Democracy as a Moral Principle

All right, good evening, everybody.

My name is Kevin Maloney, and I serve as Chief Public Affairs Officer here at Carnegie Council.

So I'm honored to welcome you all to the latest convening in the Council's Values and Interests event series, which aims to interrogate the relationship between morality and power in the practice of geopolitics.

So tonight's fireside chat will feature Carnegie Council President Joel Rosenthal in conversation with Freedom House CEO Jamie Fly.

So Jamie recently joined Freedom House after a multi-decade career working across the foreign policy, democracy, and humanitarian spaces, where he served as CEO of Radio Free Europe, held leadership roles at the German Marshall Fund, and worked within the George W. Bush

administration at the National Security Council.

So before passing the program over to Joel, because we're at Carnegie Council, I wanted to provide a bit of an ethical framing for tonight's conversation.

So I want to share a short quote from Nobel laureate Amartya Sen from his 1999 article, Democracy as a Universal Value.

So in the piece, Dr. Sen asked, quote, what is a universal value? For a value to be considered universal, must it have the consent of everyone? If that were indeed necessary, then the category of universal values might well be empty.

I would argue that universal consent is not required for something to be a universal value.

Rather, the claim of a universal value is that people anywhere may have reason to see it as valuable." So in these words, I think Dr.

Sen offers a very apt question and a claim to be interrogated, I think, in this transitionary moment of geopolitics and in our conversation here at Carnegie Council.

And with that, I'm going to pass

the program over to Joel.

Thank you, Kevin.

What a great way to start our new season.

And you can never miss by quoting Amartya Sen.

And thank you also for arranging all of this.

And I like the title.

And I hope this will make your speaking engagement here special, Democracy as a Moral Principle, to distinguish it from many other opportunities you might have.

to speak on this topic.

So thank you all for coming.

Jamie, thank you for coming all the way to New York to do this with us.

And I thought I would start, we're gonna start a little bit lofty, as Kevin cued us to, and then we'll move into some more specifics.

But I know that Freedom House is celebrating its 85th.

Maybe you could talk a little bit about this.

What I'm interested in is the concept of freedom and how it was being used and mobilized and empowered in 1941.

And maybe talk a little bit about that sort of origin moment, but then if you could sort of link it to where we are in 2026, how you think about that evolution and making it

you know,

meet the moment, if you will, today.

So with that easy question, I'm going to hand it to you for some remarks.