*Autocracy, Inc.*, Anne Applebaum (podcast 2/3 )

(cont.)

what kind of language to use.

You know, I hope so because international trade is very important to our economy. But when we do so, we should do so more carefully with controls on what we export, careful evaluation of how those exports and how that trade is affecting our own companies. Some of that is happening now. There's much greater consciousness now of what it means to do deals with a state company in an autocratic state. But it would've helped to have some of that earlier. I also think more broadly there are just better rules about property and anonymous companies that would help everybody. I don’t know why anybody needs to have an anonymous company for any reason really given the amount of harm that can be done.

A lot of it is just ordinary people hiding their money in order not to pay taxes. It's not all evil people in faraway places, but putting controls on that I think would be good for the transparency and the health of the whole economy. So, there's some changes, particularly to the financial system that we could do that would restrict the ability of foreign kleptocrats to use our financial system that would actually restrict the use of American hurdles to use the American financial system. So, I would appreciate more being done in that direction too.

I wouldn't trade with them and I would caution companies that care about their reputations and even those that care about how much money they make to be very careful because obviously if you're trading with a kleptocratic company that's directly connected to the state, then there's always a political risk. I don't know. It's hard for me to imagine how we ban all trade or how technically it would be possible to restrict trade. But there are some watchdogs already. Empowering those watchdogs to watch trade with those countries in particular would be useful.

Still, I would like the people of Azerbaijan to be able to have some contact with the outside world. I would also like them to be able to sell their wheat. I don't want to end all trade, but certainly going into it with open eyes and having better monitors and better watchdogs would help a lot.

I actually dislike this idea that we're going to separate the world into democracies and autocracies, not least because it immediately creates questions around countries like India, which defines itself as a democracy which holds elections, but increasingly looks more and more like a one-party state where one party is so dominant that it can control the media and affect the civil service and the judges and so on. There are a number of countries like that, India, Turkey, much less important Hungary, but they exist out there. There are other countries that are somehow in the middle for other reasons or for historical reasons. They don't like being aligned and so I would rather not talk in those terms.

I do think that rather than having a Democracy Summit where all the democracies talk to each other, supposedly, I would rather focus on particular issues. For example, kleptocracy - there is a group of 50 countries you could get together and who could say, ‘This is harming us. This is hurting our political systems. It's bad for our financial systems. It's distorting to our property markets. What can we do about it?’ I'd rather see foreign policy focusing on those issues rather than trying to create Cold War style block politics.

I suppose the one area where this has become very sensitive and difficult is over the question of sanctions on Russia, because it would certainly help the cause of Ukraine. It would help the cause of… Actually, it's not even really about democracy. It's just about preserving borders and maintaining stability in Europe. If Russia would lose and if Russia would feel a greater economic impact from the war… One of the reasons that it doesn't is that there's a huge sanction busting operation. Truckloads of stuff going through Turkey and Georgia. The Chinese are helping them get around some of the rules on electronics and so on. It seems to me there could be better or more directed diplomacy focused on that issue.

But I'm really not interested in getting everybody who's a democracy or calls themselves one on exactly the same page on all issues. I don't think it's useful to do that. I don’t think we'll win that argument and I don't see the point of it. I would rather, as I said, create coalitions around particular problems. In the case of Russia, there's a reason why Europe is on board and that's because Europeans feel directly the security threat from Russia. Clearly, there are other countries that don't feel that security threat and so we may need a different set of arguments to convince them to go along. Those might even have to be economic arguments.

I think that's an important point about how you think about Autocracy Incorporated is that it's not something that we're defining what is Autocracy Incorporated. Rather it's something de facto. It just already exists and it's not something that they're even thinking about consciously. It's just something that they're adapting to because it's in their interests. Something you mentioned earlier about the way that Autocracy Incorporated behaves in terms of trade was in terms of creating surveillance technologies that they often export to the West, particularly China.

Do you feel that businesses in autocratic governments tend to develop different types of technology than they do in the West particularly around things like artificial intelligence? I just imagine that China's very focused on surveillance. It seems like in the United States we're focused on other types of applications. Do you see a real divide in terms of how autocratic nations try to develop new technologies and try to develop different types of industries?

So, I don't know enough about artificial intelligence to be able to give you very precise descriptions. I can only repeat what other people have said. Namely, that it's going to be very important going forward for democracies to develop a set of standards and an ethics around it and around the way it's used, which doesn't seem to be really happening yet. One of the big differences between the US and China in this area is that, in our case, it is private companies which are far ahead on this technology. In China it's a state project. So, in our case, it's a matter of regulation rather than the DNA of the projects.

