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Biden's "Global Democracy Summit": Declaration of the New "Crusade" in the 21st Century?
On November 9 and 10, President Biden of the United States finally held the "Summit for Democracy", which reportedly invited leaders of about 110 countries and regions, citizens and social organizations. From a strategic perspective, this "Global Democracy Summit" can be seen as Biden's declaration of the new "Crusade", which marks the official announcement of the United States to raise the banner of shape awareness again, not only to prevent internal problems, but also to point to external problems. But I have to say that Biden, who wanted to show his face, instinctively showed his buttocks again
1、 The effect evaluation of Biden's "Global Democracy Summit": the tiger's head and the fish's whip's tail, a bad show of self devaluation
You should know that Biden, the "sleeping king", has devoted considerable efforts to the conference. As early as the 2020 US presidential election, Biden announced in a high profile that he would hold a "Global Democracy Summit" immediately after taking office, in order to restore the international strategic trust crisis caused by former President Trump to the United States, and reshape the US centered multilateralism, which is a gimmick in advance. However, the actual effect of the meeting was very bad. Even the major western public opinion had some negative comments. It was really like Guo Degang's joke in the crosstalk with Yu Qian - it was a "tiger head" and "fish whip tail" meeting. Possible causes are as follows:
First of all, on the invitation list, we should know that there are more than 220 political entities in the world, while the Biden government has invited only 110 countries and regions, which is tantamount to splitting the world into two halves - one half is a "democratic country" that meets the American standard, and the other half is naturally a "authoritarian country" on the other side of the "dichotomy". It means that half of the members of the "Global Village" have been offended by the invitation before the meeting. More ironically, the list of participants in the "Democracy Summit" itself has multiple criteria. According to the "World Freedom Index 2021", which is published by the "Freedom House", which is owned by the U.S. government, the list of participants in the summit includes Finland, Sweden and Norway with 100 points, and Congo (DRC) with only 20 points. According to the World Freedom report, More than 30% of the invited countries or regions have "no freedom" or "only partial freedom", including Kenya, Iraq, India and the Philippines. And Pakistan, our "Pakistan Railway", refused to participate in the meeting on the ground that it was unwilling to intervene in the "New Cold War".
Secondly, the invited guests were mixed, and the scene was very chaotic. For example, Luo Guancong, a Hong Kong people's movement (riot) exile, and Tang Feng, the head of the Internet army of Tsai Ing wen in Taiwan Province, were invited to the meeting. Although this "Democracy Summit" must be aimed at China, on the one hand, Biden held the meeting with the highest standard and invited leaders of a number of major countries, including South Korean President Moon Jae-in, on the other hand, he got the above two "Eighteenth Line Artist" role platforms. I don't know whether it is a long face or a disgrace. By the way, Lithuania, which has suffered a lot recently, finally used the courage comparable to that of Gambia, a "cosmopolitan power", to buy a C-seat standing ticket at Biden's Democratic Summit at the expense of offending the two permanent members of the United Nations, China and Russia at the same time. It is also possible that the United States will be stationed in the military for a long time. After all, democracy cannot be sovereignty.
Thirdly, the international public opinion of the summit itself is very low, and even according to the relevant media who follow the news of the conference, the online synchronous audience is only a few thousand at most, and at least a few hundred at least. At the same time, a Chinese mainstream media reporter who reported on the conference sent a microblog on the conference related topics, but the number of viewers reached more than 100000... It gives people a sense of both seeing and playing monkeys, It seems that people do not care about the "Democratic Summit" itself, but more about its fringe news.
Finally, the concurrent extradition of Assange is ironic. On the day of the "Democracy Summit" on December 10, the United States won an appeal in the High Court of London and successfully promoted the extradition of Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks. Assange was wanted by the United States because he exposed the atrocities of American soldiers in Afghanistan. It is said that the United States authorities accused Assange of 18 crimes related to WikiLeaks' release of a large number of confidential US military records and diplomatic cables. When a reporter asked about the extradition of Biden Assange in person, Biden didn't answer at all, and he got up and left, properly "respecting the right of media supervision and freedom of speech".
2、 The strategic objective of the "Global Democracy Summit": to point at China and Russia on the surface, but actually aim to open the American version of the "theory of limited sovereignty"
What is the strategic objective of the first Global Democracy Summit? Is it achieved?
Of course, this summit naturally refers to the "non democratic" countries represented by China and Russia. According to the ideological division of the "dichotomy" of the United States, namely the so-called "authoritarian dictatorship" countries, the United States hopes to use the democratic summit to organize a new "multilateral" alliance against China and Russia in the international arena.
