Global Crises and the Community of Democracies
- Thomas Garrett
- Jun 22, 2021
- 13 min read
Updated: Jun 27
There are certain global issues that pay no attention to national borders or natural barriers: climate change; the COVID-19 pandemic; nuclear weapons proliferation; and a migration and refugee crisis. These challenges can only be met by collective action.
This demand binds every country to a multilateral system, but the current global framework is showing its age 76 years after the creation of the United Nations. To be sure, the network should keep out no one: even authoritarian nations belong at the table of universal membership bodies. Their role in potential solutions to world threats often intermingles with their tragic record as the source of many of the same challenges.
But democracies need to be at the global decision-making table in force if the world is to confront the existential threats facing humanity. These require coordinated solutions reflecting the inclusion and diversity that self-correcting representative political systems provide.
Nations unite and exert influence under regional banners like the African Union, cultural/linguistic alliances like the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie, or religion-based groupings like the Organization of Islamic Cooperation. So, too, should there be a coalition of countries acting as a bloc founded upon adherence to explicitly stated human rights and democratic values.
Fortunately, there is momentum behind a new multilateral structure for the world’s democracies. Whether it’s growing a D-10, or Democracy-10, from the current G-7 as suggested by Boris Johnson[1] or hosting a Summit for Democracy as pledged by President Joe Biden,[2] or people movements like ‘NOW!’ building a league of democracies,[3] these are good steps in support of a values-based energizing of the global system.
21 years ago, driven by events of the twenty-first century, a group of thinkers turned its attention to giving a new global framework to the idea of democracy, which was rapidly becoming the dominant form of governance. At the founding of the United Nations in 1945, there were only 30 countries, almost all Western, that identified as democracies. With the swell of the ‘Third Wave of Democratisation’ described by Samuel Huntington,[4] by 2000, some 120 nations were considered democracies with representative and elected governments. And in notable instances, as in Portugal’s Carnation Revolution in 1974, the contribution of outside support to indigenous democratic institutions, in that case by West German foundations linked to the country’s political parties,[5] showed the importance of international democratic solidarity.
In his two terms of office (1993–2001), US President Bill Clinton made good on his 1992 campaign promise of promoting democracy around the world. In response to the increasing voices of ‘America first’ following the end of the Cold War, Clinton stated that official support for democracy was both in the national interest of the US and reflected America’s values. Since 1993, significant government funding increases for democracy-supporting NGOs joined structural changes in US foreign policy. At the State Department, the little-known Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs was rebranded as Democracy, Human Rights, and Labour. The US Agency for International Development’s stable of experts in global health delivery and clean irrigation systems developed new skillsets in elections and civil society support. And America’s diplomatic missions were required to include information on democracy in their country reports back to Washington.
