Daphne Chouliaraki Milner

To start, could you share what motivated you to write Autocracy, Inc.?

Anne Applebaum

This book was the result of a series of conversations I’ve had over several years with democracy activists who work in Russia, in Zimbabwe, in Iran. Many of them I’ve known for a long time. A few years ago, I became aware that the tactics that they were using, like organizing and offering counter-narratives, tactics that used to work and used to be effective, were today less effective. Even when they were very popular—for example, the Venezuelan opposition is very popular, the Iranian opposition is popular—they weren’t able to win or have much effect on their regimes.

The reason was because they were no longer fighting a single dictator or a single autocratic government. They were fighting a network. If you’re fighting the dictator of Belarus, that means he’s backed by the Russians, and he has business deals with China, and he has support in the United Nations from Cuba. This network that they’ve created as a group is stronger than any one of them is alone. I also began to understand the degree to which this group of countries is trying to affect politics and conversations in the democratic world as well. Although there’s a lot that’s written about each one of these countries individually, I felt that as a group, they hadn’t been properly analyzed and identified. That was the purpose of the book.

Daphne

You just touched on the fact that—though there have always been autocracies—today, these regimes are changing shape alongside the relationship between autocratic and democratic states, which is also shapeshifting. How so? And what are the risks that this change entails?

Anne

The most important thing about the group of countries that I’m most focused on, unlike for example the Eastern Bloc during the Cold War, is that they are not linked by ideology. These are transactional states, and they’re very often run by people whose main interest is their own power and their own money—it’s what makes them different from the most famous of the 20th century dictators. They work together when it’s in their interest. Usually they have common financial interests, and they are also engaged in a common war of ideas. Because the one thing they agree about is that they don’t like the democratic world, in the broadest possible sense. They don’t like the ideas of the rule of law. They don’t like transparency. They don’t like human rights. They don’t like any rights.

The greatest threat to them is democracy activism and the ideas that come from the democratic world because those are antithetical to their form of government. To push back against what they fear means that they first of all repress their own dissidents and their own democracy movements. But they’ve also begun to try to change conversations around the world, both in the Global South, but also in the democratic world. They want to portray themselves as stable and secure, as opposed to democracies which are divided and dangerous, by smearing the very ideas of democracy because those are the ideas that could harm them and remove them from power.

Daphne

What does this smear campaigning look like in practice?

Anne

Internally, the smear campaigning might literally mean smearing their opponents; making up stories about them; accusing them of corruption or of sexual deviance; putting them in prison; harassing them. There are different levels depending on the state.

Around the world, this story has several different versions. Sometimes, there’s a set of conspiracy theories that [the regimes] all promote, and they do this through a mostly Chinese-owned network of broadcasting, television, radio, website, and news organizations. In Russia, they do it through information laundering [via] their network of fake or false websites. They create sites that look local, but are in fact either run from Moscow or are heavily influenced from Moscow. What’s interesting is that, on these different networks, they promote many of the same ideas: that democracy is divided, degenerate, chaotic; that the Russians are going to win the war in Ukraine, that dictatorships are strong and stable, and that they offer security and guarantees.

What’s new is their collaboration. [These regimes] had set up very different ways of promoting their propaganda. And now, very often, their propaganda overlaps as does the language they use. This is not just in Russia and China, but also in countries like Mali, like the Central African Republic. The convergence of these narratives, and the ways in which their stories create a kind of echo chamber, has today also created an echo inside the United States and inside many European countries. That’s new.

Daphne

What are the social justice implications of widespread information laundering? What challenges does that pose to the organizations and movements within these societies that are working to protect the most vulnerable populations?

Anne

The main target is what we call civil society. Both China and Russia have, in official documents and in public statements, identified social movements and spontaneously organized groups (protests or organizations) as their main enemy. In 2013, there was a Chinese Communist Party document that was published that listed the seven perils of the Chinese Communist Party. Number one was Western constitutional democracy. But the equivalent of civil society was on that list as well.

What [these regimes] are afraid of is spontaneously organized groups; people who can work together. Their aim is to alienate people, to separate people, to atomize people, to make people apathetic, to make them afraid to participate in politics. And they use those tactics firstly on their own populations. But increasingly, you see it around the world. And of course, you see autocratic actors in U.S. politics and in European politics doing the same—using the same tactics and the same strategies.

Daphne

And what are the climate implications of autocracies? How do you see the relationship between autocratic governance and environmental degradation?

Anne

To begin with, many of the most virulent and aggressive autocracies are oil states, for example, Russia, Iran, Venezuela. China also controls enormous quantities of natural resources, including coal and much else. Their elites depend on these natural resources for their own personal finance, and in some cases, they depend on it for the financing of their political parties, movements or their states. They are not interested in restraining or controlling production in any way. In many cases, the people who run modern autocracies have gotten rich because either they, their companies, their friends or sometimes their families, have a symbiotic relationship with the state—and often that means with natural resources companies.

