Five Ingredients of Democracy

I'd like to start by congratulating and thanking the young artist for beautiful music. One of the things we believe in, in our work on democracy, is that there's no democracy without culture. It's good to be here among people who have the same attitude and understanding of the role culture and art have to play in a democratic society.

I'd like to begin with a couple of apologies — I always think it's good to start off by lowering expectations. First of all, thank you for the invitation. It's great to be here, and it's great because it's Geneva — a very international setting. We Europeans often act as if there's nothing beyond our borders. We're usually well-intentioned, or, rather, occasionally well-intentioned, but we're also self-obsessed. I think we're world champions in navel-gazing. So it's good to be exposed to a broader experience. But I nevertheless apologize in advance because my remarks are going to be anchored in a European reality that my organization is involved with — even if I think much of it may have broader relevance in many respects.

The second apology is for my title, Director for Democracy. It wasn't me. I think it's probably the most pretentious title in the international institutional architecture. But it started off even worse — someone suggested "Directorate of Democracy," and that's where I put my foot down. There are enough people already trying to direct democracy. We should be directing for democracy. The thing is, once I carry that title, people come to me with high expectations, expecting me to speak with authority and knowledge about how to save democracy — in ten easy steps or something — and I fail miserably every time. I have no idea. Well, I have ideas, but none of them is easy or clear. So I'd like to apologize for that too.

The reason the title matters nonetheless is that it reflects a new, broadened paradigm of how we understand democracy at the Council of Europe. In addition to institutions, which are essential, and politicians, who of course are essential too — democracy requires a democratic environment, a substantive democracy in which citizens have the opportunity, the motivation, the skills, and the confidence to engage, sustain, and make that democracy live and function. So my responsibilities, and the mandate of our Directorate, includes the main vectors of such substantive democracy, namely education, youth, media, civil society, and culture.

I'd like to mention five ingredients I think a functioning democracy needs — and, unfortunately, all of them are in ever shorter supply in today's world.

The first, already in the title of this forum, is hope. Or I'd say, more precisely, a reasonable expectation of a better future. That's essential for democracy. You cannot have democracy when people fear for their future, where they're uncertain and don't know what's going to happen, where they can't reasonably expect their children to have a better life than they did. That's the world most of us live in today, and it has an impact on democracy. A reasonable expectation of a better future doesn't mean we'll all be happy individually — that's not going to happen; a fair share of us in this room are going to be fairly miserable. But collectively, we need that positive attitude toward the future if democracy is going to work.

I was at the European School in Strasbourg last year, this time of year, on a hot Friday afternoon, in a room full of seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds preparing for the baccalaureate. They'd invited me as a parent, not as Director for Democracy, to speak alongside colleagues from Ukraine, Romania, and Albania — I'm originally from Slovenia — about our experiences of democratic transition. First, I have to give these young people credit: sitting there, polite and attentive, on a Friday afternoon before their exams, listening to a bunch of senior citizens reminiscing about their youth, says a lot about today's young people. One after another, my colleagues shared their stories — interesting, compelling, moving — but I noticed they all landed on more or less the same note: it was difficult, it was tough, but we fought for democracy, and now we have it, and you should be grateful for it.

When my turn came, perhaps a little too enthusiastically, I said: don't you dare be grateful. Be impatient, be demanding, you have the right to be angry, be critical — first and foremost, be as critical as you can.

I could see the principal starting to sweat, turning to the teacher: who invited this guy?

So I corrected myself. When I say be critical, I don't mean disagreeing with or dismissing everyone and everything you don't like. Critical thinking starts with critically testing your own opinions, your own reactions, the information you accept and act on. That's what critical thinking really means.

Then, to explain why I'd said they shouldn't be grateful, I told them I grew up in Yugoslavia. It wasn't the worst of places, it wasn't the best of places — it was perhaps the most liberal of dictatorships, a sort of Scandinavian prison. We were better off than my colleagues from Albania or the Soviet Union at the time, but it was still no picnic. Yet even then, fighting for those same democratic values in much harder circumstances, we had two enormous advantages over today's generation. First, we had absolutely no doubt that the future would be free and better. Second, we had absolutely no doubt that we would be part of that change. Today's young people are losing both of those certainties, and that's decisive for democracy. So we need to start by bringing back hope and belief in the future, and the sense of empowerment, before they are replaced by resignation, by fear, then anger, then hate — which is what's happening.

The second ingredient — I'll go faster now — is facts, and a reasonable amount of reason. Maria Ressa, the journalist from the Philippines who won the Nobel Peace Prize a couple of years ago, said that in a society with no agreement on facts there can be no democracy. That's a fact, and it describes the situation in most of our countries rather accurately. There's no more agreement — not just disagreement on the facts themselves, but on whether we should even agree on facts at all. Everyone is now free to select their own set of facts and choose a reality that suits their emotional, ideological, or other needs. Once you're there, democracy can't function. Much of this is emotionally driven — for reasons that are sometimes justified, sometimes not, sometimes a result of perception, sometimes reality — but it's there, and so far our best response has been a very rational one. We need to find better ways of dealing with this emotionally driven rejection of facts, reason, knowledge, and science, without adding to the tension. We've gotten as far as telling people: listen, democracy is great, your problem is that you are media illiterate, and you got your facts wrong. That's not going to convince anyone that democracy is great.

The third ingredient is confidence — trust in democracy. This connects to the first. People have lost trust in democracy, often for good reasons, because they're disappointed and frustrated — not in democracy or democratic values themselves, but in the way democracy has been administered to them by politicians. More and more of them feel left out, marginalized, they have the feeling their legitimate expectations and interests are being ignored. There's too much hypocrisy, too many double standards, from people whose mouths are full of democratic values. That has consequences. Restoring that confidence and trust won't be easy.

The fourth ingredient: integrity, competence, and effectiveness. It's an unfair fight — democracies are up against authoritarian populists, who are rage farmers. The worse things are, the better it is for them, at least for a while. What democracy has to offer is effective solutions to people's problems. That's tough, difficult, unfair — but it has to be done if we want to preserve democracy and make it more resilient.

Finally, common decency: not just speaking about it, but practicing and showing the most fundamental, universal human values — solidarity, respect for human dignity, empathy — all in very short supply today. Instead, we live in a world where many political leaders act in a completely transactional way, where the only way to win is for someone else to lose, where the only way to win is to inflict pain on someone else. Democracy cannot work under those conditions — and we're talking about politicians who consider themselves democrats.

So there's a lot on the plate. What is the Council of Europe doing about it? I invite you to look at our website — I won't go through it all, but we have, I think, genuinely impressive policy work addressing each of the areas I've mentioned. We have a relatively new Secretary General, from Switzerland, who launched the New Democratic Pact for Europe as an exercise in the critical thinking I mentioned earlier — about what we do, how we do it, how we can do better, how we bring others into building a more resilient democracy.

What we cannot do from the Council of Europe — what cannot be done from Strasbourg, or Brussels, or even Geneva — is bring democracy somewhere, or save it, without the participation of citizens. We can't do it. Democracy isn't built top-down, it has to be built bottom-up. When you have that alliance — citizens, civil society, local authorities, media — I think we can still succeed. We must.

I'll stop here, because my watch is telling me it doesn't look too good. I will just add that personally, I remain an optimist about the future of democracy. A very, very worried optimist, but an optimist still. And if you're looking for inspiration: the last time I was in Ukraine, sitting in a cellar during an air raid, I had a conversation with a young Ukrainian woman. She said: we can't afford pessimism here in Ukraine. Think of the alternatives.

Thank you.