The internal challenges that liberal democracies face has made Western elites more sensitive to the importance of defending and preserving democracy, both at home and abroad. That was the impetus behind the Biden administration’s Summit for Democracy, CSIS adviser Charles Edel told Irena Kalhousová, the Head of Charles University’s Herzl Center of Israel Studies, in this week’s Forum 2000 online chat.
“The idea was that this is not going to be the United States talking about how wonderful and perfect its democracy is — we all know that’s not true — but rather a conversation amongst democratic societies for how we can aid each other, how we can help each other and, critically, how we can learn from each other,” he underlined.
Other initiatives like the quadra-lateral grouping between India, Japan, Australia and the United States should show that democracy is still able to deliver practical results, Edel adds, underlining that this entailed “working together to show that democracy works, and that it can promote practical, deliverable results for themselves and for others – that’s I really think the measure of what we see happening in terms of the success of democracies being able to offer a positive vision, that’s attractive and useful in the XXI century”.
