Plans contemplating new arrangements for the ‘‘democracies’’ of the international system have multiplied in recent years. The Princeton Report of September 2006 contained a proposal for a treaty-based ‘‘Concert of Democracies’’. Just a few months later, The American Interest hosted a provoking article entitled ‘‘Democracies of the World, Unite’’, advancing a similar suggestion. In America at the Crossroads, Francis Fukuyama envisioned a new organisation of the democracies to revive multilateralism. Some American political leaders have rushed to endorse these plans. John McCain, the Republican senator currently in the race for the White House, for example, has spoken of a ‘‘League of Democracies’’ as ‘‘the core of an international order of peace based on freedom’’. Meanwhile, since 2000, a Community of Democracies (CD) has brought together a coalition of over a hundred countries ‘‘committed to democracy’’.

The idea of an official organisation of democratic states wishing to promote democracy worldwide has surfaced periodically in recent years. In 2000 the Community of Democracies was inaugurated and survives as a body committed to supporting democratic change. Now the notion is gaining further currency. US Presidential candidate John McCain has advocated a League of Democracies. And analyst Robert Kagan, an advisor to McCain, has recently made a contribution on the subject. This paper by CEPS Senior Fellow Michael Emerson and Associate Senior Fellow Richard Youngs argues against a new organisation, but does advocate a serious concertation among relevant existing international organisations and seriously interested national governments to move pro-actively for democratic progress worldwide.

As the U.S. foreign policy community begins thinking seriously about a post-Bush foreign policy, one major issue on the agenda is how to get democracy promotion back on a better footing. Despite his intention to strengthen U.S. support for democracy abroad, President George W. Bush has badly damaged the credibility of the United States as a prodemocratic actor in the world and weakened the legitimacy of the very concept of democracy promotion. He has done so by closely intermixing his “global freedom agenda” with a war on terrorism that has included invading Iraq, exerting pressure for regime change on governments unfriendly to U.S. security interests, tightening ties with useful autocratic allies such as Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharraf, abusing prisoners at U.S.-run detention facilities, and abridging civil liberties at home. Regaining credibility in the democracy domain will be one part of the broader tasks of regaining wider international support for an active U.S. leadership role in global affairs.

Las elecciones a mitad del periodo presidencial en Estados Unidos proporcionan el último ejemplo de un fenómeno en crecimiento: los gobiernos democráticos que no enfrentan un desafío eficaz por parte de una oposición. Más precisamente, este fenómeno abarca al creciente número de líderes políticos elegidos democráticamente que no tienen rivales alternativos que sean capaces de articular a los descontentos en una oposición viable.

Emerge un nuevo progresismo en el mundo, continuador de una tradición fecunda e innovador en muchos aspectos. Hoy y mañana, buena parte de él se congrega en Londres. Allí están convocados más de doscientos políticos, académicos, expertos y policy-makers de todo el globo, incluyendo una decena de jefes de Estado y de Gobierno. Es lo que se denomina Cumbre de Gobiernos Progresistas. Asistiré a dicha reunión en mi calidad de presidenta de Chile; como representante de una nación que, desde la recuperación de su libertad, ha optado democráticamente caminar por el sendero del desarrollo inclusivo, de la prosperidad y la justicia social.

Alan Johnson: You were raised in a devoutly socialist family in the 1950s, and spent your adolescence running the US young socialist movement in the 1960s and early 1970s. As an adult you have been a leading figure in the neoconservative movement. People will assume a single rupture was involved in that journey but I suspect that it was not experienced like that.

Pierre Hassner décrit un XXIe siècle confus où l'hégémonie occidentale bute sur des obstacles inédits : des concurrents qui ne sont ni amis ni ennemis, des victoires militaires qui sont des échecs politiques, des résistances culturelles aux valeurs de la démocratie. Le XXIe siècle ne sera pas le « nouveau siècle américain » que les « néoconservateurs » appelaient de leurs voeux à la fin des années 1990. Sera-t-il alors le « siècle antiaméricain », selon la formule proposée par l'auteur bulgare (et proaméricain), Ivan Krastev? Peut-on suivre celui-ci lorsqu'il proclame la fin d'une illusion, celle du « siècle de la liberté »?

