Anne Applebaum: Democracy in trouble
[Anne Applebaum is a weekly columnist for The Post, writing on foreign affairs.]
A riot of golden curlicues embellished the theater boxes; in the plush velvet seats below, ambassadors in saris crowded against activists in crumpled suits. It was standing-room only on Saturday for Hillary Clinton's speech at the 10th anniversary meeting of the Community of Democracies, and the American secretary of state had the crowd behind her. First she paid compliments to her predecessor Madeleine Albright, who co-founded the organization a decade ago with Poland's then-foreign minister, Bronislaw Geremek.
Then she spoke not about democracy, exactly, but about civil society, those "activists, organizations, congregations, writers and reporters that work though peaceful means to encourage governments to do better." Civil society, along with representative government and well-functioning markets, she said, "undergirds both democratic governance and broad-based prosperity." Yet civil society is under threat, and she mentioned activists in prison in many countries, including some that call themselves democracies: Egypt, China, Burma and Zimbabwe.
Behind me, a Kuwaiti diplomat scribbled furious notes in Arabic. Up in the balconies, delegates from Moldova and Mongolia leaned forward, trying to catch every word. But was anyone listening back home?
This is now the central question, not only for the Community of Democracies -- an organization benignly neglected by the Bush administration and recently revived by the Poles -- but for all advocates of "democracy promotion," myself included. American democracy promotion has taken different forms in recent decades, from the Reagan administration's covert support for anti-communist dissidents to the relaunching of Radio Free Afghanistan in 2002. Right now, though, the whole concept is in trouble.
This is partly because -- as Clinton and others have recently noted -- democracy is in trouble...
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A riot of golden curlicues embellished the theater boxes; in the plush velvet seats below, ambassadors in saris crowded against activists in crumpled suits. It was standing-room only on Saturday for Hillary Clinton's speech at the 10th anniversary meeting of the Community of Democracies, and the American secretary of state had the crowd behind her. First she paid compliments to her predecessor Madeleine Albright, who co-founded the organization a decade ago with Poland's then-foreign minister, Bronislaw Geremek.
Then she spoke not about democracy, exactly, but about civil society, those "activists, organizations, congregations, writers and reporters that work though peaceful means to encourage governments to do better." Civil society, along with representative government and well-functioning markets, she said, "undergirds both democratic governance and broad-based prosperity." Yet civil society is under threat, and she mentioned activists in prison in many countries, including some that call themselves democracies: Egypt, China, Burma and Zimbabwe.
Behind me, a Kuwaiti diplomat scribbled furious notes in Arabic. Up in the balconies, delegates from Moldova and Mongolia leaned forward, trying to catch every word. But was anyone listening back home?
This is now the central question, not only for the Community of Democracies -- an organization benignly neglected by the Bush administration and recently revived by the Poles -- but for all advocates of "democracy promotion," myself included. American democracy promotion has taken different forms in recent decades, from the Reagan administration's covert support for anti-communist dissidents to the relaunching of Radio Free Afghanistan in 2002. Right now, though, the whole concept is in trouble.
This is partly because -- as Clinton and others have recently noted -- democracy is in trouble...