Anthony Barnett (London, OK): According to the Guardian the Foreign Secretary is about to give a major speech in Oxford in honour of Aung San Suu Kyi. From the way Polly Toynbee writes about it, she has been given the transcript in advance - cleared already I hope by the Prime Minister... It seems that he is going to make a passionate plea for us to support democracy around the world (while, as Polly points out, not supporting democrat voting here at home). It seems to be a fact of life these days that one has to blow one's own trumpet to have a hope of being heard - or in this case, I can modestly say, half a trumpet. But a little over two years ago Isabel Hilton and I wrote a now reprinted article on the global fight for democracy. We showed that there are three linked processes: the need to support the achievement of basic democratic norms - the rule of law, fair elections, freedom of speech - in countries that do not have these, from China to the Middle East; the need to tackle the democratisation of global institutions in ways that are appropriate - accountability, transparency; and the need to deepen democracy in its traditional heartlands, from the USA to India and Britain, where the representative system is clearly failing. We argue that of course it is essential to extend solidarity and support to those struggling to achieve democracy where it does not exist - the point Miliband is apparently going to make. We must not allow 'Bush-Blair' style interventions to undermine this. But to achieve public support in the West and convince people globally, calls for democracy in 'the global south' need to be linked to demands for democracy in our global institutions and for making it a much improved reality of it in countries privileged enough to enjoy elections and the rule of law as we currently know them.
It seems that David Miliband and perhaps even his advisers have not read openDemocracy when it is, if I may say so, spot on the target of what he is trying to address. I wonder why.
