*Autocracy, Inc.*, Anne Applebaum (podcast 1/3 )

Podcast Transcript

In the past intellectuals had clear names for threats to human liberty. The founding fathers fought against monarchy. World War II was fought against fascism. The Cold War Era was opposed to Communism. These days we know old names no longer fit, but we haven’t decided on a new one. If you listen to this podcast, you’ve probably heard a few attempts to describe contemporary autocrats from Spin Dictators to Populists to 4P Autocrats to Kleptocrats.

Recently, Anne Applebaum gave them a new name when she gave the annual Seymour Martin Lipset Lecture. She calls them Autocracy, Inc. Autocracy, Inc recognizes how today’s autocrats have significant differences. Many find it natural to believe they have nothing in common at all. But too often we see them working together whether it involves Iran supplying drones to Russia or Russia investing in Venezuelan oil. Anne thinks Autocracy, Inc helps us understand their common interests and why they cooperate to challenge democracy and human rights.

Anne Applebaum doesn’t really need an introduction. She is a staff writer at The Atlantic and a Pulitzer-prize winning historian. Some of her books include Gulag: A History, Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine, and most recently Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.

Our conversation explores the motivations for Autocracy, Inc and how the West should respond. We also touch on the themes of her last book such as why some people find authoritarianism attractive. She also shares some of her thoughts on the state of democracy in Poland as they approach new elections in October.

If you enjoy this episode, please consider becoming a monthly donor on Patreon or a premium subscriber on Apple Podcasts. It’s doesn’t need to be a big commitment. For just $5/month you can access a growing catalog of bonus episodes and listen to new episodes early and ad-free. The most recent bonus episode features Scott Mainwaring in a conversation about the legendary political scientist Juan Linz. There is a link in the show notes to connect on Patreon. You can also provide a one-time donation on the website. Like always you can send questions or comments to jkempf@democracyparadox.com. But for now… This is my conversation with Anne Applebaum…

jmk

So, first of all, thanks. Yes, you're right. I've used it a couple of times and it's perhaps the title of my next book if I ever have time to write it. I've been very distracted by the War in Ukraine. I was really looking for a metaphor that describes the relationships between countries like Russia, China, Iran, Venezuela, and Belarus, because these are not traditional ideological alliances. These are not countries that have anything in common. Nationalist Russia and Theocratic Iran and Maoist China and Bolivarian Venezuela, and, I don't know, Collective Farm Boss Belarus don't share common texts. They don't share common ideas of what is a good society. They don't have a common foreign policy. They have a very, very different sense of the world.

But they do have one common interest, which is all of them have the same political domestic interest in crushing or restraining their own democratic opposition. That is one of the ways in which they now cooperate internationally. They have a common interest in crushing democracy activism wherever it appears. They dislike the language of democracy. They dislike the language of human rights. They push back against it in the UN and they even seem willing to help one another crush their respective movements. So, you saw the Russian very open interference in Belarus in 2020 when the Belarussian opposition looked very close to winning. The Russians sent in reinforcements. Not just, I should say, police reinforcements, but also Russian journalists to run Belarussian state media to do the propaganda differently.

I should also say the thing that makes them like companies is that their relationships are very transactional. So, they don't have historic friendships based on some deep, long sense of… I mean, what is the historic relationship between Iran and Venezuela? I mean, none. They're not necessarily traditional allies or regional allies either. Of course, they have certain kinds of interests in common, so they have similar ways of using, for example, the Western financial system to launder money to keep themselves in power, to export money out of their countries, keep it in various places and then import it back. It's not an accident that Russian, Chinese, Venezuelan, and frankly lots of African and other oligarchs all own apartments in London. They all use the same accountants. They use the same banks and the same techniques.

There are a lot of things and tactics that they share, even if they don't share an ideology. So, that seemed to me less like a Cold War style alliance and more like something different. I came up with Autocracy Inc. because it seemed like the best description of that.

So, there's a history to that and the history is perfectly logical, I should say, from that point of view. At the time, the theory of how we would relate to the autocratic world that emerges in the early 1990s is that through trade and through contacts and through extensive diplomatic relations, but especially through trade, we would have an impact on that world. I mean, some of it was classic, if we buy and sell things from them then we won't go to war with them. Some of it went a little bit farther than that. I mean, there was an idea that building pipelines between Germany and Russia would eventually lead to positive political change in Russia. There was an idea that American trade with China would, if not make China a democracy, then at least make it a more open society.

In fact, actually it did. I mean, trade and capitalism did make China a more open society. It just didn't make it friendlier towards us. In particular, the changes there in the last few years have made that even more difficult. But the idea that US companies or European companies could happily trade with the autocratic world and that in the course of doing so they would not only make money, but eventually would open up those societies was very widespread and accepted. I've just been doing some research on it and it really only began to become clear in the last few years that that was wrong and that in fact trade with China empowered the Chinese state, partly through the fact that many of the companies we were trading with were in effect state companies or they were controlled by the state.

Even more so in Russia where all of the large natural resource companies are either directly state owned or they're owned by oligarchs who somehow owe their fortunes to the state. So, in effect, we were trading with the Russian government when we're trading with Russian companies. The private companies that we were working with weren't really private companies.