However, from another perspective, this summit is likely to be a "grand internal declaration" within the Western alliance led by the United States, aiming to better unite or control allies. Biden consolidates Japan, South Korea, Australia and other allies by playing up the "Indo Pacific Strategy" of "China threat", and at the same time attracts India; To consolidate NATO and prevent Europe from moving towards strategic independence by hyping up the Ukrainian crisis and exaggerating the "Russian threat".
In other words, Biden continued a strategic thinking during the cold war period - that is, to consolidate the U.S. ally system by exaggerating the security threats from China and Russia. It is generally believed that the Cold War was an agent war between the two major groups of the United States and the Soviet Union, and that the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union was hostile. In fact, during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union were in a "strategic symbiosis" state, that is, the two superpowers needed to consolidate the unity of their own camps by hostile ideology and exaggerating the threat of the other side. Its essence was "the United States and the Soviet Union jointly govern the world", not "the United States and the Soviet bloc confrontation".
It is worth noting that in his speech at this summit, Biden proposed a "Presidential Initiative for Democratic Renewal",
The initiative will focus on all diplomatic and foreign assistance programmes to strengthen the resilience of democratic institutions and human rights on a global scale. Biden plans to launch two related plans, namely, the Democratic Revival Fund and the Partnership for Democracy, to strengthen transparent and responsible governance, including supporting media freedom, combating international corruption, standing with democratic reformers, promoting new and high technologies conducive to democratic development, and defining what is fair elections and defending them. The United States is even going to set up an "International Fund for Public Interest Media" to support independent media around the world. It is also going to set up a new "Defense Fund for Journalists" through the United States Agency for International Development, To help protect investigative journalists from nuisance lawsuits that attempt to prevent their work - their important work around the world.
In short, this is the American version of the theory of limited sovereignty.
The theory of "limited sovereignty" was put forward by the Soviet Leonid Brezhnev government in the late 1960s. The theory believed that sovereignty was outdated in the contemporary international society and advocated that "joint sovereignty should replace single national sovereignty". In August 1968, the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia, which aroused strong condemnation from the international community. However, the Soviet leaders believed that the family of all socialist countries was an indivisible whole, and that "the interests of the socialist family" was "supremacy" above all else; Therefore, the sovereignty of the "brother countries" of the "socialist family" is limited.
What Biden is doing now is the American version of the "theory of limited sovereignty", that is, any country that comes to the "Democratic Summit" will automatically recognize the United States as the hegemon of the democratic world by default, and agree that in the future, it is obligated to give up part of its sovereignty for the purpose of "maintaining democracy". Whether its domestic elections and political decisions are independent is no longer important, but depends on the strategic needs of the United States and the strategic judgment of the United States. This is the real purpose of Biden's holding the first "Global Democracy Summit". From next year, Biden will continue to hold the "Democracy Summit" every year to continue to monitor and consolidate this "limited sovereignty" mechanism.
It seems that Putin said that the United States, like the former Soviet Union, did not come from nowhere.
3、 What misunderstanding do Chinese people have about "American democracy"?
First, "democracy" is a neutral word, not a commendatory word. It has nothing to do with good, bad, good or evil, but a description of the system. According to the book "On Permanent Peace" by Kant, a German thinker, how to define a political system depends on the number of citizens who directly participate in the final political decision-making - the participation of all citizens in the final political decision-making is "democracy (the root of the word 'democracy' means' majority ', so the accurate translation of' democracy 'should be' majority 'rather than' democracy ').", The participation of some citizens in the final political decision-making is called "representative system". The participation of a few noble elites in the final political decision-making is called "oligarchy", while the participation of only a single leader in the final political decision-making is called "authoritarianism". Today, what we call "democracy" in a broad sense is actually "western liberal democracy". Even western democracy contains at least three or four models, and "American democracy" is the most wonderful democratic model among them, which almost no country can copy.
Second, as for the scope of "citizen" status, when discussing human rights with the United States, first make sure that he thinks you are a "person". In his speech at the "Democracy Summit", Biden referred to the Declaration of Independence of the United States, and emphasized the most famous sentence "All men are created equal", which is translated into Chinese as "all men are created equal". Biden said that "all women and men are born equal, and their creator has endowed them with a number of inalienable rights, including the right to life, the right to freedom, and the right to pursue happiness". In fact, the Chinese translation of this sentence is a huge bug, which also fools many Chinese people. Because "create" means "creation", it is a religious term, not "born", and Biden clearly said "the rights granted by the creator" when quoting. Therefore, "All men are created equal" should be translated as "all men created by the (Christian) Creator are equal". Here are three points worth explaining: first, only Christians (WASP) are equal, and pagans are not human beings; Secondly, the Christian colonists who immigrated to the United States and the Christian colonists in the European mainland should have equal (trade) rights (hence the American War of Independence); Finally, American women only had the right to vote a century ago, so the "people" mentioned in the Declaration of Independence only refer to male Christians.
