James Goldgeier and Elmira Bayrasli on the Challenge of a Democracy Summit

Elmira Bayrasli is the founder and CEO of Foreign Policy Interrupted. She is also the director of the Bard Globalization and International Affairs program, and the host of Project Syndicate's podcast “Opinion Has It.” You can follow Elmira on Twitter at @endeavoringE

This podcast episode includes references to the Eurasia Group Foundation, now known as the Institute for Global Affairs.

Show notes:

“The End Of History” (Francis Fukuyama, The National Interest, 1989)

Archival audio:

Biden: Democracy Will Prevail Over Autocracy (Bloomberg Politics, February 19, 2021)
Why Poland's conservative government is causing alarm at the EU (PBS NewsHour, July 26, 2019)
Hungary under Viktor Orban (France 24 English, May 28, 2018)
Is Turkey Becoming a Dictatorship?: Erdogan Claims Victory in Vote to Give President Sweeping Powers (Democracy Now! April 17, 2017)
Why Was NATO Created | US Army Documentary | 1958 (The Best Film Archives, October 22, 2017)
The Birth of NATO and The Treaty of Dunkirk (1947-1952) (War Archives, September 29, 2015)
Accession of Greece and Turkey [18 FEB 1952] (NATO History, February 18, 2017)
USA: CALIFORNIA: CLINTON WANTS NORMAL TRADE WITH CHINA (AP Archive, July 21, 2015)
WATCH: ‘We have to prove democracy still works,’ Biden says | 2021 Biden address to Congress (PBS NewsHour, April 28, 2021)

Transcript:

May 12, 2021

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MARK HANNAH: Welcome to None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation. My name is Mark Hannah. Authoritarianism is on the rise not only in the usual places, but also in democracies. Many of these countries sliding toward autocracy are U.S. allies—countries like Turkey, Poland, and Hungary.

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HANNAH: What does Joe Biden mean when he says America won't back down from its commitments to fundamental freedoms and our alliances? These two things don't always go hand in hand, especially when the appeal of social stability over individual freedoms is finding new purchase in this moment of democratic disarray. That's why we're reflecting today on America's alliance system, which was originally formed based not on shared democratic ideals, but on shared security interests. Now we have to ask: What kind of world has this built? And maybe more importantly, how does this new administration respond? To help us understand this, I'm joined by two guests—Elmira Bayrasli and James Goldgeier.

ELMIRA BAYRASLI: On the face of it, when you hear the word alliance, you think of friendship. You think this is somebody who shares my same values. We have a relationship based on mutual respect, and this person has my back. When you get into the realm of foreign policy, however, I think it becomes a lot more complicated.

HANNAH: That's our first guest, Elmira Bayrasli. She's the CEO of Foreign Policy Interrupted, an organization committed to elevating female expertise in foreign policy. She's also the host of Project Syndicate’s current events podcast Opinion Has It, and she’s the director of Bard’s Globalization and International Affairs Program.

BAYRASLI: When you're talking about alliances—and particularly if you're talking about military alliances, which, Turkey being a part of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, along with Poland and Hungary—alliances then take on a different dimension in which it goes beyond a relationship based on mutual respect and values. It's much more about, “We all have the same security interest, and our alliance is really because we have the same enemy.” And that's very different than seeing someone as a friend.

HANNAH: What's more important in an ally, then? Shared democratic values or shared security and economic interests?

JAMES GOLDGEIER: Well, ideally you'd have both. You’d have the shared security interests, and you'd have the shared values. I think the concern in the U.S.-Turkey relationship is these are countries that are not only diverging on values, but also diverging on interests. And there are a lot of questions being raised about whether there's really an alliance there anymore.

HANNAH: That's James Goldgeier. He's a senior visiting fellow at the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution and a professor on international relations at the School of International Service at American University.

GOLDGEIER: I think it raises the broader question of tradeoffs. The Biden Administration has said a lot of wonderful things this spring, and I think we should applaud the discussion about human rights and the emphasis on democracy and about making democracy more effective—I think that's been a particularly important point President Biden has made. Foreign policy for the middle class—also important. But there are tradeoffs involved. For example, if you have a foreign policy for the middle class, and you then pursue policies to try to protect jobs in the United States, well, that may require you to take actions that are, in fact, harmful to your alliance relationships. Our allies in Europe may not like the kind of steps we take to promote a foreign policy for the middle class here at home while they're trying to do the same thing in their country. There are lots of tradeoffs involved, and I think so far in these first few months of the Biden Administration, we're hearing a lot of great rhetoric. But there will be moments when you have tradeoffs to consider, and how those get resolved will be incredibly important.