I think in the first instance, it had the effect of making the business class to become much more cynical. All the people who were doing clandestine, or not even clandestine, I mean legal, but dodgy deals with the Russians in particular in the 2000s had some of that rub off. Perhaps the most famous example is Donald Trump. One of his children has said that much of the investment into their properties, the purchasing of properties, which of course could be done anonymously in most countries. Anonymous companies can buy apartments in luxury buildings. So, one of the Trump children has said that most of that business came from Russians.

So, the knowledge that people were stealing money and buying properties in your building and doing so somehow legally or quasi-legally had a corrupting effect on the American property market, certainly on the London property market, probably on the property market in the south of France and a few other places. I think the same thing can be said of banks and bankers. I mean, as it became clear that the really big money that was sloshing around was Russian or Chinese or even sort of Malaysian or Angolan and it was coming from people who had gotten it semi-legally or even illegally, I think that created a lot of cynicism in the financial markets and eventually that seeped into politics. The experience of constant interaction between the business community and those places had the effect of making them more cynical about our own legal system.

Secondly, of course, the fact that we now live in a global information space where everybody has access to everybody else. I think we discounted what the impact of that would be. I mean, the famous story again is the use of Russian propaganda in the 2016 election or the use of bots and divisive polarizing messaging. But actually, they do it everywhere and it's also been copied everywhere. The Russian style of campaigning which is to create fake groups that pretend to be more radical than they are on either one side or the other and all that. That's now copied and imitated by all kinds of political parties in democracies too. That way of thinking and campaigning, you know, the kind of cynicism about democracy and the cynicism about the ease of manipulation had an impact on us as well.

You could go down a number of roads - surveillance technology. I mean, Israel's not usually classified as a classic western democracy, but it is actually Israeli technology that autocrats and actually some illiberal democrats around the world are putting onto people's cell phones. This is the famous Pegasus software. There was a scandal about it in Poland where the government put it on the phones of the opposition. You know, it's been used in Mexico. It's been used in Greece. It's been used in lots of other places. This is a kind of spyware that was originally, supposedly created to defeat terrorists and maybe it does do that, but it turns out that you can also use it to spy on your political opponents. So, the range of surveillance technology that's now available…

Of course, the Chinese make and manufacture their own surveillance technology, but they also sell it. We know that they sell it to places like Zimbabwe. How much of it they sell in the Democratic world, we might not know yet, but we might soon discover that there's more than we think.

So, it depends on what you mean. We would have to break that down, but if you mean purely kleptocratic money, the banking market in London, the accountants, the lawyers, the real estate industry in London are all profoundly shaped by kleptocratic money and they in turn have some influence on politics. I mean, London is also the political capital as well as the financial capital. The presence of that kind of money has undoubtedly shaped British politics. So, if you want just that one example, I think that's one of the most famous ones.

You know, I used to think that in the US the amount of money sloshing around the system was so enormous that the tiny amount, relatively speaking, that Russian oligarchs could contribute was pretty small. But then on the margins, the Russian investment in the NRA, which wasn't really just a financial investment, they had people who were trying to be close to the NRA and so on. There may, of course, be more money than we know, because it may go through other people and so on. Maybe that made a big difference - I don't know - in the NRAs ability to continue operating and to be actually one of the most successful lobbying organizations of all time.

Little bits of money, for example, the loans made to Marine Le Penn in the previous French electoral cycle seemed to have been able to keep her in politics when other French banks wouldn't lend her money. There's another example. I don't think that was millions and billions of dollars, but it was a small loan and it kept her in the game. So, I don't know that you need billionaire type money to be influential. It depends on how you pay, where you pay it, and where you use it.

There are a lot of marginal people and groups and lobbyists and so on who don't cost very much to persuade like American think tanks. You don't need to invest very much money in them to get them to do a paper that's to your liking. There are some famous examples of that. So, I'm not sure that you need that much money in order to have a political impact.

Yeah, that's definitely true. I mean, mom and pop grocery stores are not evidence of kleptocracy. But you can pinpoint some sectors. Particularly the entertainment industry is really interesting. In the case of Hollywood, it turns out to be very important for big blockbuster movies to sell them in China and that's shaped a little bit the way that Hollywood makes movies. So, all those action movies with not very much dialogue. I mean, those are aimed at international markets, especially the Chinese market, which is of course the biggest. It turns out that the Chinese mind very much if they're the villains in these movies, so nobody makes movies with Chinese villains and that's why. The subject matter is chosen with Chinese tastes and the Chinese government influence in mind. Nobody wants to be boycotted by China.

The same is true of one or two important sports. The famous one is the NBA example, which I think is in my original Atlantic cover story article that you were quoting before where an NBA official made a positive comment about Hong Kong. So, the Chinese government responded… This is about the Hong Kong democracy movement. The Chinese government responded by banning some NBA games and he had to apologize. So, the amount of money that the NBA can make apparently from Chinese television and from Chinese franchises is enough to mean that the NBA censors itself when it talks about China. \

So, that doesn't mean that every academic in America is silenced by Chinese pressure or that journalists are, that government officials are, but the sporting institutions, Hollywood, I would guess some pop stars are affected by Chinese influence when they think about how they're going to sell themselves and what kind of language to use.

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