Don’t Let Humility Get in the Way of Robust Democracy Promotion

At a virtual panel discussion last week, Thomas Carothers, an expert on democratization at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, pointed to a global trend that he said should inform democracy assistance programs going forward: the “equalization of the political terrain.” “The old idea that there’s a set of countries called ‘established democracies’ that largely have solved their democratic problems and are working on the details, and then a set of countries, ‘new or struggling democracies,’ that are grappling with fundamental challenges—that old division is gone,” Carothers explained at the event, hosted by the Parliamentary Centre, a think tank in […]