This article is from a special report on the Athens Democracy Forum, held in association with The New York Times, where experts gathered in the Greek capital last week to discuss global issues.
When the first Athens Democracy Forum was held back in 2013, the discussions were about how to bolster and fix liberal democracy. The primacy and value of democracy were not in question; autocrats and populist movements were worrisome deviations that needed correction, but not existential threats.
Not this year. The talk at the Forum held Sept. 30 to Oct. 1 in the Greek capital often sounded more like a eulogy for democracy.
Consider some random jottings from various discussions: “This democracy thing is just not working.” “People are taking to the streets, not to a political party.” “We don’t think voting is sufficient anymore.” “Every effort at a global solution is blocked.” “This is democracy’s existential moment.”
It was not all doom and gloom as participants searched for “New Visions for Hard Realities,” to echo the title of the Forum. But it was the drumbeat of hard realities that echoed in the hall of the Athens Conservatoire.
There was no sense in discussing the “defense of liberal democracy,” argued Ivan Krastev, head of the Center for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria. Politics is in the throes of fundamental change, taking us into a world we’ve not known before, and the nostalgia preached by populist politicians, the notion that life should return to some past idyll — as in “Make America Great Again” — was a chimera. “There is nothing more dangerous than to defend something that does not exist anymore,” Mr. Krastev said, adding the problem is not how to defend, but “how to reinvent the system. The problem is basically how to deal with this change.”
And if in bygone years new generations offered a promise of renewal, it’s not so anymore.
“We’ve seen throughout the conference examples of young people as champions of democracy,” Abigail Branford, a researcher at Oxford, told a panel. “But I think that we cannot assume that young people are going to save democracy, because unfortunately sometimes young people are the ones who are the most open to authoritarianism.”
“They increasingly question the rule of law. They question nonviolence. They question civilized debate,” he said. Most susceptible were the millennials — a generation now in their 30s and early 40s — whose entry into adulthood was accompanied by economic crisis, then the migration crisis, then the Covid shutdown.
For the students invited to the Forum, the very definition of a populist seemed unclear. In panel discussions, a populist emerged as someone who seized on grievances and manipulated them into struggles between “us” and “them,” “the people” and “the elites.” But how can we discern whether a populist is exposing socialist inequality or exploiting it, asked the students. What institutional or societal safeguards are there to limit populism without undermining democratic principles?
Rarely referred to by name, but looming over the deliberations was President Trump, whose politics of nostalgia and grievance, punishing tariffs and disdain for the post-World War II order have rendered the United States, the erstwhile model of liberal democracy, to a case study of the new realities.
That did not mean that voting Mr. Trump or any like-minded national leader out of office would end the travails of liberal democracy. “Part of the problem in the U.S., honestly, is that we still think that if Trump loses, ‘we’ will win,” said Marjan H. Ehsassi, North America director of the Federation for Innovation in Democracy. “The moment requires that we fight. But what are we fighting for?”
That, really, is the question of our time. If disillusionment with politics is at the core of the problem, then elections and referendums will only reward the populists who feed on discontent. If technology serves equally to provide universal access to information and to undermine that information, then is dialogue useful or even possible?
At a discussion of why young Africans were not voting in elections, one woman said it was because she saw democracy as a pyramid scheme — elected officials just getting richer and richer.
“So the question is,” said Ms. Branford, the Oxford researcher, “can we give young people a reason to believe that more democracy is the answer, and not less democracy?”
Can a world with 195 nation-states claiming sovereign equality resolve global problems like the water cycle or climate change? “Every effort at a global solution is blocked,” lamented Danilo Türk, president of the Club de Madrid, a nonprofit organization created to promote democracy. The United Nations has been marginalized, the World Health Organization blocked, the World Trade Organization paralyzed by Washington’s disdain.
Was there room for deliberation in a politics increasingly dominated by demands for aggressive action, even if they violated traditional legal or institutional constraints? Mr. Krastev described it as a growing primacy of “intensity” over “consistency,” with Mr. Trump as a prime example. “This is the kind of world,” noted Mr. Krastev, “in which we have not been before.”
As is usual these days, that led to mulling about what role artificial intelligence might play in this new world, for good or for evil.
Achilles Tsaltas, head of the Democracy and Culture Foundation and organizer of the Athens Democracy Forum from its inception, put the issue to an A.I. program, and after a back and forth, got this: “Much is being said about A.I.’s power to disrupt markets, transform industries and even challenge the very idea of what it means to be human. But perhaps the deeper, more urgent question is this: As A.I. evolves, what kind of human beings are we becoming? And what kind of democracies will we choose to sustain?”
Was the response a display of wisdom? Or merely catering to what the questioner wanted to hear? In either case, the questions remained unanswered.
In the end, as the curtains fell on the Forum, what seemed evident was that the traditional components of liberal democracy — credible information, conscientious voting, functioning courts, honest politicians and a nonpartisan civil service — could exist only so long as they were trusted by the people, and for a broad range of reasons that trust had been shaken.