My impression so far, and maybe I'm wrong, it's been my impression about technology in general, is that certainly Congress is not yet sophisticated enough or doesn't really have the advisory or the backup to successfully regulate really almost anything involving technology, certainly not social media, probably not artificial intelligence. Going forward, Congress must develop that sort of missing muscle, those missing capabilities, so developing that as well is going to be very important in maintaining it. A lot, of course, depends on do we have a president, do we have an administration, that wants to have ethical artificial intelligence? If there's a second Trump administration, I can imagine that maybe they don't. So, we'll see.

So, there is a class of people, and I'd say it's roughly a third of most countries, who are bothered by the cacophony of contradictory voices, who don't like rapid change, who are uncomfortable with whether it's social or demographic or economic or informational transformation and who dislike the openness and need to rapidly readjust that you find in the modern world. Sometimes there is a mostly economic component to this. I mean, people who've lost their jobs because of the rapid change. Sometimes there's a social component. People don't like the way social mores have changed in the last couple of decades. Sometimes people are just overwhelmed by the amount of information they receive on their phones and on their television sets.

For those people, the appeal of a single party, a single answer or single leader, homogeneity, unity, a return to some real or imagined previous era when everything was simpler and things were much more predictable… For some people, that's a very powerful feeling. I mean, I think the word the historian and writer Timothy Snyder - I was recently at an event where he was talking about the significance of predictability versus unpredictability. Autocracy often seeks to create predictability with, of course, the exception of the dictator himself, who gets to be unpredictable. But a lot of people like and prefer predictability They like and prefer people to be unified. There is an autocratic language that appeals to those people.

So, the idea that automatically everyone wants to be open and everyone wants to be outward looking and everyone wants to be constantly in touch with all different kinds of things and people and opportunities is wrong. Just as I said, there are particular types of politicians and political leaders and their propaganda who understand this and who seek to appeal to those people who are bothered by modernity. That's a bigger problem than we usually like to think about. So, most people who write for newspapers or who take part in American politics have had for a long time this fundamental assumption that democracy is automatic and everybody agrees about it and everybody wants it to go the same way.

The sort of mainstream story that we've told ourselves about democracy opening up over the past century after having been something confined to white male landowners, eventually spread to include a much broader definition of who is American and who gets to vote. We assume that's a positive story, but not everybody does. The backlash against that has taken the form of an autocratic backlash. You know, I'm not just talking about the United States. I could talk about Poland or I could talk about France or I could talk about Germany and lots of other countries where you find a percentage of people who want to hear something very different from that.

It's also important to remember that throughout human history most of the time most people have lived in autocracies. I mean, they were monarchies or they were dictatorships or they were something else. You know, democracy is very rare. It doesn't usually last very long and it's easily overthrown by demagogues who appeal to people who don't like the idea that they have to allow their political opponents to rule for four years before they get a second chance.

In a number of countries, there are now anti-democratic parties that would like to change their country's political system in order never to lose power. In some places that's become a divisive partisan issue. Yes. I wouldn't like to say it is always and everywhere, but certainly in some. Poland is a very good example where you have a ruling party that was elected completely democratically and which emerged in a democratic system. Its first election was democratic, but during its years in power, it has tried to alter the political system so that it won't lose.

That is a longer story. It's to do with altering the judiciary, altering the role of state media, which is very important in Poland. It's the media that about 30% of the country watches. It's about changing the civil service. It's about providing funding for sort of fake think tanks and NGOs. I mean, there's a whole range of things that they do and maybe moving right up to cheating and altering the election results. We don't know yet. There's an election in October, but I wouldn't be very surprised if they try and do it. But those were originally democratic parties. So, originally the battle between that party and the three or four others in the Polish system wasn't about democracy, but it has over time become about democracy. Now it is.

So, Poland can't align itself with Russia because Poland is directly threatened by the war in Ukraine and would be the next target if Russia were ever to overrun Ukraine. That's the main difference. Internally, Polish politics are as ugly as they ever were and getting worse. So, the impression created by the War in Ukraine that Poland is fighting for democracy is true up to a point. It's true that Poles are fighting for Ukraine or they're helping Ukraine and helping Ukrainian refugees. But that's partly because it's popular in Poland.

The political system is declining rapidly. At the moment, many of the leading Polish opposition figures are under criminal investigation, for example. The leader, in fact, Donald Tusk, who's the leader of the largest party, is under a completely bogus, fake investigation. So, while it's true that they're not seeking to join Russia, that doesn't mean that they've created a milder system at home. I also wonder under different circumstances, if Russia hadn't invaded Ukraine, what their policy towards Russia would be. But anyway, that's just speculation.