President Joe Biden brought representatives from more than 100 governments together virtually this week for something called the Summit for Democracy.
The stated objectives were difficult to disagree with: defending democracy against authoritarianism, fighting corruption and promoting human rights. Biden argued that democracy is facing a global challenge and that democratic governments need to demonstrate that they can still deliver for their citizens.
China and Russia were not invited. Taiwan was.
That immediately transformed what might have been a fairly predictable diplomatic conference into something much more politically interesting.
Because before countries can hold a summit of democracies, somebody has to answer a surprisingly difficult question:
What counts as a democracy?
At first, the answer seems obvious. Democracies hold elections. Citizens choose governments. Political opposition is allowed. Courts constrain power. Journalists can criticise leaders. Governments eventually leave office.
But real political systems rarely divide themselves neatly into two boxes labelled democracy and dictatorship.
There are consolidated liberal democracies with strong institutions. There are electoral democracies with weaker protections for rights. There are governments elected competitively that subsequently weaken courts or the media. There are authoritarian states that hold elections without meaningful political competition. There are monarchies that allow some political participation but reserve enormous power for unelected rulers.
Then there are countries moving between categories.
The United States therefore had to draw a line through an extremely complicated political spectrum and decide which governments belonged on which side.
That line was inevitably political.
Pakistan was invited. The Philippines was invited. India was invited. Poland was invited. Several governments facing serious criticism over democratic institutions or human rights were included, while other countries were excluded.
This does not necessarily make the summit hypocritical. A democracy does not have to be perfect to remain a democracy. If the admission standard were flawless liberal government, the guest list would be extremely short.
But the ambiguity exposes a larger problem with Biden’s foreign-policy framing.
He increasingly describes international politics as a competition between democracy and autocracy.
That captures something important about the current world. China has become more powerful while remaining an authoritarian one-party state. Russia has become increasingly authoritarian under Vladimir Putin. Democratic backsliding is occurring in several countries. Technology gives governments new tools for surveillance and information control.
Political systems really are competing over legitimacy.
But international politics is not organised entirely around regime type.
America cooperates with governments because of strategic interests as well as democratic values.
Sometimes those principles align.
Sometimes they don’t.
Saudi Arabia is one of the clearest examples. It is an absolute monarchy and an important American strategic partner. The United States has extensive security and economic relationships with several governments that would never plausibly qualify for a summit of democracies.
That does not automatically make American foreign policy immoral.
Countries have interests.
Washington needs relationships concerning energy, terrorism, regional security, trade and military access. Refusing all cooperation with governments that fail American democratic standards would dramatically reduce America’s ability to influence much of the world.
But it does make the language of a global democratic coalition more complicated.
If America says international politics is fundamentally democracy against authoritarianism and then cooperates closely with authoritarian governments when strategically useful, those governments excluded from the democratic camp can reasonably point towards inconsistency.
China certainly does.
Beijing argues that the United States has no legitimate authority to decide which political systems qualify as democratic. Chinese officials present their own political system as a form of democracy centred on consultation, development and performance rather than competitive multiparty elections.
I do not find that argument convincing as a definition of democracy.
If citizens cannot realistically remove the national leadership through competitive elections, organise independent opposition parties or freely criticise the government, calling the system democratic stretches the term until it loses much of its meaning.
But China’s broader criticism deserves more attention: why should Washington be the institution issuing democratic membership cards?
There is no internationally elected authority that appointed the United States referee of political systems.
The summit is an American initiative. America therefore chooses the invitations.
That means strategic considerations inevitably enter a supposedly principled classification.
Taiwan demonstrates this perfectly.
Taiwan is a functioning democracy. On democratic criteria, its invitation makes sense.
But Taiwan’s participation is not politically neutral because Beijing claims Taiwan as part of China and strongly opposes governments treating it as an independent state.
Inviting Taiwan therefore communicates two things simultaneously: support for a democracy and a geopolitical signal towards China.
Again, motives do not have to come one at a time.
The United States can genuinely value Taiwan’s democracy and genuinely see Taiwan as strategically important in its competition with China.
Both can be true.
This is why foreign policy becomes misleading when governments present interests and values as though they always point in the same direction.
Sometimes they reinforce each other.
Sometimes values provide the language through which interests are pursued.
Sometimes interests constrain how consistently values can be applied.
A serious foreign policy has to acknowledge all three possibilities.
There is also an uncomfortable domestic issue for Biden.
