This platform was born from my passion for political writing and democracy, for telling the stories of those who make it, and for bridging between my two homes – America and Eastern Europe.
I believe words matter, they can create and build, or undermine and destroy. We live in a time when the challenges to democracy, and the liberal world as we know it, come from words and weapons equally, through disinformation, conspiracy theories, fake news, and false narratives literally turned into political violence or used to justify war. We see such threats everywhere, we monitor them, yet they are spreading with unprecedented velocity, polluting the communication environment.
As someone born in a former communist country, Romania, who grew up during the transition to democracy and served in all the main political institutions in Romania, I know how living under a dictatorship looks like, how hard it is to build a democratic system, and how easy democracy can be threatened. After a couple of decades of Romanian experience, I am now fortunate enough to have lived in Washington DC for a few years and to have acquired at least some experience with the American democracy as well. Working as a Romanian diplomat in DC allowed me to interact with American institutions and insiders and see their perspectives.
I assert there is a significant gap of information, understanding, and thorough analysis in Romania about what is going on in America. Very often I get questions about American politics or society from friends, former colleagues, and even politicians in Romania. Not rarely such questions reveal how the information about American politics can get distorted or taken out of context.
At the same time, despite existing research and growing interest from academics and politicians, Eastern Europe remains for many Americans a distant region. The historical context of Eastern Europe and the experience of having lived under the communist dictatorship can be explained and understood, but rarely fully gotten by someone born in freedom.
I created this platform to being to close these gaps, and I am bringing to it my personal views sourced both by my academic background and my practical experience.
I believe a well-informed public is less susceptible to manipulation and offers less fertile ground for conspiracy theories, populism and extremism.
Consider “Democracy Debates” a simple tool for a multi-faceted purpose: to make American politics more available to the Romanian and Eastern European public and understanding Eastern Europe more enticing to the American readers, through providing informed opinions, in-depth analysis, and reliable research.
At the end of 2021, at the Summit for Democracy, President Biden called the defense of democracy “the defining challenge of our time,” and the Summit inaugurated “the year of action” in implementing at all levels the commitments to democracy. “Democracy Debates” is my contribution to the “year of action” and, I believe, to the many “years of action” to come in defending, strengthening, promoting, and expanding democracy.
