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.”
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| Madeleine Albright |
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.
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| Bronislaw Geremek |
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.
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