Democracy in the time of Biden: a fight for the free world

As international society enters the 21st century, the political, social and economic schemes inherited from the postwar period are increasingly being questioned. With the rapid rise of China, the political turnaround of the Trump period and the Covid-19 health crisis; new fronts and needs arise for governments around the world.

Democracy, the quintessential political system, not only faces its own contradictions, but is also being pressured by the strengthening of authoritarian and nationalist regimes. New sociopolitical phenomena have recently been witnessed at a global level: populism, electoral opacity, foreign intervention in the electorate, cyberattacks and the creation of false news, among many others.

According to data from Freedom House, freedoms and democratic regimes in the world have been regressing mainly due to restrictions on virtual media, extreme right-wing nationalism and a lack of global leadership. The latest data available from his report Freedom in the World shows the balance[1] of 64 countries that experienced a deterioration in their political rights and civil liberties, compared to 37 countries that showed an improvement.

Although the trend is mostly located in the Eurasian region, the decline has been seen in States with mature democratic systems and even within the United States. Only this country has fallen[2] eight places in the world rating, occupying the 86th position below countries like Mauritius or Latvia.

Graphic: Freedom House, “Freedom in the World 2020” Freedom House, 2020, p.11, https://freedomhouse.org/sites/default/files/2020-02/FIW\_2020\_REPORT\ _BOOKLET_Final.pdf

Biden Doctrine?

The not very optimistic panorama that the Freedom House report gives us is something that has not gone unnoticed within the foreign policy position that the virtual winner of the US presidency, Joe Biden, has established on his platform. The keys to understanding the Democratic candidate's strategy are found in his essay Why America Must Lead Again published in Foreign Affairs in March of this year.

“[...] It is up to the United States to lead the way. No other nation has that ability. No other nation is based on that idea. We have to defend freedom and democracy, regain our credibility and look with relentless optimism and determination towards our future”[3]

In the first place, it takes up the exceptionalism of the United States as a way of justifying its leading role against other nations that share this same political system. We are faced with a modern declaration of what a doctrine could mean in the face of opposing political regimes and, above all, the actors that promote them.

What for Donald Trump meant making an internal readjustment, sacrificing commitments abroad; For Joe Biden, the strategy lies in the reconquest of the spaces of power that have been eroding within international cooperation. Will it be at the cost of creating a new common enemy? Will opposition to authoritarian regimes, China and Russia form the basis of modern American discourse?

“[...] The Kremlin fears a strong NATO, the most effective political-military alliance in modern history. […] We must impose real costs on Russia […] to the kleptocratic authoritarian system of President Vladimir Putin.”[4]

The language that Biden uses throughout his writing takes us back to terms that were very characteristic during the postwar era: restructuring, confrontation, common front and technological race. Even the fact that he openly defines China and Russia as political and economic counteracting factors could lead to a dangerous polarization similar to that seen during the Cold War.

Democracy Summit

To implement this vision, the creation of a "Democracy Summit" has been established within its platform, in whose structure the following will be included: States, civil society organizations and the private sector, including technology corporations and the giants of the social networks[5]. An effort that seeks to renew the leadership of the United States in the face of the erosion and disappointment of the promises that its political model established after its victory against the Soviet Union in 1989.

“[…] What Biden and his advisers have in mind is not a formal institution like NATO but a forum, a kind of enlarged G-7, in which democratic allies can find common solutions to transnational problems […] presented by the rise of authoritarian states, including election interference, surveillance technology, and China's role in 5G technology”[6]

The fact that such a pragmatic measure had to be resorted to, again reminding us of the great summits of the 20th century, indicates that global governance institutions have not been sufficient to prevent the threat of the Western status quo. We are at a time when organizations, such as the United Nations, must question their structures and forms of representation if they do not want to be overwhelmed with initiatives like this.

What we could see with this initiative is a multidimensional mechanism, focused on new technological areas and founded on the idea of opposition to the "undemocratic". Here lies a substantial difference with forums like the G-20 or General Assembly; there is an implicit exclusion of a series of States with a particular political system, will this evolve into an ideological issue?

Image: Spencer Platt/Getty.

It still remains to really see how much the initiative and the discourse will materialize once the new presidential term begins. However, the elements that we have analyzed in this article cannot be ignored since not only is this a drastic turn to Trump's isolationist tendency, but the repercussions of a potential polarization of international society would have profound consequences for relations. international.

International Policy Implications

If the area of greatest confrontation and tension during the Trump administration was the commercial field; in the Biden administration it will be the technological dimension. One of the major emphases in his platform is the emergence of transnational issues and the manipulation of technological advances for authoritarian purposes or interference by foreign states.

The new political, technological, and even ideological emphasis could lead us to see the rise of new forms of power, new global threats, and a return to a political bipolarization of the international system. So much so that we can already see a kind of zones of influence like the one that China builds through its economic projection of One Belt One Road or Russia with its ethnic claims in Eastern Europe.

“[…] The events of the coming years will determine if democracy recovers its balance or if the authoritarian turn accelerates. That is what is at stake, and the challenge is to achieve the best results while avoiding the worst consequences”[7]

The rescue that Biden makes of elements such as the defense of the free world, exceptionalism and the claim of American leadership; it is an early sign of a potential interventionist foreign policy. In the best of cases, this will only result in a discursive justification for exporting agendas within the Democracy Summit and not in the gradual cooling and polarization of international politics with Russia and China at the center.

The truth is that this new decade will remain marked by the search for alternatives to all those contradictions that were accumulating and that today fail to respond to a hyper-technological reality. The digital era has arrived to create spaces, solutions and confrontations not only for democratic nations but for global governance as we know it.