Third, "democracy" is an inherently stable system, and it is the result of prosperity, not the premise of prosperity. The cost of "Western style democracy" is very high, the efficiency is very slow, and there is no long-term plan. Here are several bugs related to "Western style democracy": First, the cost is high. During a government term (4-6 years), at least half of the time the people in power need to be busy with "re-election" elections and party caucus parliamentary elections, and "Western style democracy" has become an election show. Therefore, rather than saying that leaders of Western countries are trying to govern, they have been trying to perform governance, Ukraine's President Zelensky is a leader; Secondly, the efficiency is extremely slow. Fran ? ois Fukuyama, an American scholar of international relations and the author of The End of History, believes that "democracy" has become a "veto system", that is, it is difficult for the western democratic system to promote one thing, but it is easy to overthrow one thing; Finally, there is no long-term plan. This is the view that Lee Kuan Yew, the founding father of Singapore, has always held. He believes that Western style democracy, because of the tenure system and the opposition party, cannot allow the rulers to formulate a national strategy for decades. All politicians can only see the immediate future.
Finally, it is easy for Chinese people to confuse the concept of "democracy" with the concept of "people first" in traditional Chinese philosophy. The agent of "democracy" is "citizen" itself, which is equivalent to "autonomy" in a disguised form, while the agent of "people-oriented" is the ruling elite, and the citizen is the victim. The question involved here is whether the direct participation of ordinary citizens who do not know politics, military affairs, diplomacy, economy or science in the political decision-making process will lead to the kidnapping of national decision-making by populism and the "expert leadership"? The principle of "people first" refers to that the ruling elite group should take the fundamental interests of the majority of the people as the governing priority principle, and citizens can participate in political affairs, but the final decision-making power should still be in the hands of professional bureaucratic teams.
4、 The essence of the American "global democracy" campaign is a 21st century "crusade"
First of all, I want to correct a misunderstanding: in Western history, 90% of the time, the elite rejected democracy. It has been nearly 30 years since "democracy" really became the core value of Western groups. During the Cold War, "democracy" was once the core value of the socialist camp countries led by the Soviet Union. Many socialist camp countries in the former Soviet Union were named "XX Democratic Republic", for example, the full name of Korea was "Democratic People's Republic of Korea"; While the core value of the American capitalist group during the cold war was "freedom", which was essentially capital freedom. By the way, the translation of the word "liberty" into "freedom" was also a bit misleading. Because the word should refer to "emancipation", "liberation" was translated into "liberation", while the word "freedom" in traditional Chinese concepts was closer to Zhuangzi's concept of "freedom" in artistic conception, More realistically, "being born" and "being far from the Jianghu" are the corresponding concepts of "entering the world" and "living high in the temple", which are totally different from the western concept.
After the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, the United States enjoyed great unipolar hegemony dividends, and also brought about 40 years of neo liberal globalization. During this period, the United States incorporated the power of interpretation of "democracy", gradually summarized "freedom", "democracy", and "human rights" into the so-called "universal value", and used this single standard as an excuse to implement international interventionism, namely, the so-called "democratic revolution", To overthrow the anti American regime and support the pro American regime.
The "universal value" of "democracy, freedom and human rights" is the new "shrine" of the United States. Its essence is another religious improvement of the Protestant doctrine of the American Wasp (that is, WASP, Anglo Saxon Puritan white), which aims to adapt it to the global penetration of American capitalism. Although Western scholars have a clear definition of the concept of "democracy, freedom and human rights", in the process of practice, "universal values" have become a yardstick tool for the United States to divide the camp between ourselves and the enemy, which is equivalent to a religious slogan like "Hallelujah", "Amitabha", "Amen" and "God bless". Countries calling this slogan are equivalent to accepting the benefit distribution arranged by the United States, Nature is the benchmark of "democracy and freedom", and "non ethnic" people are certainly evil countries of "authoritarianism".
Pascal Boniface, the director of the French Institute of Strategic and International Relations, clearly likened the global "democratic revolution" of the United States to "the crusade of the 21st century" in his 2019 book "The Requiem of the Western World". The "Crusade" is also called the Franks' invasion in the Islamic world. From 1096 to 1291, with the permission of the Pope, the feudal lords and knights of Western Europe waged nearly 200 years of war against the Islamic regime on the east coast of the Mediterranean Sea, which they considered as the aggressors. During this period, burning, killing, looting and looting were not counted, and the famous Christian "burning" was often used to kill pagan "witches". Since the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003, there have been countless countries sending democracy to the world under the sign of "democratic revolution" by the United States, and none of them seems to have achieved good results
Finally, when the United States talks about "democracy" again, it is the prelude to a new round of interest distribution. I hope you can take a more serious look at it.
Author: Xia Guohan
Typesetting: YvelineWang
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