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as far as i understand it, nato does not have any democratic principles in its rules because was assumed that everyone in it wants the same thing, so everything needs to be done with full agreement. that's why sweden and finland were blocked from entering for multiple years, turkiye would not allow them in.
so basically, as long as the us wants to be in nato, it will be in nato. better to scrap it and start again. i propose the name na2.
Clever, but I don't see why it should be limited to North Atlantic countries.
If for instance Australia and South Korea want to join, that should be an option.
I think we should go with GDI, Global Defence Initiative
Meanwhile US creates the GWI
You mean the Brotherhood of Nod
because it's full of yes men?
doesn't necessarily need to be short for North Atlantic, could be Not America's no. 2
Eurovision 2
What if China wants to join? Or Russia? What would be the policy?
the policy shoud be "this is union of democratic countries"
And who decides which countries are democratic and which are not?
we have the whole field of expertise for that, we call it the political science. and no one with more than 2 brain cells thinks china or russia are democratic countries.
So having 2 braincells should be a policy then!
that would be necessary, not sufficient condition.
I doubt political scientists in China agree with, say, German political scientists' definition of democracy. What supranational organization will decide which country's political scientists are correct?
I could perfectly well argue that France isn't Democratic. The majority of the population voted for a leftist coalition that is being blocked by the president of the republic from being elected, and Macron has already skipped the democratic will of the people by declaring emergency measures to pass antidemocratic legislation such as the increase of retirement age.
In Greece, when a leftist government (Syriza) was elected around 2010 after the huge economic crisis around a platform of reviewing the state debt and democratically decided on referendum to do so, the European Central Bank threatened with dropping its obligations towards Greece and forced neoliberal austerity policy.
In Berlin, the people democratically voted through direct referendum for a cap to rent prices, and shortly after the highest court of Germany declared it illegal and rent prices were uncapped again (despite economic studies of the policy results in its limited lifespan prove it was effective in lowering rent pricing).
In Spain (my homeland), when a leftist party (Podemos) was getting ranked 3rd in the country by polls and was on trend to overtake the socialdemocrats (PSOE), an illegal police operation directed from the ministry of internal affairs fabricated false evidence of funding of said leftist party from Venezuela and Iran and leaked these falsified police reports to all media before the elections, which destroyed the popularity of the party.
I gotta say, being a leftist in Europe, it doesn't feel democratic at all that all the choice we have is to vote once every four years the colour of the party that will impose neoliberal austerity policy and raise military expenditure (all countries in the EU do this)
No serious political scientist claims democracy is a matter of ideology or “who feels represented.” There is broad cross-national agreement on procedural criteria: competitive elections, universal suffrage, freedom of association and expression, independent courts, civilian control of the military, and peaceful transfer of power. Chinese or Russian academics may reject these standards, but that doesn’t make them arbitrary—just inconvenient for regimes that fail to meet them. There’s no need for a supranational authority to decide this any more than there is one for physics; standards emerge from scholarly consensus and empirical comparison.
Second, pointing out abuses and contradictions inside democracies doesn’t negate their democratic character. What you describe in France, Greece, Germany, and Spain are are events happening within constitutional systems, not the absence of those systems. Courts overturn referenda because constitutions limit majority rule; executives misuse emergency powers; police and media manipulate narratives. That is democracy functioning badly, not democracy not existing.
The decisive distinction is whether these actions can be challenged, exposed, reversed, and punished. In Europe, governments lose elections, courts rule against executives, journalists investigate police misconduct, and opposition parties—leftist ones included—can recover and return. In Russia, journalists, opposition politicians, and anti‑corruption activists don’t lose court cases; they lose their freedom, their lives, or very famously, fall out of windows.
That is the difference between democracy and dictatorship, comrade.
This simply isn't true, ask Cuban political scientists or Chinese ones or Vietnamese ones.
Argument from the majority. By that logic, Taylor Swift objectively makes the best music in the planet, and Jazz isn't real music.
Ridiculous comparison. Political sciences are not a hard science, and different political systems give rise to different interpretations. The fact is that this "broad cross-national agreement" is rejected by many, many scholars, particularly Marxist ones, with Marxist political scientists describing the western system as "bourgeois democracy", meaning that despite suffrage once every four years, the outcomes are functionally the same as if only the 10% wealthiest voted. This is serious criticism based on empirical studies (such as likelihood of laws to pass based on what percentage of the population agree with them by income), and you cannot simply disregard it as "it's not the consensus".
Macron is president and won't go to jail, the ECB is still operative and no bureaucrat will go to jail for destroying the Greek economy, nobody has gone to jail in Spain for tampering with democracy and fabricating false evidence from within the police, and the judges in the highest court of Germany won't go to jail.
