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On November 22, the German Marshall Fund’s Paris office hosted a roundtable on transatlantic democracy promotion, the results of which are under the Chatham House Rule.

In the United States, it was put forth that there are three types of democracy promoters:
* the universalists, who view democracy as the absolute goal, tend to emphasize election and campaign monitoring and is still Bush’s discourse; 
* the structuralists, who emphasize the need for structural reforms to build a democracy-friendly environment;
* the realists, who are now becoming predominant in the debate and think that democracy should be promoted in un-friendly autocracies but not necessarily in "friendly" ones.

The three positions are represented in the current U.S. administration and account for the administration’s different and sometimes contradicting discourses.

From the Central and East European perspective, the main ideas were:
* European Union integration remains the most powerful tool for democracy assistance. For potential accession countries, it has become synonymous with democratization, modernization, and social protection. Candidate countries are not naive however: they understand that social integration is a long process. But the EU should leave the door open for them.
* Successful democracy promotion incentive needs a plurality of action and a unified voice.
* Democracy promotion efforts cannot succeed if they don’t build upon existing efforts and create a sense of ownership among the population. This sense of ownership must develop both in the state and non-state sphere, where the role of civil society may be predominant.

The West European perspective held that the EU should work to democratize the periphery to the promise of eventually integrating. There must be consistency between democracy promotion incentives abroad and the state of democracy at home, especially with regard to domestic political turbulence, the EU’s failed constitutional treaty, and American troubles in Iraq.