December 5 this year marked eight years since the death of the father of our democracy, world-renowned leader uTata Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela.
Mandela stood steadfastly for the right of all people to self-determine. This self-determination in a democratic context was one that appreciated that things, concepts and politics are not homogeneous and that the application of all progressive concepts should be applied relative to the national conditions we face.
One of the terms most synonymous with the post-apartheid state is the word “democracy”. Our country is lauded and revered as a bastion of hope and as upholding the highest level of democratic principles.
It is because I, as a patriotic South African, value democracy so much that I couldn’t reconcile myself with a deep feeling of unease when the US announced it would be hosting a democracy summit – this is a nation that placed Tata Madiba, one of the worlds most renowned symbols of democracy, on a terrorist watch list until 2008.
The Summit for Democracy will be a virtual summit hosted by the US “to renew democracy at home and confront autocracies abroad”, on December 9 and 10. The three themes of the summit are defending against authoritarianism, addressing and fighting corruption, and advancing respect for human rights.
Perhaps to understand the extent of my discomfort with the summit, we should look closer at democracy and its application within the host country, and ultimately at what I believe is an attempt to further the agenda of weaponising democracy.
Democracy is a common value shared by all humanity. It is a right for all nations, not the prerogative of a few. Democracy takes different forms, and there is no one-size-fits-all model. It would be totally undemocratic to measure the diverse political systems in the world with a single yardstick or to examine different political civilisations from a single perspective.
The political system of a country should be independently decided by its own people. It is no surprise that the announcement of the summit was met with widespread suspicion.
Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto criticised the summit, saying it had features of domestic politics of the US. The Chinese ambassador to the US, Qin Gang, and Russian ambassador to the US, Anatoly Antonov, jointly published an opinion article pointing out that by hosting the summit, the US was empowering itself to define who is a “democratic country” and who is not, which is an evident product of its Cold War mentality that will stoke up ideological confrontation, creating new “dividing lines”.
The second prominent issue is whether the US has the moral authority or legitimacy to host the “Summit for Democracy”? The US’s democracy is in a disastrous state.
Surveys have shown that 44% of respondents see the US as the biggest threat to global democracy, and 81% of Americans say there is a serious domestic threat to the future of their democracy. As Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin put it, “The US has overdrawn its democratic credit, and US democracy has long gone bankrupt.
However, the US is still using democracy as a cover to interfere in other countries’ domestic affairs, infringe on their sovereignty and violate basic principles of international law and basic norms governing international relations.
It's hosting of the ‘Summit for Democracy’ is neither justified nor legitimate, but merely an old trick of trying to shift its domestic problems overseas in an attempt to find a cure.”
It would be hard to convince anyone that the US is not using this summit to try to make the rest of the world subscribe to its very limited understanding of democracy.
We must be vigilant when it comes to the US and its interests. History has tough lessons for those who once believed that the US has noble interests in the spheres of peace, stability and democracy.
*Matiwane is the Deputy President of the South African Students Congress
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media and IOL.