What is democracy?
Is it what America does? Or is it what America tells others to do? There is at present nothing else for it to be.
Democracy is possibly the most powerful force in the world just now. Or, to put it another way: America is.
America is a democracy.
Outside the sphere of American approval there can be no democracy.
And the problem facing democracy is China. In order for the entire world to be democratic, Chinese civilisation must be broken up.
The most striking thing about President Biden's "Summit for Democracy" is that it lists Taiwan as a democratic and sovereign state. This can only be understood as a move towards the breaking up of China.
For a generation after the change of regime in Peking in 1948, and the retreat of Chiang Kai-Shek's Kuomintang Army to Formosa, Washington recognised the Kuomintang regime in Formosa as the Government of China, and used its UN Veto to prevent the actual Chinese Government in Peking from taking the Chinese seat in the UN. So certain was America then that Formosa was an integral part of the Chinese state, that it held mainland China to be in rebellion against its legitimate Government in Formosa.
But the corrupt, reactionary Nixon sold the pass and allowed the Government of the Chinese billion to join the UN and depose the Kuomintang.
Formosa changed its name to Taiwan, but its Government did not revoke its claim to be the legitimate Government of China. President Biden excludes China from his Summit while including Taiwan.
This is not a matter of recognising a Taiwan declaration of independence. Taiwan has not declared independence. It still considers itself the Government of China.
The actual Government of China says it will regard any American move in alliance with Taiwan against China as an act of war. President Biden is feeling his way towards such a move.
If Biden makes the move we will find out—those of us who survive—if Democracy/USA is till the most powerful force in the world.
In a bygone era "democracy" had an objective meaning. It meant a particular way of forming a government. Political parties contested elections in which all adult citizens had the vote, and the party that won formed the Government and governed in accordance with their election policies. In those days it was not required that all Governments should implement the same policies. It was taken for granted that different peoples favoured different ways of life, and that these differences would influence government policies. But those days have passed away. Uniformity of outcome regardless of which party wins is now a democratic requirement.
President Biden has excluded Hungary from the democratic world. Its Government was elected fairly. Nobody disputes that. It is doing what it was elected to do. But the EU has condemned it for being in breach of the current values, or fashions, of most EU states. Hungary says that it holds the values that were EU values a generation ago, when it joined and it is content with them.
But the EU imagines that its changes of fashion are changes of law, and finds that Hungary is in breach of law—without being able to specify the law.
There was once something that could be called "European civilisation". It was destroyed in the two Total Wars launched by Britain. Present-day Europe is an American creation out of the post-1945 shambles, and it is therefore what one would have expected it to be.
Ireland was not part of that shambles. It kept itself out of the 1939 War by its willingness to fight against whichever side tried to bring it in. It had its own view of the War. It might have asserted that view in the post-War world, but did not.
For the past forty years it has been acting as if it had been defeated in the War and had therefore no right to think its own thoughts!
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