HANNAH: This isn't the first time America has faced these tough decisions—these tradeoffs between pragmatism and idealism. It goes back to the very beginning. Take America's relationship with Turkey, for instance.

BAYRASLI: When Turkey joined NATO in 1952, Turkey was not a Western democracy, as the United States or Western Europeans define it. It was a country that was very Western-oriented. It wanted the things the West had, which were economic advances and innovations and a good standard of living. But it's hard to argue that Turkey—whether it's in the 1950s or thereafter—was a country that was going to embrace democratic values. But that wasn't the prime motivator for why Washington wanted Turkey as a member of NATO. Going back, it was very much a geostrategic security interest that Washington wanted to have Turkey within the Western orbit. It was a time when U.S. foreign policy was very much focused on containment. How do you contain the expansion of Soviet power and the notion of communism?

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BAYRASLI: When you take a look at a map, and you look at Turkey, their northern neighbor at the time, in 1952, was the Soviet Union, and I think Washington, D.C. very much feared that Turkey would come within the Soviet orbit.

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BAYRASLI: I think the interesting thing about bringing Turkey into the NATO alliance is precisely because Turkey is a Muslim majority country. And so, getting back to this notion of alliances, when you're talking about shared values, looking at it in a post-9/11 world, I think a lot of people would agree that the West has been, quote unquote, “at war with” Islam and the Muslim world. So, I think this question of whether these alliances were created out of a notion of shared values is an important one to look at, because when you're actually looking at it, it was definitely created much more out of a mutual interest in security for the United States. And for Turkey's perspective, Turkey went along with it because Turkey was also a very new country. Turkey had been established in 1923 after the fall of the Ottoman Empire. It was largely a poor country, very underdeveloped, and coming into the orbit of the United States and the West was going to be an economic boost for Turkey. They were going to establish trade relationships, but more importantly, they were going to get a lot of foreign aid, which was very key to Turkey at that time.

HANNAH: Many modern democracies are trending toward authoritarianism. Freedom House has documented fourteen consecutive years of democratic decline around the world. But it wasn't always this way. There was a time in the 1990s when the spread of democracy around the world seemed all but inevitable.

GOLDGEIER: It is worth thinking about what it was like thirty years ago. I think in a sense, we got fooled by how easy it seemed, particularly in Central and Eastern Europe. At the end of the Cold War, you had countries that had been behind the Iron Curtain. They'd been dominated by the Soviet Union. They had to live in a certain way. They were finally able to break free. They wanted to join the West. We looked at them and said, “This is so great. They want to be part of us.” And throughout Central and Eastern Europe—in Poland and the Czech Republic and in Estonia—you had populations and people who had been dissidents—for example, people like Lech Violence, who becomes the leader in Poland, and Václav Havel in the Czech Republic—who had been oppressed and now are free. Now they're leading free countries and trying to trying to do the things that will get them in the good graces of NATO and the European Union. And I think we sort of lulled ourselves a little bit into a sense of complacency that we won the Cold War. Our motto was great. Other countries wanted to adopt it. And there was a sort of sense—even among the people who criticized the end of history argument by Frank Fukuyama—there still was some sense that we had moved to a stage where it was clear that democracy was superior.

HANNAH: In its struggles, first against communism and later against terrorism, the United States collected a whole host of strategic partners and allies, and in the face of these bigger conflicts, America was willing to overlook a lot. Now, the cost of that is becoming clear. A growing number of countries sit on the fuzzy line between democracy and autocracy.

BAYRASLI: Well, on the face of it, if you take a look at Poland, Hungary, and Turkey, on a piece of paper, they are democracies. They have leaders who are democratically elected, and there are regular elections. When you dig a little deeper, you can look at the justice systems in all three countries, which are very much controlled by the ruler of each of the three. And also the media—the media is not free in in all three countries. It's really hard to argue that elections in any of these countries are free and fair when the ruling party—and actually the strongman—is controlling the airwaves—whether it is television, radio, or certainly print—and doesn't give enough airtime to the opposition, doesn't allow for investigative reporting, and doesn’t allow journalists to actually criticize the government. In Turkey, anybody who criticizes Erdogan gets thrown in jail. People are afraid to speak out against him. And so, Erdogan can argue that Turkey is a democracy and that they hold elections, and he is democratically elected. But by our standards, I think it's very hard to say Turkey fits the definition of democracy as we know it.

HANNAH: The United States, which claims to be a champion of democracy and liberal values, is finding itself pulled between its ideals and its pragmatic interests. The United States needed Turkey to defend against the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Now Turkey is turning away from the United States, both in its external relationships with Russia and China, and also internally. Suddenly, it seems the U.S. has less leverage than ever before to promote democracy around the world, even within allied countries,

BAYRASLI: When it comes to having alliances like Turkey or Poland or Hungary, the United States today wants to have it both ways. The United States wants to continue to be the superpower, calling the shots and to be the so-called global world leader. But at the same time, it has a problem when world leaders go off on their own path and start carving out their own relationships, as Turkey has done with Vladimir Putin in Russia and how Turkey is now doing with Xi Jinping in China.

Early on, when Erdogan first became prime minister in Turkey in 2003, he had a foreign policy called “zero problems with neighbors,” which the United States did not like. Washington did not like the fact that Turkey was reaching out to Iran and developing close alliances with Iran. I think the United States needs to actually face facts that the world has changed. And while it may still be the military and economic superpower—for the moment—countries like Turkey, Hungary, and Poland have made such advances that it no longer depends on the United States in the way it did in the twentieth century and early twenty-first century. When you are looking at the autocrats in Poland, Hungary, and Turkey, I think the common thread is they understand their people have a certain level of confidence they don't want to lose, and they do appeal to that nationalistic pride by saying, “We won't be pushed around by the West, and maybe if Brussels or London or Washington, D.C., used to call the shots, we don't need them anymore.” And you see that. People go wild for Erdogan in Turkey when he stands up to the United States or lashes out at Angela Merkel or the European Union because Turks have for a long time felt humiliated. They felt the Western Europeans—and to a large extent, the United States—were calling the shots, and Turks never had a voice in their in their own destiny, whether it was internally or within their foreign policy.

HANNAH: How did we get here? One place to look is at the failure of one theory of democracy promotion—the presumption that capitalism would inevitably lead to democracy, that economic liberalism and political liberalism were necessarily linked. This hasn't panned out in the twenty-first century. To understand why, there's one country we should look at, in particular—China.

GOLDGEIER: The China challenge is multifaceted, but on this particular issue it’s quite fascinating. We always assumed—certainly, I’m a political scientist and have read a lot of political science literature on this over the years—that what happens is when countries reach a certain level of economic development, there is a growing middle class, and that middle class then demands more political voice. And you end up with liberalization. So, for example, in a country like South Korea or Taiwan, this is what we saw. In the 1990s, I think this was the expectation in China and how we related to China: “We're going to engage China. We're going to bring it into the World Trade Organization.”

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GOLDGEIER: It was following this line of reasoning: Well, when they have economic growth and a middle class, the middle class is going to demand more voice, and you're going to have political liberalization in China. And here's a regime in China that seemingly has been able to keep itself in unitary political power and allow for that unleashing of economic activity. That’s very different than the Soviet Union, which was an authoritarian state where the economy wasn't working at all for the last couple of decades before the collapse. Now, is it just that we're not quite there yet, and eventually they'll succumb to the same issue we saw in other places? Or have they really figured out an alternative model? I don't think we know yet. But at this point, I don't think we can count on the political liberalization we just assumed in the 1990s was going to take place in China. As you say, for political leaders elsewhere who are thinking, “How do I get economic growth here? Gee, if I could do this without opening up politically and giving more voice to the opposition, then that seems like a great way to go.”

HANNAH: Elmira, does the United States have to reassess its alliance building strategy? Because it seems to me that when we align ourselves with a less than democratic country, our ability to actually foster democracy there is quite limited. How does the United States fix that? Or can it?

BAYRASLI: Here, I think the United States needs to ask itself very hard questions. Who are we as a country? What is our place in the world? It needs to stare itself in the face and realize the world has changed. But then it also needs to grapple with the fact that for a very long time—throughout much of the twentieth century and through today—is the United States devoted to democracy, or is it devoted to free markets? I think this is where the United States falls down in terms of its national security and foreign policy making, because as we've seen with the growth of China, you can have huge economic growth and enormous free market capitalism while you have an authoritarian government. And I think a lot of people like Erdogan have seen that and have started saying, “Democracy and capitalism don't necessarily go hand in hand.” That was the common thinking back in the 1990s. We see that is not true today. And so, I think if you're going back to looking at the rise of the autocrats—whether it is in Turkey, Hungary, Poland, the Philippines, Brazil, or India—they are very much anchored in: “I'm going to go out there, and I am going to deliver jobs. I'm going to deliver economic growth. I am going to make India, Philippines, Turkey, Poland, Hungary, Brazil great again.” Is that the priority? Or is it that we want to focus on freedom of the press and civil liberties and human rights? Those are two very fundamentally different things, and the United States can't have both.

HANNAH: This is where the Biden Administration finds itself: in a world in which democracies, including our own, are on shaky ground. It's easier to point to America's failed attempts to promote democracy with military intervention. But more subtly, yet just as importantly, the economic approach seems to have failed as well. What's the solution? The starting point for the Biden Administration is a democracy summit meant to heal fraying alliances as well as outline common principles and goals. But navigating our illiberal Democratic allies will be incredibly fraught. Every approach has possible pitfalls.

GOLDGEIER: Well, that's really, I think, the biggest issue, and a lot depends on how big of a summit they want to hold at the end of this year, because if you have some big, open meeting and say, “We're going to have a huge summit, and we're going to invite all the countries we consider to be democracies,” you run into some serious challenges, especially when it's done by the Administration, because you have countries that are treaty allies of the United States that are not exactly moving in a direction you would consider to be democratic. For example, within NATO, Hungary and Poland have gone in a non-democratic direction in recent years. And of course, Turkey under President Erdogan has been moving in a more authoritarian direction. And so, do you have a summit in which you don't invite some of your NATO member states? Turkey is an important strategic ally. Poland is an important strategic ally within NATO. Do you not invite them? What happens if you do invite them? Are you basically covering over what they're doing? Do we then get a phenomenon of democracies in name only? And are you helping give them cover for the authoritarian moves they're making at home? Similarly, the Philippines—a treaty ally of the United States—under Duterte has been quite undemocratic in many ways. Do you invite them to the summit? A big meeting raises all sorts of questions having to do with your strategic interests versus your goals in strengthening democracy among your alliances and more broadly. So, the answer may be to go smaller.

HANNAH: James, what's the summit actually going to accomplish in practical terms?

GOLDGEIER: It's certainly not enough on its own. I mean, you can't just bring people together and talk about democracy and have everybody go home. The question is what kinds of mechanisms do you have just to get to work? This is my issue with these summits. It can be perfectly fine to have these meetings once you get past the issue of who to invite and who to leave out, but the real issue is getting to work. I think there you've got you've got two things. One is really thinking about the kind of commitment you want countries to come away from the summit with. What steps are they going to take? And the other is how to get governments to engage with civil society and the private sector. What is the role of the private sector? We've seen, for example, the influence companies like Facebook can have in our own democracy. This is going to be a big issue among countries that do come for this meeting. I think we have these mechanisms. It's up to us to build on those so that we're actually getting things done, because I think President Biden is really onto something, where we have to show that we can be effective in governing ourselves,

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GOLDGEIER: If we can't show that, then the China model will look more appealing to people if you can get stuff done. I don't want to live in a country like China. I don't want to live in an authoritarian country. But I would like to see a country where our roads can get fixed. And our bridges can get fixed. And we have better train service. But I don't want to live in a country where the politicians aren't accountable to the people. I think he is onto something when he talks about the ability to make our governance more effective, passing legislation to get things done to fix some of the challenges we have here at home. I think he's correct on that. Then you get into the question of: Are there ways we can provide assistance to other countries that are trying to build democracy? Thirty years ago when the Cold War ended, and new democracies were emerging in places like Central and Eastern Europe, for example, that's what we tried to do. We had people in these countries that wanted to build democracy. That's the most important thing—that you have people in these countries that want to build it for themselves. And then the question is: What kind of assistance to them will enable them to strengthen their own democracy? That's what we've been trying to learn from the lessons of the last thirty years.

HANNAH: And that’s the question we at the Eurasia Group Foundation have been asking as well. In fact, we're about to come out with a new study with implications for how the United States can better promote democracy abroad. Spoiler alert, it really does come down to modeling it at home.

Thank you, James and Elmira, so much for joining us.

I’m Mark Hannah, and this has been another episode of None of the Above, a podcast from the Eurasia Group Foundation. I also want to give a special thanks to our None of the Above team who make all of this possible. Our producer is Caroline Gray. Our associate producer and editor is Luke Taylor. Our music was composed and our sound was mixed by Zubin Hensler, and EGF’s graduate research assistants are Adam Pontius and Lucas Robinson. If you enjoyed what you've heard, subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or anywhere else you find podcasts. Rate and review us. If there's a topic you want us to cover, send us an email at info@noneoftheabovepodcast.org. Thanks for joining us. Stay safe out there. See you next time.

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