Conference Seeks to Advance Democracy as a Global Issue

When the leaders of 35 nations met in Helsinki 25 years ago to sign the Final Act of the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, many observers saw the document mainly as confirming the Soviet Union’s domination of Eastern Europe.

But the agreement reached at the Helsinki conference also pledged signatories to observe basic human rights. As the years went by, those promises took on a life of their own, eventually contributing mightily to the collapse of communism, first in Moscow’s satellites and then in the Soviet Union itself.

Now, a ministerial-level conference to be held Monday and Tuesday here in the Polish capital aims to do for democracy what Helsinki did for human rights: place the issue firmly on the international agenda as a legitimate topic of diplomatic discussion.

Today, even countries such as China claim to respect human rights: They simply argue that freedom from hunger, for example, is a more important right than free speech. But foreign demands that China become more democratic are fended off as improper interference in its internal affairs.

Although the Soviet Union participated in the 1975 Helsinki conference, China and other nondemocratic states will be absent from the Warsaw gathering. Organizers say the logic of the process, which will be launched by more than 100 countries in Warsaw, is not to condemn by name those who weren’t invited but rather to create an exclusive club that they eventually will want to join.

“I would be more than happy and delighted to see China and Iraq entering the democratic community,” said Polish Foreign Minister Bronislaw Geremek. “But this entrance fee [of adherence to basic democratic standards] must be paid. There is nothing like a free lunch.”

The plan is for the meeting to be the first in a series of conferences to be held in different countries every two years, under the theme “Toward a Community of Democracies.”

Between conferences there will be stronger attempts to coordinate the efforts of democratic countries in the United Nations and “all other international organizations,” Geremek said.

“We think that a positive line of thinking should be our point of departure, indicating that democracy is an opportunity,” Geremek said. “I do not think that any particular charges should be voiced during this conference.”

At some level, however, the conference clearly hopes to undermine dictatorships.

“We believe that solidarity of those people who are deprived of democratic rights is a matter of fact,” Geremek said.

There will be discussion of such topics as “to what extent existing dictatorships and totalitarian systems contribute to tensions worldwide,” he added. “Based on our experience, we may state that lack of democracy is an underlying reason for wars, for poverty, for conflicts springing up in various places.”

An independent but related conference of nongovernmental organizations, called the World Forum on Democracy, will be held concurrently in Warsaw, from Sunday through Tuesday. Scheduled speakers range from U.S. financier and philanthropist George Soros to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and Chinese human rights campaigner Wei Jingsheng, who is based at Columbia University.

The forum is sponsored by New York-based Freedom House and the Warsaw-based Stefan Batory Foundation, which is part of the Soros network of organizations set up to promote open societies in formerly nondemocratic states.

There will be some overlap in the activities of the two conferences, including a report from the NGO forum to the ministerial conference Tuesday morning.

“The interaction between the World Forum and the ministerial meeting will result in the highest-level international dialogue on issues of democracy ever undertaken between governments and the nongovernmental sector,” organizers of the forum said in a recent statement.

Geremek said holding the ministerial meeting in Poland is in itself an important statement.

The Warsaw conference can be “a message that a democratic system can be reinstalled in a state,” he said. “This perception is a very good message to other countries which are at the beginning of this road.”