The United States is holding a global summit about democratic resilience less than a year after a mob attacked the US Capitol while Congress was certifying the presidential election.
Donald Trump continues to claim that the 2020 election was stolen despite the absence of evidence sufficient to overturn its result. American politics remains deeply polarised over the legitimacy of that election.
This could be used to argue that America has no right to discuss democracy abroad.
I don’t think that follows.
A country does not lose the ability to defend democratic principles because its own democracy experiences serious problems. If that were the standard, almost nobody could criticise anyone.
But America’s domestic difficulties change the tone it should use.
There is a difference between saying “we have perfected democracy and will teach it to you” and saying “our democratic institutions are also under pressure, so countries facing similar problems need to learn from one another.”
The second is considerably more credible.
In fact, January 6 may strengthen one part of Biden’s argument. Democratic institutions cannot simply be assumed permanent because a country has been democratic for a long time.
Norms can weaken.
Citizens can lose trust.
Political leaders can challenge electoral outcomes.
Democracy requires maintenance.
That applies in Washington as much as Warsaw, Delhi or Manila.
This is where the summit’s emphasis on democratic backsliding becomes important.
Modern democracies do not usually collapse through one dramatic military coup.
Sometimes they erode incrementally.
An elected government attacks independent media.
Then it changes judicial appointments.
Then it weakens electoral institutions.
Then it uses state resources against opponents.
Each individual step may be legally defensible or politically popular.
The cumulative effect can be a political system in which elections still occur but removing the government becomes increasingly difficult.
That is a more complicated threat than old-fashioned dictatorship because democratic institutions remain visible.
There is still a parliament.
Still an election.
Still a constitution.
The question is whether those institutions retain enough independence to constrain the people governing through them.
This is why Biden is correct to treat democracy as something broader than voting.
But that creates difficulties for some of the countries Washington invited.
Poland, which I wrote about in October, is engaged in a serious confrontation with the European Union over judicial independence and the supremacy of EU law. The Philippines under President Rodrigo Duterte has faced extensive criticism over human rights and the conduct of its anti-drug campaign.
India also raises increasingly complicated questions.
India is the world’s largest electoral democracy and has maintained competitive national elections and peaceful transfers of power for decades. That achievement is substantial, particularly in a country of its size, diversity and income level.
At the same time, critics have raised concerns about pressure on journalists, civil society, religious tensions and the use of state institutions.
Recognising those concerns does not mean declaring India no longer democratic.
It means democracy exists in dimensions rather than as a single switch that is either on or off.
Elections can remain highly competitive while other democratic institutions weaken.
A country can improve in one dimension and deteriorate in another.
That is why democratic measurement is difficult.
And it is why a summit divided into invited and not invited can create a false sense of precision.
Perhaps the more useful question is not simply “Is Country X a democracy?”
It is “Which institutions allow citizens to constrain political power in Country X, and are those institutions becoming stronger or weaker?”
That produces a much more informative analysis.
There is also an economic argument underneath Biden’s summit that I think may ultimately matter more than the speeches about values.
Biden repeatedly argues that democracies need to prove they can deliver.
I wrote something similar after the G7 summit in June.
Democratic legitimacy cannot depend entirely on telling citizens that democracy is morally superior to authoritarian government. People also expect competent government.
Can democracies build infrastructure?
Can they manage pandemics?
Can they reduce inequality?
Can they respond to climate change?
Can they make decisions quickly enough to address technological change?
China’s strongest argument for its political system is not necessarily ideological.
It is performance.
The Chinese Communist Party can point towards decades of extraordinary economic growth, infrastructure construction and poverty reduction and argue that its system produces results.
There are enormous qualifications to that story, including repression and the absence of political freedom.
But if democracies respond only by saying “our values are better”, they may underestimate the political appeal of performance.
People care about freedom.
They also care about whether trains work, electricity stays on and their children become richer.
A democratic government that repeatedly fails to provide basic competence cannot assume voters will remain satisfied simply because elections occur.
This is one reason authoritarian populism can emerge inside democracies themselves. A leader promises to bypass slow institutions and simply get things done.
Parliament is inefficient.
Courts obstruct us.
Journalists complain.
Experts delay action.
Give the executive more power and government will finally work.
That argument becomes attractive when democratic institutions appear incapable of delivering outcomes.
The defence of democracy therefore cannot simply consist of defending procedures.