The fact that you aren't aware of these things happening in Europe or the USA doesn't mean they don't happen. You could look up the cases of Rita Barberá or Miguel Blesa, both higher ups of the conservative party in Spain (PP) who died in mysterious circumstances shortly before going to trial, or Fabra winning the lottery 3 or 4 times. Ask the Catalonian pro-independence politicians if there is democracy and political freedom in Spain, with many of them enjailed or fleeing the country as political refugees. Ask Julian Assange or Edward Snowden about freedom in western "democracies".
Lol why are they ableist again?
In Romania, they declared a candidate illegal.
Putin has higher approval ratings than any western leader. Chinese people are happier with their level of democracy than any country in the west.
Our countries are extremely corrupt with elections fully determined by Zionism, CIA and oligarchy, with parliaments/congress providing 0 useful bills of any kind, including avoiding popularly requested freedoms.
An empirical definition of democracy, as best fit, is nations with performative elections that result in a winner that is in full agreement with US foreign policy.
The cognitive dissonance of popular discontent within US's NATO colonies is that because the US is a directly stated enemy intent on destroying them, they would be far more advantaged to be in an alliance with Russia and China, and to contain the US, instead of finding the most extreme way of subjugating themselves harder to the US.
you are joking, right? a dictator who falsifies elections and statistics has good "approval ratings", oh wow, we should abandon democracy immediately and opt in for a dictatorship, must be so sweet!
of course comrade.
In Estonia they also recently determined a decade in jail for a few pro-Russian politicians. Not saying that necessarily that's a bad thing, those are just right wing ghouls, my problem is more why those same mechanisms aren't used against our autoctonous far-right
The standard for NATO has always been to only accept democracies.
I see no reason why we would change that requirement for a new alliance.
I'd even go so far as to make respect of human rights a demand too like we have in EU, so we for instance exclude countries with death penalty.
There needs to be common values that we want to protect, with NATO it was democracy, based on our experience with USA, we need to extend that to include respect for international law and human rights as well as protecting democracy.
As defined by whom exactly? Chinese citizens will tell you that they're in a democracy and very satisfied with it, much more so than Spaniards for example (my homeland)
EU is literally funding the genocide of Palestinians with 0 economic or political sanctions to Israel coming from governments. By that logic, all of EU deserves out of NATO immediately. NATO also triggered the Libyan civil war through bombing, bombed Yugoslavia, and many NATO countries directly participated in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.
LOL, how silly.
Russia and China are democracies - they have systems of voting, candidates, politicians fall in and out of favor with the public, etc. In fact, China is innovating on how to get MORE participatory systems into their Republic that aren't limited to gerrymandered popularity tests.
But human rights? You're joking, right? Guantanamo Bay. Extraordinary rendition. Abu Ghraib. Vietnam. Cambodia. Laos. Guam. School of the Americas. Iran-Contra. Overthrowing the Shah. Operation Paperclip. Operation Gladio. CIA black sites. Drone striking weddings. Drone striking funerals for people who died at those weddings. Zero Units. Napalm. Agent Orange. Land mines. Somalia. Libya. Iraq. Afghanistan. Kidnapping a head of state. Double tapping fishermen. Spying on all communications of their own citizens. The Five Eyes spying on each other's citizens and trading the intel back to each other.
You think respect for human rights is required for NATO membership? Do you know what NATO has even done?
No they are not, they are authoritarian regimes that oppress any political competition through censorship, imprisonment and even death. Just like we've seen with Navalny and Jack Ma. Try to look up tiananmen square in China. Or just ask a Chinese AI about it, it won't tell you anything.
You are a complete idiot, and I really mean literal idiot for calling those 2 countries democracies, there are clearly standards for what constitute a democracy, and Russia and China are not in any way within those standards. Free press and freedom of expression without threat of persecution by the government is a requirement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Democracy_Index
Democracy is not just about being allowed to vote for the dear leader, there has to be ability to participate in the whole political process without being oppressed.
Now you are just being stupid again, I said it shout be EXTENDED to human rights if we make a NATO replacement without USA, which we obviously can't do now while USA is a member, because USA nolonger even pretend to observe human rights.
Don't bother responding. I have blocked you, your points are moronic, and I don't want to ever read anything from you again.
Get off the meth for christ sake.
So then America isn't a democracy because it persecuted Assange, Snowden, Manning, and many many others over its long history, right?
Because it outlawed the communist party and persecuted every single person in every industry that was associated with the communists, black listing them and ending entire careers let alone lives, right?
Oh wait, you blocked me. Nevermind
2na2to
Keep the name and call it NATO: Nations Against Trump Organization
I propose the name that @DaddleDew@lemmy.world proposed
A new NATO with blackjack and hookers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-making
Consensus is far more democratic than majority rule, which is the norm in most Western democracies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority
only if all actors are working in good faith.
How about nay2? Thst way, when it comes to the unavoidable acoustical misunderstandings, it's also the answer to what's talked about.