October 23, 2022 | Foreign Policy
Democracy Needs a New Sales Pitch
Here’s how to get the world excited about it again.
October 23, 2022 | Foreign Policy
Democracy Needs a New Sales Pitch
Here’s how to get the world excited about it again.
Excerpt
In a recent address at Ditchley Park, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair described today’s moment as a global inflection point, a time akin to the early post-World War II years or after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when Western nations had to rethink and remake our policies both foreign and domestic.
In Blair’s words: “We need a new plan, a way of looking at the world, to make sense of it and how best to pursue the advancement of its people…Western democracies need a new project that gives direction, inspires hope, and is a credible explanation of the way the world is changing and how we succeed within it.”
He is right. We do need a new plan.
We need to define and enlist allies in a shared global agenda to strengthen our national economies and democracies. To equip ourselves with the economic strength and political will to maintain a democratic rules-based order while checking authoritarian interests. In this new moment of clarity and confrontation, we must demonstrate that our democratic systems deliver more in the form of both political freedoms and economic opportunity than strongman states—states that foster corruption at home, destroy basic rights, build dependency, and employ tools of coercion abroad.
John Austin is the director of the Michigan Economic Center and a nonresident senior fellow with the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Brookings Institution. Twitter: @John_C_Austin. Elaine Dezenski is senior director and head of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Jeffrey Anderson and Andy Westwood contributed to this article. FDD is a Washington, D.C.-based, nonpartisan research institute focusing on national security and foreign policy.