Democratic institutions need to demonstrate that constraints on power are compatible with effective government.
This connects directly to Tunisia in July, where frustration with parliamentary paralysis helped create support for President Kais Saied’s suspension of parliament.
The lesson is uncomfortable: people can value democracy and still become willing to weaken democratic institutions if those institutions appear persistently ineffective.
Biden’s summit also focuses heavily on corruption, which makes sense because corruption attacks democracy through exactly this mechanism.
When citizens believe political elites use government primarily for personal enrichment, elections begin to look like competition over who gets access to state resources rather than genuine public accountability.
Corruption therefore damages more than government finances.
It damages the perceived legitimacy of democratic rule.
The Pandora Papers demonstrated another side of the same problem. Political elites can operate through financial structures citizens cannot easily see, creating the perception that the powerful live under different practical rules.
If Biden wants a global democratic coalition, fighting those inequalities inside democracies may matter as much as criticising dictatorships outside them.
There is also a strategic risk in organising international politics too rigidly around regime type.
China and Russia already argue that Western democracy promotion is actually an attempt to weaken governments Washington dislikes.
If the United States constructs an explicit democratic bloc while excluding them, Beijing and Moscow may respond by deepening cooperation with each other and with other governments suspicious of Western pressure.
Then ideological competition begins reinforcing geopolitical blocs.
That can become self-fulfilling.
America sees authoritarian states cooperating and strengthens democratic alliances.
Russia and China see democratic states coordinating against them and strengthen their own partnership.
Each side interprets the other’s response as proof that its original strategy was necessary.
This resembles the security dilemma I wrote about last week, except the dividing line becomes political systems rather than military deployments.
Again, this does not mean Biden should stop supporting democracy because authoritarian governments dislike it.
It means policymakers should recognise the incentives created by the way they frame international competition.
There are global problems that cannot be solved only by democracies.
Climate change requires China.
Nuclear arms control requires Russia.
Pandemic management requires cooperation with every major country capable of producing or detecting variants.
Iran’s nuclear programme requires negotiations with an authoritarian government.
International politics therefore cannot become a permanent summit in which democracies speak only to other democracies.
Values can determine whom you trust most closely.
They cannot determine whom you sometimes need to negotiate with.
This is why I think the Summit for Democracy is useful if treated as a forum for democratic governments to improve their own institutions.
It becomes less useful if treated as a dividing line through the entire international system.
Democracies have genuine common interests. They can cooperate on election security, corruption, independent journalism, digital surveillance and protection of civil society. They can learn from one another’s institutional failures.
But the strongest argument for democracy will not come from the guest list.
It will come from what those governments do afterwards.
If countries attending the summit continue weakening courts, attacking journalists or manipulating electoral rules, the conference becomes branding.
If democratic governments remain unable to address inequality, climate change, corruption and public services, speeches about democratic superiority become less persuasive.
And if Washington condemns authoritarianism only when practised by strategic competitors while ignoring it among useful partners, the values-based framework loses credibility.
That does not require perfect consistency.
Foreign policy cannot be perfectly consistent because interests conflict.
It requires enough consistency that principles influence behaviour even when following them has some cost.
Otherwise they are not really principles.
They are descriptions applied selectively to policies governments wanted to pursue anyway.
Perhaps that is the real test of Biden’s democratic foreign policy.
Not whether America can identify authoritarian governments.
That is relatively easy.
Not whether democratic leaders can agree that democracy is valuable.
They obviously can.
The difficult question is whether democracies can constrain themselves.
Can an elected government accept a court ruling it hates?
Can a president accept losing an election?
Can a parliamentary majority protect the rights of people who voted against it?
Can governments tolerate journalists exposing corruption?
Can powerful countries apply democratic principles when doing so complicates their strategic interests?
Democracy is often described as government by the people.
Increasingly, I think its most impressive characteristic may be something less inspiring:
people with power voluntarily accepting limits on what they can do with it.
Dictatorships can make decisions.
Democracies have to make decisions while allowing somebody else to tell the government no.
That is slower.
It is frustrating.
Sometimes it produces terrible policy.
But the alternative is trusting whoever currently holds power to decide where the limits on their own power should be.
Biden invited more than 100 governments this week because the United States considers them participants in a global democratic project.
The invitation itself proves very little.
The more important test begins when each leader closes the Zoom window and returns home.
A summit can declare that democracy is under threat.
Only institutions can demonstrate that democracy deserves to survive.
