U.S. and European Leaders Must Fight Now to Maintain Democracy
Attending 60 meetings in 23 days and watching an historic U.S. election have provided a plethora of new thoughts, inspiring insights, and a multitude of varying approaches and angles on many issues during the course of the Marshall Memorial Fellowship. Gathering all this new and rich information throughout our voyages in five very different U.S. cities, I constantly wondered what exactly I would like to write about in this blogpost. What do farmers in Florida, police officers in South Chicago, the Tent City Jail of the notorious Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Phoenix, lobbyists in Washington, DC, and David Axelrod all have in common? Are there more similar or different problems and issues on both sides of the Atlantic? Can one even speak of United States and Europe as a transatlantic whole?
There are as immense differences between U.S. states as there are cultural, economic, and political gaps between European countries. But leaving these differences aside, one can observe a larger common theme that is evolving into the most important sociopolitical issue of our time: the disenfranchisement of large proportions of our societies and the subsequent rise of populism on both sides of the Atlantic.
For the past few decades in the United States as in Europe, we have witnessed by and large peaceful and prosperous times, and despite the financial crisis of 2008 our economies have grown. But at the same time this growth has not been shared by everybody, and the gap between the rich and the poor has been constantly widening for decades. This is the main reason why many people on both sides of the Atlantic feel that they are the losers of a globalized, free-market, trading world. This growing anger about the widening gap and fear of being left out of the new global paradigm has been expressed numerous times in the past years through the rise of populism. We now have groundbreaking electoral results, from the vote on Brexit to the presidential vote in the United States, as evidence of this unrest.
Having spotted the problem and analyzed its causes one can only hope that the leaders of this world will finally understand that they cannot rule through binoculars, underestimate the will of the masses and disregard what they have to say. The leaders on both sides of the Atlantic must be very sincere when reflecting on how they have acted in the past and why we have arrived now at a pivotal point in history.
If they decide to learn their lessons — to start listening to people again and most of all start taking decisions with the general public in mind — there might be still time to turn the ship around before it crashes against a cliff. If not, the values and principles of the West, which have been hard fought over centuries, will be in danger. Leaders must understand that history is not linear and that democracy and its values can never been taken for granted. Leaders in government, private sector, and civil society must constantly fight to keep democratic institutions strong, for they are the true safeguards of our society.
Alexander Theodoridis, managing director and co-founder of the NGO Boroume, is a Fall 2016 European Marshall Memorial Fellow.
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