The journalistic proverb that “no news is good news” is not always accurate. President Joe Biden yesterday hosted a second Summit for Democracy which, held under his impulse and again in a virtual format despite overcoming the pandemic, took place with all the sorrow in the world and without any glory. The call brought together leaders from 120 countries. But the commitments, proclamations and announcements of aid in favor of democratic values, headed by the US president himself, served mainly to highlight the general crisis and specific setbacks in terms of rights and freedoms in the different regions of the planet.
In a pre-recorded speech that none of the main US television channels broadcast at the time of the summit, Biden congratulated himself on the “resilience” and “fortitude” that democratic governments would have shown in the face of dictatorial or autocratic in the 15 months since the first Democracy Summit, with the war in Ukraine at stake.
However, the facts belie the head of the greatest superpower. According to an exhaustive report recently published by the Swedish institute Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem) with data collected and analyzed by almost four thousand academics and experts from all over the world, 72% of the world population (5,700 million people) lives today under some autocracy, compared to 46% ten years ago. In this decade, the number of nations in the process of democratization has gone from 43 in 2012 to only 14 in 2022, a relationship that is inverted for those that walk in the opposite direction (from 13 to 42) as they move towards autocracy. The progress affects only 2% of the globe’s inhabitants: the lowest proportion since 1973.
In this context, the aggression of the autocratic Russia against Ukraine and the tensions between China and the West competed in prominence with the democratic crisis in Israel. In the midst of the open and unusual confrontation that took place hours earlier between Biden and Israeli President Beniamin Netanyahu, the UN Secretary General, António Guterres, added fuel to the fire by stressing how “Israel has shown time and time again that autocratic leadership cannot not the guarantor of stability but rather a catalyst for chaos and conflict”.
The list of rulers invited and not invited to yesterday’s summit did not go unnoticed either. It was striking that Biden gave space in the meeting to both Netanyahu himself and the leaders of India or Poland while – as he had done in the first meeting – he denied it to two NATO allies: Hungary and Turkey.
The President of the United States announced an outlay of $690 million in funds to help fight corruption, support free and fair elections, and promote technologies that support democratic governments.
Biden called on participating countries to unite against the threats and challenges posed by Beijing and Moscow. To which the Chinese government responded by stating that the summit “promotes division in the name of democracy” while the Russian ambassador in Washington, Anatoli Antonov, accused the US of hypocrisy. “We have already seen the disastrous consequences of US attempts to force the export of democracy in Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan,” Antonov said.
The meeting left one question floating: is the world more peaceful and democratic than it was two, three or ten years ago? There are doubts.
