundred supposedly “democratic” states. The Biden administration claimed that the major objectives were to focus on challenges and opportunities facing democracies, defend democracies against authoritarianism and promote human rights. However, an analysis by Politico has revealed while 28 percent of those attendee-states fall under the partial-democratic category, 3 percent are authoritarian. Some authoritarian states like Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq and Angola made it to the summit, and hybrid states – democracies with authoritarian inclinations – such as Kenya, Ukraine, Malaysia, and Niger were also participants. India’s Modi, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, and the Philippines’ Duterte were among the “democratic” leaders who graced the summit with their presence – the same leaders whose populist extremism has caused subversion of democratic institutions in their respective nations. The diverse mixture of attendee-states, irrespective of their democratic standing, is revealing enough of the fact that some ulterior motives lay behind the convenient narrative of democracy promotion. Through engagements and partnerships with those “democratic” attendees, the US aims at ramping up containment efforts against its main rivals – China and Russia.
In an anarchical international system where ruthless power-pursuit is the only rule of the game, democratic values, in and of themselves, neither do nor can motivate state actors. That national interest triumphs over values is almost axiomatic in international politics. It is no aberration that, time and again, the US has readily discarded the principles of Liberal International Order (LIO) in forming strategic alliances with authoritarian regimes, or even overthrowing democratically elected governments for that matter. For instance, in 1953, the US orchestrated a coup d’état against democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. The US then implanted the Shah monarchy which was later overthrown by the Islamic Iranian Revolution of 1979 – the rest is history. When incompatible with its strategic interests, liberal values are of no relevance to the US. On the contrary, if the US’s strategic interests align with those liberal values, the LIO is touted as a guiding principle in the conduct of its foreign affairs.
President Biden’s Summit for Democracy is no exception. Democracy promotion is just a convenient narrative that the US has relied upon for its larger strategic endeavour. It is because of the universal appeal that democracy enjoys, “democracy promotion” as a narrative has become an efficacious tool for superpowers in sugar-coating their purely strategic pursuits. Under the veneer of democracy promotion lies the US’s ulterior motive of checking its rivals’ extending spheres of influence. China’s rise has threatened the US’s reign as the only hegemon for almost three decades, and China aims to be the sole Asian hegemon as has the US been in the Western hemisphere. The US is subjected to increased security and economic challenges in Asia and beyond by the China-Russia duo – and it is only likely the great power rivalry intensifies in the days to come. It is, therefore, authoritarian states or states with hybrid regimes, which hold strategic values for the US in its rivalry against China and Russia, got a free pass to the democracy summit.
The cause of concern isn’t, in any way, that the US is dead set on prioritising its interests over those liberal values it claims to abide by – that’s what all states do. The problem is that democracy could become an inadvertent victim of the great power rivalry. The rise of China and its alliance with Russia have now made the world a safer place for authoritarian regimes. These two authoritarian superpowers could use their newfound economic and political leverage in providing fellow authoritarian regimes with legitimacy, trade, and foreign aid. It isn’t just a coincidence that authoritarian regimes across the globe appear emboldened lately while democracies are dealing with internal crises, and with the threat of authoritarian tilt. The populists’ surge from both ends of the political spectrum has put even the most advanced of democracies in a precarious position. In this context of democratic backsliding, the US’s acceptance of authoritarian regimes or the hybrid ones as “democratic” would only assist in the further democratic decay. This is because, with the US’s acceptance, those states gain international legitimacy and democratic recognition all the while their authoritarian tendencies go unchecked.
By virtue of being the leader of the supposed “free world”, the US’s relationship with any nation in and of itself shapes the nation’s image – perhaps its democratic standing as well. Noam Chomsky and Ido Oren, among other scholars, have pointed out that a state’s relationship with the US has been a better determinant of its perceived democratic standing rather than the state’s adherence to democratic values. When Imperial Germany and the US had a cordial relationship in between the late nineteenth century and the first World War, Germany’s political system was hailed by American intellectuals and President Woodrow Wilson, who was an intellectual in his own right, as an “advanced constitutional democracy”. However, Imperial Germany was quickly denigrated to the autocratic one when it appeared as the US’s main rival in the First World War. Likewise, President Wilson had critiqued Imperial Russia as the “absolute backward autocracy”. In a dramatic change of opinion, once Russia allied with the US in the First World War, Wilson exclaimed, “Russia was known by those who knew it best to have been always, in fact, democratic at heart, in all the vital habits of her thoughts.”
This changing perception of a state’s democratic status based on its relationship with the US isn’t just restricted to political or popular discourses, academia too is equally susceptible. Those values emphasized as democratic ones by scholars are shaped, to some degree, by the US’s interests. While constitutionalism was one of the much-emphasized democratic values by American scholars until the early twentieth century, it was discarded right after the First World War. This is because Imperial Germany was earlier considered as the “advanced constitutional democracy”. Likewise, in the Polity II data set, which is widely used by political scientists, contemporary American democratic values are the standards against which all polities are coded – polities from the past as well as the present ones. The case is largely the same with other data sets, barring a few. The US receives almost perfect scores throughout while other states’ democratic ranking is quite reflective of their relationship with the US.
President Biden’s democracy summit fits perfectly in this political and intellectual tradition of politicizing democracy as per one’s strategic interests. As Taiwan was one among the attendees, the summit also heralds the likely deviation of the US from its formal “One China Policy”. In response, China’s top governing body, the State Council, has released a paper titled “China: Democracy That Works”. It is hard to fathom how a one-party system could even meet the basic democratic standards, let alone qualify as the successful one. But the claim sounds less ridiculous when attendees of Biden’s summit are taken into consideration. Though democracy has become an inadvertent victim of superpowers’ rivalry, paradoxically, this also reflects democracy’s triumph as a governing model. Such is democracy’s universal validity that from the authoritarian superpowers China and Russia to brutally repressive totalitarian states of the likes of Democratic People’s Republic of Korea identify themselves as democracies. That triumph aside, democracy is bound to get further trapped in the quagmire of the great power rivalry – Biden’s “Summit for Democracy” just seems a precursor to it.
