Can Biden make world safer for democracy?

UNITED STATES President Joe Biden has made 'revitalising democracy the world over' a key goal of his administration, but it has taken almost a year since his inauguration to fulfil the key pledge of holding a summit of democracies which takes place this week.

To be sure, it has been a busy 2021 for the new US president, but it is surprising to many that it has taken so long to hold the event. Especially given the increasingly hostile environment across the globe for democratic government that recent studies have highlighted, including by the US think tank Freedom House.

The White House contends that the summit is just a beginning, not an end. It therefore wants this week's gathering to kick off a 'year of action' in 2022 to make democracy 'more responsive and resilient' in the face of the growing influence of authoritarian states, especially China.

There are multiple motivations for Biden's focus on democratic government in his presidency. For one, it is reported that he has been influenced significantly by the book How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt.

The core concept of this study is that democracies, in recent generations, haven't generally collapsed at the hands of a military coup or an armed revolution. Rather, they have broken down gradually with public institutions and political norms weakened from within.

Hence why Biden said in his address to Congress in April that 'proving that democracy is durable and strong' is 'the central challenge of the age'. And he is referring here not just internationally, but also in the US too given the soul-searching after the January assault on the US Capitol by pro-Trump supporters.

It was then that the former president disputed the legitimacy of the November 2020 election in a way that the Stockholm-based International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance asserts undermined fundamental trust in the electoral process. On this basis the institute made the eye-catching claim last month, in its latest annual report that the US - for the first time - belongs to a list of regressive or 'backsliding' democracies across the world.

This context helps explain why Biden is so eager to demonstrate that democracy is still an effective form of government in his own nation, including addressing US infrastructure needs which have for so long been neglected. When his landmark infrastructure bill was signed into law he asserted that 'I know compromise is hard for both sides, but it's important, it's necessary - for a democracy to be able to function. . . Today, we proved that democracy can still work'.

The bill is the largest federal investment in US infrastructure for decades and includes US$550 billion in new federal expenditure, over the next 8 years, to upgrade highways, roads and bridges, and to modernise city transit systems and passenger rail networks. It also sets aside funding for clean drinking water, high speed Internet, and a nationwide network of electric vehicle charging points.

Yet, the consequences of January's Capitol Hill debacle are not just important domestically, but also internationally as they undercut US credibility with its longstanding democracy promotion agenda. At the time, US foes across the world from Venezuela to Iran and Russia relished the Trumpian disorder in Washington DC.

Take the example of Russia's Deputy UN Ambassador Dmitry Polyanskiy who tweeted the evening of the Jan 6 attacks that 'quite Maidan-style pictures are coming from DC'. He referred here to pro-European protests in Ukraine, that Russia believes were orchestrated by the US, that toppled the Moscow-backed president of Ukraine Viktor Yanukovich in 2014.

There is little doubt that the debacle was watched with glee by nationalist-populists across the world, including in the former Eastern bloc, who are now less likely to feel the pressure of US-style calls for respect for the rule of law and democratic norms. During his period as US vice-president from 2009-17, Biden had an active role in such former Soviet countries, including Nato and European Union ally Hungary, speaking against corruption and in favour of the consolidation of democratic institutions, with an emphasis on the independence of the judiciary.

However, applying such pressure may no longer be as powerful. This is not just because of last January's chaotic scenes and the much wider erosion of US democratic traditions during the Trump era, but also the moves made by countries like Hungary, the only EU member not invited to this week's summit, in bringing a disequilibrium in the rule of law and post-Cold War democratic norms.

Perceptions in some developing countries in Africa, the Americas and Asia, especially where popular anti-US sentiment is already a significant political force, could also be an impediment to Biden's agenda. Damagingly, political discourse here still occasionally centres on recent US disorder and the allegation that US democracy involves an element of chaos and indeed sham.

In this context there are some Republicans, and possibly centrist Democrats too, who prefer Biden not to over-emphasise democracy-based political rhetoric.

They argue, for instance, that ideas like a summit of democracies, with a sometimes simple, binary distinction between 'good' and 'bad', can sit awkwardly in a fast-changing, complex world of ambiguity and uncertainty where there is frequent need to work with states lacking democratic traditions, but with shared interests with the US.

Some of these critics favour instead an international approach based more on classic, quantifiable national interests arguing other states, especially developing ones, might be more likely to aspire to emulate the US because of its material prosperity, rather than appeals based on the country's democratic virtues.

Economic modernisation and liberalism, it is claimed, will be an impulse towards future democratic reform, and help counteract the appeal of China's alternative, authoritarian model of development that has brought significant indebtedness to key US allies, increasing dependency on Beijing.

The implication is that Biden's agenda would be best delivered by putting significantly more emphasis on new economic reform and infrastructure packages in Africa, Asia and the Americas, via signature new initiatives such as the Build Back Better World to counter China's Belt and Road which some 140 nations have already signed cooperation agreements with.

In other words, far from preaching democracy, the best practical demonstration of US intent will be doubling down on offering investment for low and middle-income countries in values-driven, high-standard, and transparent partnerships to narrow the developing world's US$40 trillion infrastructure, exacerbated by the pandemic.

• The writer is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics