New Models of Democracy

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/17/opinion/athens-democracy-forum-issues.html

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At the Athens Democracy Forum last week, a conference organized by the Democracy & Culture Foundation in association with The New York Times, international leaders and policymakers debated the evolving state of democracy around the globe. Here are excerpts from the discussions. They have been edited and condensed.

Far from diminishing, ethnic, national and religious tribalism are on the rise and feeding intolerance, exclusion, populism and conflict. Why are the ideals of multiculturalism and inclusion so elusive, and so often held in disdain?

NATHAN LAW, Hong Kong politician and activist

KASSEM EID, human rights activist and author

SERGEY A. KARAGANOV, dean of the School of International Economics and Foreign Affairs of the National Research University Higher School of Economics and honorary chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy in Moscow

MODERATOR: KATRIN BENNHOLD, Berlin bureau chief, The New York Times

MS. BENNHOLD Our topic this morning is as old as humanity itself: us versus them.

Nathan, you and your fellow protesters in Hong Kong are fighting for the rights of democratic freedoms, while in the West we’re struggling with our own democracies. What is the “us” and the “them” for you?

MR. LAW The story of Hong Kong is really important in this time, especially that we are fighting for democracy and autonomy of our hometown. I can tell, from a personal story, the worst form of this kind of “we” and “them” is to stir hatred among people, is to use misinformation campaigns to create conflict among people, and that’s what China has been doing.

MS. BENNHOLD Kassem, in 2011 you were kind of doing what Nathan is doing now — you were fighting for democracy — standing up for democracy in your own country, in Syria. And you got beaten down. You made the same appeals to the West to help that Nathan is just making here now, and nobody helped. Maybe just give us a quick overview of your story.

MR. EID I grew up with poverty, in a very dark place where dreams are crushed and we have no opinion. Everyone was telling us since we were born that the walls have ears, that we cannot talk, we cannot think, we cannot love, we cannot have any kinds of dreams. My only dream, and everyone’s dream, was actually to leave Syria, to get away from this big prison without walls.

But in 2011 our dreams changed. During the Arab Spring, instead of all thinking about how we should leave the Middle East, how we should leave the Arab world and run to Europe or run to America, we actually just wanted to stay home and make our countries a better place for everyone. We stood up in the streets and we started chanting for freedom, for democracy. But we discovered that was all bullshit. Democracy is — I think it’s not for everyone.

MS. BENNHOLD Sergey, I want to come to you. The West seems to be unable to deliver on its promise of a multiethnic democracy, where there is no “us versus them,” there is just an us. Viewed from Russia and from Moscow in 2019, is liberalism failing? Is Western democracy on its way out?

MR. KARAGANOV I must say that I do not agree that democracy is dying in the world. It is more democratic than ever for two reasons. One is that now countries have more freedom … than ever in history to choose their ways, the cultural parts, their economic models. The second is, of course, that even in more authoritarian countries, because of the information, people have more possibilities to influence their governments, even in formerly democratic countries.

“We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both,” said Louis Brandeis, a member of the U.S. Supreme Court. Was he right? Can economic inequality be tempered without discouraging innovation and entrepreneurship?

PAUL POLMAN, former chief executive, Unilever, and co-founder and chair, Imagine

MARGOT WALLSTROM, former minister for foreign affairs, Sweden

ANNA DIAMANTOPOULOU, president, DIKTIO Network for Reform in Greece and Europe

MODERATOR: LIZ ALDERMAN, chief European business correspondent, The New York Times

MS. ALDERMAN Why are the rich continuing to get even richer, the middle class continuing to hollow out, and the poor not being able to make advances? Let me start with Margot Wallstrom.

MS. WALLSTROM I really think that we are in a situation in the world today where it has become a kind of fight between good and evil in a way. And I think that rising inequality undermines democracy. It does so because I think that what we see now is a lost confidence in governments. It means also that we have fraying social fabrics as well. And we see increasing political divides and also growing divisions between rural and urban populations. If democracy does not deliver economic growth, and prosperity and the hope for a better future, then people will lose faith in democracy and in democratic institutions as well.

MS. ALDERMAN Anna, one of the issues is the continued development, the continued entry, for example, of artificial intelligence technology in the workplace, also the continued spread of the so-called gig economy, which as we are discovering is not all it’s cracked up to be. These are economic developments that have contributed to the creation of jobs, but to arguably much poorer-quality jobs. How do you address that, the continued hollowing-out of support for working people?

MS. DIAMANTOPOULOU Inequality is a keyword through human history. But it has different forms from century to century, from era to era. And for me it is very difficult to speak generally about inequality. So I would like to concentrate on the Western world, the Western democracies, and on a particular issue, which is our new big fourth Industrial Revolution. The recent decades in Western democracies, in modern democracies, we had combined democracy and relative justice prosperity. So there was a strong middle class; there was social mobility. This is not the case today, and this is why we have this increase of inequalities.

MS. ALDERMAN Paul, we hear people like yourself talk about the fact that business needs to be more responsible. But how can you show us that those aren’t hollow words in terms of the ways that your company and other companies actually operate?

MR. POLMAN Let me start on a positive note, if I may. It’s without any doubt in the last five, six decades we have lifted more people out of poverty than in any time in human history, and we should feel good about that. The population has grown threefold, but the income or G.D.P. has grown nine times over that period. The unfortunate thing is that obviously with population growth that we’re seeing, the trend is not our friend. So while many people would claim that we’re moving in the right direction on many of these indicators, we’re just not moving fast enough.

Disenchantment with liberal democracy has confronted it with an existential danger. But while the problem has been richly described, few tangible solutions have emerged to reverse the alienation voters feel from their elected leaders and institutions. What is the answer, or answers?

HUIYAO (HENRY) WANG, founder and president, Center for China and Globalization

JAYATHMA WICKRAMANAYAKE, United Nations Secretary General’s envoy on youth

KAROLINA WIGURA, sociologist, Kultura Liberalna Foundation, Poland

MODERATED BY STEVEN ERLANGER, chief diplomatic correspondent, Europe, The New York Times

MR. ERLANGER So we have a kind of disenchantment with liberal democracy. We’ve all been hearing about that. But I think what we need to think about are its roots and its sources, partly in human nature, and partly in the way we organize our societies.

Karolina, please, you’re first.

MS. WIGURA I think that if the citizens are filled with anger, with rage, then the rule of law will not last.

What is the emotion, what is the feeling that made populists’ victory possible, and makes them still be popular, like in my country, for example? What is the particular emotion? I would say that the emotion is the feeling of loss. We certainly think that development is something good. But development and change means loss. It’s a loss of families; it’s a loss of connections between people. Populists channel the feeling of loss into civil war, hatred and disgust.

MR. ERLANGER Henry, you come from a country that has been struggling with how to represent its citizenry. What is your sense of what representative governments, democratic governments, ought to be providing to their citizens?

MR. WANG We are coming into an age of globalization and also at a crossroads. Seven and a half decades after a major world war, democracy has flourished in so many countries, and [it led to] prosperity. So I think the global governance system — which has been led by the U.S., European and other countries — has actually paved the way for a lot of good things to happen. But as time goes on I think that now, with all the technological development, with all the world experiencing explosive growth, it’s time to rethink the models that we are in now. We have to upgrade, we have to reinvent.

MR. ERLANGER Jayathma, social media — which is a big deal for all of us, but certainly for young people — is this helping democracy? Or is it hurting it?

MS. WICKRAMANAYAKE I think social media definitely is a double-edged sword. I struggle a lot to make the work of the U.N. communicated in a way that is relevant to the young people of today, which is of course crucial and important given the fact that half of the world’s population today is under the age of 30.

I think there are a couple of reasons liberal democracy and democratic institutions have pushed and continue to push young people away from being engaged. I think the lack of trust in political institutions is one of the biggest causes for that.

Today traditional parties in many mature democracies have become polarized, weakened and alienated from the public, giving way to populist parties and leaders who put their personal interests above the values of democracy. Why has this happened, and what is the remedy?

GEORGE A. PAPANDREOU, former prime minister, Greece

ANGIE HOBBS, professor of the public understanding of philosophy, University of Sheffield

JAY WEATHERILL, former premier, South Australia, and industry professor, University of South Australia

MODERATED BY SERGE SCHMEMANN, program director, Athens Democracy Forum and member of the Editorial Board, The New York Times

MR. SCHMEMANN Political parties are a mainstay of a functioning democracy. They are supposed to play a moderating role in the emotions of the electorate. So let me put the first question to you, George. Your father founded PASOK, which was long one of two major parties in Greece. But then in 2012 you resigned from the party, and you sit now in parliament as a member of something called the “Movement for Change.” Why did you shift from this established party?

MR. PAPANDREOU We have such a concentration of wealth and power that it has undermined democracy. You do not need a party anymore; you need good finance and good media to be elected. Many parties were a way for expression. Today people express themselves as individuals, through Facebook and social media. What is needed is to create parties which are much more open, much more participatory. More and more people feel they do not have a say, so I think this is where parties have to go.

MR. SCHMEMANN Angie, you spend a lot of your time in Ancient Greece, where rhetoric, logic, were highly prized in the deliberations of the elites. Now that this has been replaced by the babble of social media, how do you go about shaping the debate that democracy needs?

MS. HOBBS When party politics doesn’t work so well, it’s when elected representatives put their own personal ambitions ahead of their party, or when parties put their own livelihoods against the national interest. Also, if the parties fail to grasp and react quickly to huge changes, you tend to get people switching off, not turning out to vote, not getting involved in the conversation and turning to single issues.

MR. SCHMEMANN Jay, polls I’ve seen from Australia show that less than half of Australians under the age of 44 preferred democracy over other forms of governments. I’d like to get your sense whether this is a crisis or whether this is a process of renewal among the young.

MR. WEATHERILL I don’t think the way the youth are responding to the political process is wildly different from the way everybody else is seeing it. There is a widespread disillusionment with politics and politicians. If faced with a politician that doesn’t seem to be able to represent your interests, either they’re corrupt or they’re incompetent. We need to deconstruct the way in which governments make decisions. We’ve got to raise awareness about the very problem so that you can actually get permission to address it. Then you need to tap into the greatest resource we’ve got, which is the common-sense judgment of everyday citizens.

Social media is integral to connecting with one another these days. But it has also become a platform to spread lies and hate. How do we deal with this dilemma?

LAURA CHINCHILLA, former president of Costa Rica and chairwoman of the Kofi Annan Commission on Elections and Democracy in the Digital Age

CRYSTAL PATTERSON, global civic partnerships manager at Facebook

ALVIN CARPIO, chief executive of the Fourth Group, an advocacy organization focused on tech issues

MODERATOR: ALICIA WITTMEYER, an Opinion editor at The New York Times

MS. WITTMEYER Laura, you said earlier that “we talk a lot about the ways in which social media shapes democratic processes in the developed world,” but “we talk less about how it operates in the global south.” What are we missing, and what are we misunderstanding?

MS. CHINCHILLA Social media didn’t create most of the problems that we have been discussing here, but in certain ways it is amplifying some of those problems. Part of the complexity we have to consider is that social media doesn’t behave the same way in all regions, in all societies, in all contexts. So it is very important to understand that some countries are more vulnerable than others. In the global south it is more common to find high polarization levels, weaker institutions and public distrust with regard to those institutions. And there are low levels not only of digital literacy, but of literacy in general. So those are the kind of vulnerabilities that we have to be aware of when we analyze the negative effects of social media on public debate, deliberation and on democracy.

MS. WITTMEYER Crystal, what is Facebook doing about the issue of cultural competency in a way that addresses the issue of understanding the context of the places that it’s in before something happens, instead of correcting itself after the fact?

MS. PATTERSON Well, we do spend a lot of time trying. We do try to work with governments, we try to work with civil society. We work with a number of international organizations that just have a really strong sense of kind of cultural standards, the geopolitical dynamics in specific countries and regions, to kind of help inform how we’re thinking about our tools and how they’re used. And we’ve gotten better with this over time. To your point, there are a number of places where we’ve sort of been way too late about understanding the impact our tools were having on existing difficulties. And it is a challenge.

MS. WITTMEYER I wanted to turn to the question of echo chamber versus agora. Because, Alvin, when you were thinking about this panel and the question of whether social media created an echo chamber, you said that to some extent you thought it was just making echo chambers that already existed more evident and easier for the rest of us to see. Can you talk a little bit about that?

MR. CARPIO When you think about it, democracy itself for millennia has been an echo chamber. Political institutions have been so exclusive that they’ve been an echo chamber for the elite. People like me — born and raised in places like East London, one of the poorest boroughs in the United Kingdom — people of color and women fought for the ability to be able to even vote. And we need to really think about that historically. That’s very recent. And when I think about the fourth Industrial Revolution, and technology, and the ability to actually see what people truly think, I think that’s actually a beautiful thing. We’re hearing voices that we never heard before, where the means through which you can express your views and your ideas are no longer beholden to a gatekeeper.