In his second inaugural address on January 20, 2005, President George W. Bush used the word freedom 25 times, liberty 12 times, and democracy or democratic 3 times. Bush did not enter the White House with a mission to promote freedom around the world. Rather, as a presidential candidate, he put forward a modest foreign policy agenda that eschewed nation-building. The events of September 11, 2001, however, radically jarred his thinking on the nature of international threats and triggered a fundamental reevaluation of his administration’s national security policy that elevated democracy promotion as a central objective of his foreign policy agenda.

Tras varios días de reunión en Praga, el ex presidente del Gobierno español José María Aznar, el ex presidente checo Vaclav Havel y el ex ministro israelí Natan Sharansky han firmado una declaración conjunta de diez puntos en la que exigen la liberación de todos los presos políticos en el mundo.

Our first Policy Brief was on fishing futures. This brief is on the theme of corruption and anticorruption— a timely topic given the recent headlines over the AWB payments in Iraq. It provides three perspectives: a diagnosis of the causes and cures for corruption, an economic analysis of corruption and the links between democracy and corruption.

By this point, of course, it should hardly be shocking that there is a widespread conviction that neoconservatism is the ideology of All Bad Things. One need only turn on the TV or stray just a few inches off the lighted path and into the darker alleys and unseemly neighborhoods of the Internet to discover whole cosmologies grounded on the granite metaphysical fact that neoconservatives are the dark priests of the profane, the cruel, and the greedy. It is a given that neocon means fascist, or crypto-fascist, or “Straussian” (which is merely German-Jewish for “fascist”).

Un liberalismo aséptico, desatento al discurso de los valores, liofilizado, corresponde más bien a los aledaños de la nueva tecnocracia europeísta. Es el desodorante de moda para la entelequia ciudadana de una Unión Europea sin «demos». A su modo, articula un cierto consenso con la socialdemocracia más destilada, más post-ideológica. Se suman ambas actitudes a un sentido cripto-progre de la vida pública y al de una vida privada sin sentido, en la que se da por un hecho gozosamente consumado el crepúsculo del deber. Hasta cierto punto coinciden en una concepción del progreso piramidal, y juntos dan la espalda al sentido trágico de la Historia.

When President Bush said that America hopes to spread democracy to all of the world, he was echoing a sentiment many people support. Though Americans do not put "extending democracy" near the top of their list of foreign policy objectives (preventing terrorism is their chief goal), few would deny that if popular rule is extended it would improve lives around the world.

Hailed as the key to the solution of poverty, corruption, bad governance and, last but not least, terrorism, spreading democracy around the globe has become the centerpiece of U.S. foreign policy since 9/11. However, this enterprise is at risk because most of our policymakers have a poor understanding of the economic and institutional landscape that is most favorable to the extension of political liberties and free elections.

Somos demócratas y progresistas, y proponemos un nuevo alineamiento político. Muchos pertenecemos a la izquierda, pero los principios que propugnamos no provienen exclusivamente de este ámbito. De hecho, abarcamos desde la izquierda socialista hasta los liberales igualitarios y otros comprometidos de manera clara con la democracia. En realidad, la reconfiguración del pensamiento progresista a la que aspiramos implica el trazado de una frontera entre las fuerzas de izquierdas que permanecen fieles a sus valores auténticos y otras corrientes que últimamente han manifestado una excesiva flexibilidad respecto de esos valores. Supone hacer frente común con los demócratas de verdad, sean o no socialistas.

When it is asked whether Western countries can "impose" democracy on the non-Western world, even the language reflects a confusion centering on the idea of "imposition," since it implies a proprietary belief that democracy "belongs" to the West, taking it to be a quintessentially "Western" idea which has originated and flourished exclusively in the West. This is a thoroughly misleading way of understanding the history and the contemporary prospects of democracy.

Several strategic thinkers, including the brilliant Martin van Creveld, have suggested the nation-state is kaput. At least two books published in the 1990s sported titles trumpeting "the end of the nation-state" -extreme versions of the reasoned van Creveld critique.