Ferenc Laczó reviews Anne Applebaum, Autocracy Inc. The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, New York: Doubleday, 2024
Anne Applebaum – a liberal conservative historian and journalist with an impressive catalogue of publications and exceptionally wide reach – may have recently distanced herself from her former right-wing allies. However, her new Autocracy Inc. displays more than the occasional penchant for Manichean perspectives. Autocracies, she asserts at one point, “want to create a global system that benefits thieves, criminals, dictators, and the perpetrators of mass murder” (p. 159).
What makes this an even more acute problem is that such actors have come to believe that they are winning and have therefore become greatly emboldened, Applebaum explains. It is not only that they are ready to offer each other financial help and security cooperation. They have also developed a sense of impunity and, according to the author, “feel no shame about the use of open brutality” either (p. 6).
The core concerns of Autocracy Inc. correspond with these striking observations: to explore where that disturbing autocratic belief in superiority came from and why it persists, how (in an admittedly less Manichean mode) the democratic world may have helped consolidate it, and how it could battle and defeat it now (p. 17).
To fulfil those ambitious promises, Anne Applebaum offers a series of sobering essays that develop a number of interconnected theses. She concurs with recent diagnoses – such as Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman’s on what they label spin dictators – that autocracies have become savvier and tend to be run by “sophisticated networks” these days. At the same time, hers is a harder and more realistic interpretation than what the concept of spin dictatorship allows. Autocracies these days rely on “kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services – military, paramilitary, police – and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation,” she writes (p. 1).
Applebaum hastens to add that such regimes do not operate like a bloc. They are much more transactional and alliances between them often shift. Their rulers may in fact variously call themselves communists, monarchists, nationalists, and theocrats, and structure much of their collaboration as for-profit ventures.
The most appropriate way to think about their networks may indeed be as an agglomeration of companies – as Autocracy Inc. –, so the key thesis of the volume (p. 3).
That in turn generates common interests, of course, and leads to the bundling of military and financial aid for struggling partners; Applebaum writes of a “regime survival package” in this context that combine propaganda, surveillance technology, economic aid, and actual weapons (p. 120).
It is an intriguing suggestion that the global autocratic network may function much like an agglomeration of companies these days. However, despite its valuable insights into the transformation of politics in countries like Russia, Venezuela or Zimbabwe, Autocracy Inc. offers surprisingly sparse descriptions of the network it posits – who exactly are the key actors and what type of influence have they exerted; who cooperates with whom in what precise manner; and how has their network expanded over time are key questions that remain insufficiently analyzed on these pages.
A central point in the book is that autocrats do not simply attempt to smear pro-democracy activists these days but to “poison” ideas that people would otherwise be “naturally drawn to,” as Applebaum puts it – such as human rights, democracy, or freedom (p. 73).
This implies an offensive autocratic plan that connects the idea of democracy with degeneracy, instability, even chaos, often proceeds via manipulation of strong emotions about gender and religion, and aims to induce people to be more skeptical, passive, or even cynical, she explains.
In this context, Autocracy Inc. discusses lavishly funded Chinese efforts to buy or influence media and elite audiences around the world and diagnoses a slow convergence of Chinese and Russian propaganda tactics and practices of “information laundering” (p. 94). These pages of the book amount to a characteristically fluent and precise, if not particularly inventive summary of relevant trends. What is conspicuously absent from them though is any explicit discussion of race and racism – the book in fact mentions the word “race” only once and does so to refer to the Moscow electoral race of 2013 (p. 34).
Where Autocracy Inc. convinces less, unexpectedly enough, is when Applebaum suggests historical contrasts. She writes, for instance, that “In the twentieth century, Stalin’s regime successfully smeared Trotsky as a traitor and spy, and in the 1930s and 1940s Stalin arrested tens of thousands of other people as Trotsky-sympathizing traitors. But modern autocratic regimes go one step further, for they need to smear not just their opponents but their ideas” (p. 134). Such an exaggeration of our grave current predicament must strike us as somewhat strange, especially coming from someone who has written widely reputed books – Gulag: A History from 2003; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956 from 2012; Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine from 2017 – on that cruel despotism. I was certainly left wondering: do modern autocrats really go further than Stalinists did? Didn’t the latter also openly smear the – “shallow” and “self-serving” – ideas of their opponents?
The just cited remark may well be a relatively minor point in the book, but it seems to me indicative of how a sense of urgency is crafted here at the expense of more substantial historical comparisons and insights. This in turn reflects a wider journalistic tendency to oppose past and present in rather facile ways and exaggerate the novelty of our current malaise.
Applebaum’s book also explains, much more persuasively, how autocratic actors hope to rewrite the rules of the international system. As she perceptively notes, they wish to remove the language of democracy as well as references to political and human rights from international institutions and would prefer to replace them by seemingly dull and unthreatening ideas such as the right to development, sovereignty in a multipolar world, or mutual respect between countries and cultures. They try to project a quasi-legal appearance even as they export lawlessness across their borders, she rightly emphasizes.
