Challenges of Today, Implications for the Future: Part Two

In War — A Crime Against Humanity (Hojas del Sur / Amazon 2015), I discussed the need to strengthen the commitment of international and multilateral institutions to each other and to the establishment of world peace. I said at the time that the UN needed to be restructured to keep the five veto-holding powers on the Security Council from manipulating war and peace according to their own geopolitical agendas, and suggested that the NATO alliance should be bolstered and used to reestablish and maintain peace in areas of the world within their sphere of influence where armed conflicts emerge.

Above all, however, I stressed the importance of democracy as the mortar that cements together the building blocks of world peace. I emphasized the importance of not only unifying Western democracies, but also of promoting democracy throughout the world as a major ingredient in the mix of international cooperation and the eventual abandoning of war as a means of settling international disputes. That was why I suggested that perhaps the best organization to carry the world toward global peace would be the Community of Democracies (CD). This is a group founded in 2000 on the initiative of then United States Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Poland’s then Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek at the First Biennial Ministerial Conference held in Warsaw in June of that year.

At the closing ceremony of that Warsaw conference—at which perhaps the most salient outcome was the signing of the Warsaw Declaration, a pledge to form the CD—then-UN Secretary General Kofi Annan—who died this past week, aged 80—called the CD initiative a positive step toward worldwide democracy, adding, “When the United Nations can truly call itself a community of democracies, the Charter’s noble ideals of protecting human rights and promoting ‘social progress in larger freedoms’ will have been brought much closer.”

Unfortunately, in the intervening decade and a half since then the CD has failed to gain any real traction in terms of concrete steps toward greater worldwide democratization. And although it has expanded its membership to around a hundred nations, it is practically unknown outside of diplomatic circles. It is hard to imagine that the low profile that it has been stuck with is an accident. Indeed, with the rise of autocratic political movements in the West and elsewhere in most recent years, it is clear that the cold shoulder being turned to the CD is by design. And the current US administration can certainly be held responsible for undermining democratization and Western unity still further.

For instance, last year and the year before, it was the turn of the United States to preside over the CD. And as per procedure since the CD’s founding, each presidency in the group ends its term with a ministerial meeting held in the host country. But with the election held in the US in 2016, the American administration changed midstream in its CD presidency. The administration of US President Donald Trump has demonstrated in its first year and a half in office that it has only the most tenuous grasp of democratic and constitutional principles and the president’s own rhetoric and actions have tended to show that he often prefers the company of autocrats to that of the democratic allies of the United States.

A clear example of this was his European tour earlier this year during which he strong-armed the European Community into paying a bigger portion of the costs of NATO, talked down to the EU as a whole and launched withering attacks on two of Europe’s top leaders, Theresa May of Britain and Angela Merkel of Germany, before flying on to Helsinki to meet with Russian strongman Vladimir Putin. Contrary to his open hostility to America’s democratic NATO partners, his attitude toward Putin—an autocrat who has violated international law with the annexation of Crimea, the crushing of political resistance in Georgia and the supporting of ethnic-Russian insurgents in Ukraine—conciliatory, even acquiescent. It included a hint that he took Putin’s word over that of 17 US intelligence agencies regarding now-proven Russian intervention in the 2016 US elections—a breach so serious that many intelligence officials are referring to it as “an act of cyber-warfare”.
Nowhere was the Trump administration’s flexible attitude toward democratic principles more patent than in the organization (or lack of same) of the biennial CD meeting that the Trump administration was slated to host in Washington last year. Just weeks prior to the biennial meeting, the US State Department under then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was still keeping those involved in the dark about how or indeed if the conference would take place. Tillerson seemed reluctant to sign off on any firm plans and when the meeting finally did take place, it was as a much diminished event at which precious little happened and where the host country signed a standard litany of good intentions re-committing to “consolidating and strengthening democratic institutions.” There is a distinct feeling among democracy advocates that the current idea in Washington is for the CD to simply be permitted to fall victim to atrophy and die.
Meanwhile, there are unmistakable signs from the Trump administration that the US will no longer take the lead in defending democracy and human rights; indeed, that it is disengaging from a long-standing American policy of promoting democratization as a major part of the criteria for the establishment of permanent relations between the US and other countries.

In War — A Crime Against Humanity, I make the point that if we wish to build a new world order to facilitate the de-legitimization and criminalization of war, we need to carry out a deep-reaching reform in the pertinent international organizations. In recent decades, their interventions to halt wars and emerging conflicts have frequently met with scant success and have made it plain that within the new and increasingly violent world context they are no longer fulfilling as required the role for which they were created.

This is mainly because of the restrictions imposed on them from the top down—where non-democratic nations like Russia and China used to have to face-off with the US and Europe as the champions of peace and democracy, but where now the US has created a major power vacuum—and the stultifying bureaucracy that keeps them from being as agile as they should be. Widespread democratization is the key to effecting such reforms. And, unfortunately, the US administration’s withdrawal from its former role as the shining democratic beacon on the hill has visibly dimmed the chances for an effective turn toward world peace based on mutual principles such as the promotion of diplomacy and democracy.

CD co-founder Madeleine Albright was recently quoted as saying, “At a time when autocrats are becoming more aggressive and sophisticated in repressing their own citizens and working in concert to undermine democratic societies beyond their borders, the Community of Democracies is even more relevant today than it was 15 years ago. This is a time when democratic governments must join together to reaffirm their common cause, to support each other and to confront those forces that would threaten a more peaceful, stable, prosperous and humane world.”

Clearly, the current administration in Washington has done much in the last year and a half to undermine this noble mission.