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To be sure, it has been a busy 2021 for the new U.S. 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 U.S. think tank Freedom House.
The White House contends that the summit is just a beginning, not an end. It wants this week's gathering to kick off a "year of action" in 2022 to make democracy "more responsive and resilient."
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 United States too given the soul-searching after the January assault on the U.S. 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 United States, for the first time ever, belongs to a list of regressive or "backsliding" democracies across the world.
So the consequences of that January debacle were not just profound domestically, but also undercut U.S. credibility with its democracy promotion agenda. At the time, U.S. foes across the world from Venezuela to Iran and Russia relished the disorder on Capitol Hill.
There is little doubt that the debacle was watched with glee by nationalist-populists across the world, including in Eastern Europe/NATO allies such as Hungary, which are less likely to feel the full force of U.S.-style calls for respect for the rule of law and democratic norms going forward.
This is not just because of last January's chaotic scenes and the much wider erosion of U.S. democratic traditions during the Trump era, but also the advances made by governments such as Hungary, the only EU nation not invited to the summit, in recent years in bringing about 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-U.S. sentiment is already a significant political force, could also be an impediment to Biden's agenda. Damagingly, political discourse here still occasionally centers on recent U.S. political disorder and the allegation that U.S. democracy involves an element of chaos and indeed sham.
In this context there will be some Republicans, and possibly centrist Democrats too, who will prefer Biden not to over-emphasize 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.
Some of these critics favor 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 United States because of its material prosperity, rather than appeals based on the country's democratic virtues.
Economic modernization and liberalism, it is claimed, will be an impulse toward future democratic reform, and help counteract the appeal of China's alternative, authoritarian model of development that has brought significant indebtedness to key U.S. allies, in an 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, 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 on.
In other words, far from preaching democracy, the best practical demonstration of U.S. intent will be doubling down on offering investment to low- and middle-income countries in values-driven, high-standard, and transparent partnerships to narrow the developing world's $40 trillion infrastructure deficit, exacerbated by the pandemic.
Andrew Hammond (andrewkorea@outlook.com) is an associate at LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics.
