Last week Toronto hosted a conference on Democracy. It was co-sponsored by the Canadian bank BMO and The Eurasia Group ("to bring political science to the investment community and to corporate decision-makers." It was billed as a Canada-USA summit, but its panelists seemed to be mostly American and to have that unique Planet America vision of world affairs.
According to Susan Delacourt of the Star, Ian Bremmer of Eurasia set the tone by declaring:
“Back in 1989, when the (Berlin) Wall came down, the United States was the principal exporter of democracy worldwide.... In 1989, other countries looked at the United States as an aspirational model. You wanted your political system to be like the U.S., right?"
They did? In 1989, when all the newly independent states of the former Soviet bloc looked to establish democratic governments, didn't they all choose parliamentary systems on the British model rather than the American (president, congress, and division-of-powers) constitution. (As did German and Japan and Israel and India and Pakistan and many other counties in the aftermath of the Second World War, and more in the decolonization of Africa and the Caribbean in the 1960s.) Hardly anyone in the twentieth century has attempted to set up a democratic state on the American model.
Americans do take it as self-evident that the United States invented democracy and has been its principal exporter and role model -- well, until Donald Trump, some now think. It's still hard to get Americans to consider that their eighteenth century constitutional model is not even serving the United States well any more, and has not been widely copied by democratizing states for a very long time -- really, since the South American republics were setting themselves up in the early nineteenth century.
To quote Delacourt again, the seminar also had a Planet America solution to the problems of democracy at least in North America. And it's so weird that I think I will just quote it:
The solution, the senator says, is to give citizens government that works for them, in a practical way. That’s why, he said, so many attendees at the summit were focused on matters of economic integration between Canada and the United States — because that’s where the solution lies to the political forces driving people apart
Update, April 20.
I should acknowledge there is much more to democracy promotion than providing a model for constitutional institutions. Vital American contributions to the sustaining of democracy such as, e.g., arming Ukraine, should not be forgotten