Despite the author’s recurrent use of Manichean rhetoric, Autocracy Inc. is depicted on these pages not just as a network within and between autocratic countries but as one that reaches deep into democracies as well. What we see these days is not merely a rather traditional, if fierce geopolitical competition, the book argues. After all, autocracies clearly view the democratic world as their implacable enemy (pp. 10-11). Notwithstanding that, the international situation does not amount to a Cold War 2.0 either, Applebaum underlines (p. 2, pp. 157-58).
What may be more characteristic of our age is a strange blending of the autocratic and democratic worlds, she explains in one of the book’s more nuanced passages, where the direction of influence increasingly often runs from the former towards the latter (p. 149).
The division between democratic and autocratic forces therefore runs inside countries now and many regimes do not easily fit into either category, she points out (p. 158).
Autocracy Inc. elaborates on two major factors that have resulted in such blending: a heavy dose of democratic naivety and Western amorality. Applebaum critiques here that excessive confidence was placed in the efficacy of trade and the benefits of diplomacy after 1989 – to the extent that the point of having harder-edged policies was nearly forgotten, she claims. Optimistic expectations that economic innovation and political empowerment would go hand in hand were widely shared too: if there was naivety about the beneficial role of interdependence, there was even more concerning the democratizing role of new technologies, she rightly complains. She is also correct to point out that even when the economic impact of open borders on Western markets were discussed, hardly anyone spoke about the political impact on Western democracies (p. 27).
Applebaum complements her critique of such liberal blind spots and illusions with noting just how deeply enmeshed the financial community has become with the autocratic world. The arcane world of kleptocracy has connected milieux, such as that of the KGB with its long expertise in money laundering, and the equally cynical, amoral world of international finance, she asserts in a polemical passage (p. 32).
Even more than the liberal democratic credulity of previous decades, it is the enabling role of actors in democratic countries – institutions, companies, lawyers, and politicians who facilitated corrupt schemes, profited from them, or covered them up – that would need to be urgently reckoned with, Autocracy Inc. suggests.
What Anne Applebaum therefore propagates is a “war against autocratic behaviors” (p. 159). She presents two key dimensions of that test of strength: the need to develop and institutionalize an “international anticorruption alliance” (p. 163), one that would restore transparency to the international financial system as well as anticipate and halt lawless behavior, and – second – the pursuit of a fight for “evidence-based conversations” (p. 166) that would go well beyond swift fact-checking and demonstrate how such a fight leads to tangible improvements.
The latter agenda implies, more specifically, that people should be able to directly influence their algorithms and would finally get to own their online data too. A crucial political goal of democrats, Applebaum perceptively adds, should be to break autocrats’ monopoly on the use of strong emotions. Through centering the values of transparency, accountability, liberty, and fairness and restoring a free marketplace of ideas Autocracy Inc. can still be stopped, Anne Applebaum concludes in her familiar – urging and assertive – voice.
If the dedication of Autocracy Inc. reads “For the optimists,” its contents remind me much more of warnings though.
Democracies are inherently fragile and have been weakened from within and without. Committing to their defense has now become existential, the book’s arguments aim to persuade us. And that remarkable combination of stark, at times downright Manichean rhetoric with a calm and confident tone may well be a key reason behind the book’s wide appeal.
They may be winning right now but we can sure still win, Applebaum seems to be saying.
There is a catch in all this though. Tellingly, Applebaum at one point evokes “the democratic world” – such as “the West,” NATO, the European Union, and the internal democratic opponents of autocrats – and “the liberal ideas that inspire all of them” (p. 10). Reducing democracy to liberalism implies a clear choice, of course. It determines which problems are highlighted on these pages and what kind of solutions are proposed.
To take just two examples: Tax havens are rightly critiqued, however, the broader and more crucial questions of inequality and redistribution remain unaddressed. Second, autocratic propaganda is dissected effectively, but the simplified depictions and vulgar sensationalism in mainstream media outlets of numerous democratic countries – which result from our current “inattention economy” fostered and exploited by monopolistic tech companies – do not merit a parallel discussion.
Yes, we do need a truly free marketplace of ideas and a much more effective anticorruption alliance.
However, the dramatic negative trends Autocracy Inc. identifies may well have more general – and therefore even more worrisome – causes than the rise of corrupt and now openly cruel autocrats and the long-standing, notorious amorality of international finance.
Anne Applebaum suggests early in the book that the goal dictators pursue with ruthless determination is to preserve their personal wealth and power, whereas they are disinterested in creating prosperity or enhancing their citizens’ well-being (p. 7). Could it not be that the global trend we need to urgently confront these days has more to do with leading autocracies – a repressive and increasingly heavy-handed China, most importantly – having performed rather exceptionally in the latter regard during recent decades while liberal democracies have become socioeconomically much more polarized without substantially enhancing the well-being of their proverbial “average citizen”?
Those committed to the defense of democracies certainly need more convincing stories why autocratic threats should worry us all and Anne Applebaum’s new book has relevant insights to offer in this regard. However, the ability of democracies to truly convince ultimately hinges on them delivering more beneficial and equitable results.
