Joe Biden's Democracy Starter Kit

In 2008, the late US Senator John McCain put forward a proposal, called the League of Democracies, with the ambition to go beyond the framework of the United Nations. The new league sought to transcend W. Wilson's vision of the League of Nations, drawing on T. Roosevelt's earlier idea of creating a selective club of nations with shared values, whose common mission would be peace. American, of course. Joe Biden has embraced the idea, which revolves around ensuring that a majority of fully democratic nations, or those in the process of reaching that stage, have more economic muscle than the " illiberal " set of states, with China in the lead, but followed at a good distance by Russia.

While the Biden Administration has not yet made explicit its intention to push for such a conclave under the aegis of the UN General Assembly, it is not difficult to infer that its plan is to promote the establishment of a global standard of democratisation; a kind of "Democracy Starter Kit" for aspiring world champions.

The launch of this strategy at the December 2021 Democracy Summit was virtual in more ways than one, and at times felt like the wandering of an answer in search of a question. First, because of the crisis of legitimacy facing the host itself after the events of 6 January on Capitol Hill, the culmination of a relative deterioration of US democracy, which has been described as 'flawed' by the democratic quality index of the British weekly The Economist for the past five years.

On the other hand, due to inconsistent selection criteria, thirty-seven of the fifty-four African countries and Hungary were left out of the summit, while Poland, India, Brazil and Pakistan, ruled by authoritarian rulers, were invited. Most Middle Eastern and North African countries were also excluded, precisely ten years after the failed Arab Spring.

These inconsistencies raised the suspicions of a number of longstanding US allies, who have the "full democracy" cachet bestowed upon them by the aforementioned weekly, that Biden's summit appeared to be a geopolitical ploy by the US State Department to further US foreign policy objectives, sponsoring an alliance against China, as the French foreign minister bluntly stated, and suggested the unsuccessful efforts of Japanese diplomacy to get Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam on the guest list.
 
All in all, the summit had positive aspects - more declarative than constitutive - such as a general commitment to defending against authoritarianism, fighting corruption and promoting respect for human rights. From this point of view, it is possible to understand that Biden has received the acquiescence of the bulk of liberal democracies for the return of the United States to the forefront of the regeneration of global democracy.

However, Biden will have to grease the ailing US diplomatic machinery more and better, in order to reduce the friction points that arise from some of its practices, such as those that arise from the fact that the economic sanctions that the US administration lavishes on the application of moral criteria also benefit the interests of US companies, while objectively harming the companies of its allied countries.

In any case, beyond the grandiloquence of idealistic rhetoric, the challenge that Biden must face during his term in office - predictably his last - is to demonstrate, in pragmatic and tangible terms, that democracy is, in real and realistic terms, a more egalitarian and efficient system than its authoritarian alternatives. 

If anything should have been learned by now, it is that the model of one-size-fits-all suits that attempted to dress up invertebrate societies, which had not even reached the stage of bourgeois revolutions, as democratic, is that, in the medium term, the imposition of an ideal pattern of Western democracy is counterproductive because it is malicious, and can end up being interpreted as a kind of democratic fundamentalism that causes more rejection than adhesion.