Democracy slips back and our choices will determine its future. Will we let it retreat or will we have the vision and the courage to drive human progress and freedom forward? Here is the decisive challenge, democracy is not a state, but an action “: with these words, quoting the motto of Abraham Lincoln on the battlefield of Gettysburg in 1863,” Government of the people, by the people, for the people “, US President Joe Biden opened the Summit of Democracies yesterday. Conceived by the late Republican Senator John McCain as the Caucus, committee, of free countries at the United Nations, the idea of a summit against totalitarianism was revived by Biden in the gloomy days of January, when the US Congress was stormed by coup leaders Trumpians. Faced with the offensive of the Kremlin leader Vladimir Putin, on the border of Ukraine, and of Chinese President Xi Jinping, with the siege of Taiwan, Biden hopes that a moral recovery of the democracies will win the game of “soft power”, making the open societies more fascinating than totalitarianism.
The enterprise is not easy. The Chinese reaction was furious, “The summit is a hoax, America is not a democracy, the Chinese hate it, US politicians are lobby agents,” Tian Peyan, of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, said scornfully. a Russian analyst cuts short in a Chinese newspaper “It is as if the mistress of a brothel was preaching to the boarders.” The ambassadors of Beijing and Moscow, Qin Gang and Anatoly Antonov, in a rare double-signed document, call for an end to “the diplomacy of values” and a confrontation centered only on interests, as China did last weekend, launching the its International Forum of Democracy, hosted 120 countries and a white paper by the head of propaganda Huang Kunming: “China is a democracy that works, aims at results”, Western systems are inefficient. In The Atlantic magazine, essayist Anne Applebaum is pessimistic, “in the 21st century the bad guys are winning”, dictatorships prevail over freedom.
President Biden is aware of how much the image of his country has plummeted under the Trump administration, even in Europe at 20%, rising to around 60% now (source Pew Institute), and he knows that the images from Guantanamo, Kabul, with armed militias on the streets, laws to obstruct the right to vote of minorities sow skepticism about the “American system”. He therefore criticized himself: “Here, in the United States, we know best of all that renewing our democracy and strengthening democratic institutions requires constant efforts”, promising interventions to eliminate the traps against the vote of African Americans.
However, the summit aroused controversy, if the no to Russia and China leaves out authoritarian capitals, allies of Washington, Turkey and Singapore, as well as an EU country, Hungary, have not been invited. Present instead are Iraq, Angola, Kenya, Serbia, Pakistan, whose civil rights status is controversial. Biden had no doubts, and yesterday and today he presented conclusions entrusted to Vice President Kamala Harris, in front of the big screen with the faces of the guest leaders.
European and Italian commentators sympathetic to President Putin mock the two days, persuaded that Biden is trying to distract from the collapse in the polls that afflicts him, confident that the Realpolitik of Moscow and Beijing will prevail. But the US president is not an idealist dreamer, his vision of diplomacy has tempered over decades in the Senate, every success to be negotiated, the hegemonic battle made up of compromises, small steps. He has read the Harvard Report which fears China’s next technological overtaking on the United States, is aware of Xi Jinping’s economic pressure on vassal countries and wants to return to offering a positive image of America. He will use the lever of sanctions, the Magnitsky law, dedicated to the Russian dissident who died in prison for denouncing the regime, against the Chinese and Russian oligarchs who violate civil rights.
Among the first spoke yesterday the Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi, whom Biden considers among Washington’s best friends, and who wanted, in person, to inform after the summit with Putin on the war in Ukraine, last week, a privilege reserved for Great Britain , Germany and France. Draghi challenged the premise that democracies are dysfunctional, citing the Italian reaction to the Covid-19 pandemic: “The pandemic represented one of the main challenges to democracies, we had to balance individual freedoms with security measures and ensure prosperity in a moment of strong recession. We have been up to the task so far. The EU experience offers an excellent example of the resilience of democracies. In the darkest days of the crisis, we launched Next Generation EU, a € 750 billion reform and investment program financed through joint loans. We have chosen to stick together and collectively share the costs of recovery. We have transformed the pandemic into an opportunity to reverse long-standing inequalities, improve sustainability and foster innovation ».
Biden and Draghi conceive politics and democracy pragmatically, they are not idealists, they trust the ability to correct themselves of free systems as a strategic advantage over monolithic systems, and they want to defend it by exposing its advantages. A testimony in this sense, surprisingly, came from the writer C. Pam Zhang, author of the novel How much gold is there in these hills (translated by 66th and 2nd): born in China, 31 years old, now a US citizen, to whom he asks her at the book fair in Rome how she lives the two great powers of her identity, she replies “I feel American, because the United States can criticize them and criticism is always an act of love”.
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