Will Biden’s Summit for Democracy Save Democracy?

The Copenhagen Democracy Summit 2021 (CDS2021), a two-day event, will take place between May 10 and May 11 in a hybrid format (in person and via web conference due to Covid-19 travel restrictions) in Copenhagen's Royal Playhouse. The event will draw many participants including business executives, political leaders, activists, and other democracy supporters from selected countries and companies to promote Biden's global democracy and US leadership in this arena.
The summit, an initiative of the Alliance of Democracies Foundation, comes as President Biden who himself opened the first Copenhagen Democracy Summit in 2018 prepares a global Summit for Democracy later this year. Although details like the timing and location have not been finalized. People familiar with the process said they expected an event near the end of the year.
CDS2021 is convened by Anders Fogh Rasmussen, former NATO Secretary - General (2009-2014) and Danish Prime Minister (2001-2009). The event will be moderated by Politico's Ryan Heath and former ABC and CNN correspondent Jeanne Meserve.
 
On the Alliance of Democracies official website and Twitter account, the organizer of CDS2021 has confirmed that Charles Michel, President of the European Council, Zuzana Caputova, President of Slovakia, Tsai Ing-wen, President of Taiwan along with exiled Hong Kong opposition leader Nathan Law, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya from Belarus and Juan Guaido from Venezuela, Eric Schmidt, Chairman of the U.S. National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) and former CEO of Google, Michael Chertoff, CEO of Chertoff Group and former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security, Derek Mitchell, President of the National Democratic Institute (NDI) and former U.S. Ambassador to Myanmar, Gen Nakatani, former Defence Minister of Japan will be among some of its participants or panelists.
 
CDS2021 is preparation for Biden's promise to host a global Summit for Democracy later this year, hoping to show that a post-Donald Trump America will be committed to democracy at home and abroad. The event will discuss what to expect at the first global Summit for Democracy, the need for creating a global alliance of democracies, and a tech alliance of democracies. The discussion panel will also debate on social media's effect on democracy.
 
Writing in Foreign Affairs last spring, President Biden said a global Summit for Democracy would be "to renew the spirit and shared purpose of the nations of the free world. It will bring together the world's democracies to strengthen our democratic institutions, honestly confront nations that are backsliding, and forge a common agenda". President Biden said his summit could be modeled on President Barack Obama's four nuclear security summits, in which world leaders convened to share ideas and make specific pledges about reducing and securing nuclear weapons. Mr. Biden added that his event would feature civil society organizations "that stand on the front lines in defense of democracy" and include "a call to action" to technology and social media companies that become vessels for anti-democratic disinformation.
 
At a time when rivalries between the U.S., China, and Russia are growing, hosting a global Summit for Democracy would be an eye-catching reaffirmation of America's role as "leader of the free world". In Washington, a debate over the idea broken out earlier among former U. S. government officials and academics.
 
Some foreign policy experts argue that such a meeting is ill-advised and the administration should instead hold a democracy summit at home - one focused on "injustice and inequality" in the United States, including issues like voting rights and disinformation. In the aftermath of the Capitol riots on Jan. 6, there have been calls for the Biden administration to abandon this idea, insisting that America must focus on getting its own house in order before trying to revitalize democracy globally.
 
"The United States has lost credibility; there's no question about that", said James Goldgeier, a professor of international relations at American University and a former National Security Council aide in the Clinton administration, according to a New York Times article published earlier this year.
 
"How can the United States spread democracy or act as an example for others if it barely has a functioning democracy at home?" Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, wrote in Foreign Policy.
 
The real test of America's influence will come in how the Biden administration structures the invitations and agenda of its planned Democracy Summit later in 2021. One major dilemma with the idea becomes apparent as soon as Washington tries to draw up the guest list. If Washington casts its net broadly, it will inevitably include NATO allies like Turkey, Poland, and Hungary as well as countries like Brazil, Peru, Azerbaijan, India, Kuwait, Iraq, Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, Qatar, Kenya or the Philippines, which could serve as spoilers.
 
It is hard to imagine holding such a summit without inviting these U.S. allies that hold regular elections. At the same time, there are legitimate questions about the erosion of democratic values in these countries, including freedom of the press and the protection of women, minority, and LGBTQ rights. Ignoring issues like these would make the U.S. seem hypocritical and might actually damage its own credibilities and democracy in the countries concerned. On the other hand, restricting the guest list to a subset of the members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development would also possibly alienate many longstanding U.S. partners and treaty allies. If Biden invites leaders like Duterte and Erdogan, he would discredit his summit of democracy. If he does not invite them, he would risk pushing them into the arms of Beijing and Moscow.
 
Even a country like India, which boasts of being the world's most populous democracy, presents risks. The U.S. would like to see India as an ideological and strategic counter to China's rise. But it is becoming increasingly difficult to overlook India's fast-declining democratic standards. The daily assaults on civil liberties and the threats to India's Muslim minority under Modi's Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) have noticeably increased since Modi's re-election in 2019.
 
Pressing China on human rights while ignoring gross violations by allies is not a good look for the new Leader of the Free World, especially one who projects himself as the moral opposite of his blatantly transactional predecessor. This is where the Modi government's increasingly undisguised tyranny becomes a Biden problem.
 
How the Biden administration tackles such questions could offer broader clues about its foreign policy plans, including which countries the president will favor and which ones he will keep at arm's length.
 
Biden has called the event a "Summit for Democracy," not a "Summit of Democracies". That linguistic distinction could give organizers some room to maneuver on invitations: If your government says it's for democracy even if it is not very good at it, then maybe you get on the list.
 
The second danger is that a Summit for Democracy could prove geopolitically divisive, hastening the world's split into democratic and non-democratic camps and undermining prospects for pragmatic cooperation with China and Russia. The challenges of global interdependence, such as transnational terrorism, climate change, nuclear proliferation, pandemic disease, and financial instability, are shared by all countries, regardless of regime type.
 
Advocates say that Biden will have to walk a careful line during his planned summit, one in which he boosts the ideals of democracy without coming across as though he is lecturing. For the moment, the Biden administration might do better to build on these existing institutions and initiatives - rather than staking everything on a high-profile summit of democracy that could easily go wrong.
 
American stewardship of a new global summit feels like an old answer to a new problem wrote Adam McCauley in his article published by Open Canada, an online magazine published by the Canadian International Council. The Summit for Democracy is likely to fail for two main reasons. First, in selecting participants, Biden will probably alienate both friends and foes as his administration tries to balance their stated values against America's hard interests. Secondly, the summit seems to confuse the symptoms of democratic decay with their cause: authoritarianism or autocracy has grown increasingly potent where people perceive the liberal democratic promise has not, and cannot, deliver at home. Biden's true democratic restoration must begin and meaningfully progress in America before a global summit is either useful or feasible.
 
Some Americans think too much that democracy is a religion and the only thing you have to do is to convert people, said one analyst. Obviously, democracy is not something that President Biden can declare or lecture the world, but what America needs to demonstrate. Skeptics Say, heal thyself first before preaching to the rest of the world.