Introducing Our Blog: Why International Principles Matter Abroad and at Home

What you learn from promoting well established international principles and practices around the world is that the United States, despite being one of the oldest democracies in the world, often fails to live up to them. We know that because we spent decades promoting them around the world.

Sometimes it worked, such as when we helped prop up civil society in Eastern Europe.  More often, it did not, such as when we tried to democratize Somalia from our heavily guarded compounds or eradicate poppy in Afghanistan while disrupting its substance agriculture markets with aid.

Every so often, we would try to test some of the same practices at home, with surprising results. Such as when the US would send its own citizens to join international organizations observing elections abroad and then threaten to arrest observers from the same organizations if they tried to do the same in the US.

But back then international election observation in the US was more of an academic exercise and a learning experience – maybe a foreign policy tool to say that we would accept the observation missions we demanded of others.  It was not intended as a serious effort to help American election organizers, or render a neutral assessment of elections, or to prevent potential violence, as it was abroad. As a mature democracy, we relied on our strong state institutions and checks and balances.

Most of my colleagues and students will remember me sharing my favorite example about how, when the Supreme Court decided the 2000 election, one half of American electorate accepted the decision despite not agreeing with it and “tanks did not roll into the streets,” as my boss at the time put it. Twenty years later, I tried to argue again that another institution, the police, again played a key role in preventing the violence from escalating in January 2021, which may not have happened in less developed democracies. That argument was less well received as people became truly concerned about developments in the US, but it was true that state institutions held, however tenuously.

That now seems like lazy overconfidence.  As our civic space has closed and democracy deteriorated also in the United States, finding a way to rediscover our civic culture and apply international principles and practices becomes urgent at home.

This is why a group of us launched Civic Hub US -- to promote awareness and application of some of the best international practices in democracy around the world domestically, and more specifically, to generate civic interest and action as an alternative to highly polarized politics.

We are launching this blog to discuss some of those democracy buff ideas and get your thoughts. Many of us have already been let go, with our industry all but shut down. This provides fertile ground for a very honest discussion about how things worked, what we could have done differently, and how we should have paid more attention to such stuff at home. We start with four main topics.

In Democracy in America we discuss international democratic principles and practices as applied, or not, in the US. Want to know more about those international observer arrests (which started much before the first Trump Administration)? Stay with us and check it out in the coming days.

In How USAID Should Have Been Reformed we will collect ideas about what we would have changed at USAID before abruptly shutting it down. As we gather stories and substantive ideas for reform from thousands of closed projects, we also discuss them on our blog in very simple and open terms. We all know that there was a lot to fix, and we should not allow our sadness and defensiveness about the chaotic last few months to get in the way of thinking through what we got wrong and right.  We may occasionally entertain you by asking you to help us translate some of the phrases we used that an ordinary person, or even our local partners or a development professional without specific USAID experience would have found hard to understand.

In From the Ailing Heart of Democracy we share what’s happening in DC, where most of us are based. Outside the mainstream media, we hope to provide you with a direct glimpse of how neighborhoods are reacting and check in from DC events, which includes protests these days.

And we may occasionally share an interesting idea related to our more technical work that we can’t let go, such as continuing to support adaptation of Voting Technologies and other ways for improving the organization of elections in the US and around the world.