What It Is
The Summit for Democracy was launched by President Biden in 2021 as a flagship multilateral commitment of his democracy-vs-autocracy strategic framing. The first summit (December 2021, virtual) brought together 110+ governments. Subsequent iterations were held in South Korea (March 2023) and the third in 2024.
The Summit's Year of Action between meetings focused on country-level commitments on , anti-corruption, gender , and democratic resilience. Notable invitations and exclusions generated controversy: Hungary was excluded as an EU member state with democratic backsliding concerns; Turkey was invited despite similar concerns; India was invited despite Western criticism of democratic backsliding.
Why It Matters
The Summit was the most concrete diplomatic expression of the 's organizing that the central global divide is between democracies and autocracies. By convening democracies as a self-identified group, the Summit attempted to build a coordinating mechanism for democratic governance issues that the universal UN system could not host because of its inclusive membership.
Common Criticisms
Critics raised several concerns: the criteria for invitation were inconsistent (some backsliding democracies were invited, others excluded), the actual deliverables were modest relative to the rhetoric, and the framing risked dividing the world into camps in ways that might harm rather than help democratic resilience globally.
Future Uncertainty
The Summit's future under different administrations is uncertain — the is closely identified with the Biden Doctrine. A successor administration could quietly let the Summit lapse, replace it with a different framing, or continue it.
Real-World Examples
The 2023 South Korea Summit included substantive workstreams on anti-corruption and information integrity. The 2024 Summit focused on AI governance for democracies. Country commitments under the Year of Action have included specific reforms in Moldova, Ecuador, Ukraine, and others, though follow-through has been uneven.
Comparison With Other Democracy Forums
The Summit operates alongside other democracy-promotion frameworks: the Community of Democracies (founded 2000 in Warsaw), the OSCE's democratic-governance work, the Partnership (founded 2011), and various regional democracy frameworks. The Summit's distinctive feature was leader-level convening with explicit country commitments — a level of political profile and accountability the other forums had not achieved at the same scale.
Example
The first Summit for Democracy's deliberate exclusion of Hungary while inviting Poland (under the populist PiS government at the time) signaled the political difficulty of consistent democratic-backsliding criteria.