The classic example is Gazprom, a company that is in effect both a private company (in that its main beneficiaries are Russians who work at very high levels in the state apparatus) and it’s a state company (in that it carries out Russian foreign policy, but it does so for the benefit of the ruling elite). This means that the interests of Gazprom and the interests of Putin and the people around him are identical.

Historically, environmental damage and pollution were often the source of a lot of spontaneous organizing. This is true to this day. In Russia, a very powerful and important environmental movement arose around a forest near Moscow, which was in danger of being cut down. And that created a lot of local activism; people who were involved in anti-pollution protests or climate movements sometimes organized in reaction to or in objection to environmental damage. For states that dislike civic organization and organized mass movements, this is very dangerous.

The target of state propaganda, and sometimes state harassment, is very often these kinds of groups. Environmentalists are dangerous to autocracies in the same way that democracy activists are: because they represent something spontaneous; because they’re not under the control of the state; because they don’t have the interests of the ruling clique in mind. They’re a challenge to the power and the system of control.

Daphne

Are international environmental laws and governance effective in holding these specific autocratic regimes accountable?

Anne

It’s not a monolithic picture. In some cases, [these regimes] have some fears about climate change themselves. In China, they’re afraid of how it will affect the country, and so the state may itself have some interest in pushing for climate [policy]. They have also invested pretty heavily in solar panels and electric car technology.

But if I were going to make one generalization, I would say that none of these countries feel particularly obligated to international law. They’re not very interested in legitimizing it. They push back against it in different forms, including the old United Nations charter against international organizations that use the language of human rights. Some [autocratic] regimes, for their own reasons, might have an interest in stopping or being part of a global movement against climate change. They have different interests here, but if your question is about law, they’re not very interested in it.

Daphne

Many would argue that some western democracies are gradually adopting far-right positions on issues like migration and the climate—as the recent EU elections showed. How does this shift towards the normalization of far-right ideas, rhetoric, and policies complicate or undermine the democratic position on autocracies?

Anne

It’s very hard to generalize because the situation in particular countries is different. 

For example: the argument about immigration in Poland, a country I know very well, is mostly theoretical. There is a specific problem to do with the Belarusian border—an artificial migrant crisis created by the Belarusian and Russian governments, who import people from the Middle East and push them across the border. The Polish government’s insistence on standing up against that is because they see it as a national security issue. That’s different from the Hungarian government, which has used a fake migrant crisis to create fear and anxiety among the Hungarian population and fueled a wave of anti-Muslim panic that helps the far right. That’s different again from the US, which has a genuine border issue. The system isn’t designed to process or help the numbers of people who arrive every day. This has created both a humanitarian and a political crisis.

The dangerous game is to go along with the far-right’s demonization of migrants. The rhetoric of, “these are murderers and rapists and they’re here to kill us, and they come from an alien culture,” is dangerous because it turns them into hate figures. And sometimes you get a nod to that from center-right or even other kinds of political parties in Europe. This is going down a very dangerous, slippery slope because it normalizes the idea that you should hate people who are different from you. That’s different from saying we have a particular kind of crisis—like a humanitarian—at our border and we need to prevent it.

Generally speaking, I think center-right political parties who have tried to mimic or imitate far-right rhetoric have lost. The Tory Party in the UK, which was challenged by the far right, tried to adopt and steal their language to make themselves sound appealing to the far right. That was a disaster. It was a political disaster. It was a policy disaster. It was a mess. I very much hope the new government will come up with different answers.

Daphne

There is no prospect in sight that autocracies are going to be diminished. In fact, by 2019, dictatorships outnumbered democracies—and there’s research to show that the majority of the world today live under a dictatorship. But should the rise of autocracies be contained? If so, how?

Anne

There is no magic wand. I can’t give you a formula. In my book, I talk about reforming our own laws on money laundering; on anonymous companies and anonymous purchases of property in order to push back against kleptocracy. Leaders of the autocratic world steal and then they hide their money in London property or New York apartments. There’s no reason we should tolerate this. 

There are projects that the democratic world can do together. We need to develop a better conversation about social media and social media regulations—I don’t mean censorship, but transparency. We need to make algorithms more transparent. And we need to give people more choice by creating alternatives to the current social media platforms that are more compatible with democracy and with civilized debate—not shouting and division.

More generally, we need to understand that there is a network, and that the network needs to be tackled as a whole. And I think [we should be thinking about] the deeper links between democracy and transparency activists with people who care about climate change. They are on the same side. They are fighting the same regimes and the same propaganda, and there is much that can be done [through collaboration]. The anti-autocracy and the anti-climate change movement should absolutely be working together.