Autocracies around the world have become increasingly mutually reinforcing in their competition with democratic societies, Pulitzer Prize winning U.S. journalist and historian Anne Applebaum said in an interview with Current Time.
"Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe, Azerbaijan, and Angola don't have a common ideology," Applebaum said. "But they have places where they can cooperate and common interests. And some of their interests are financial."
"The Chinese invest in autocratic regimes all over the world and help prop them up," she added. "The Russians do the same…. They offer mercenaries to dictators in Africa who are in trouble. They look for areas where they have something in common and where they can help one another."
"They don't need a common ideology to do that," Applebaum said.
In her new book, Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want To Rule The World, Applebaum writes that such governments are undergirded by "sophisticated networks composed of kleptocratic financial structures, surveillance technologies, and professional propagandists, all of which cooperate across multiple regimes," the book argues, according to the author's website.
Applebaum told Current Time this is a fundamental difference from the geopolitical situation in the 20th century, "when there was a thing called the communist bloc and they all used the same language…and they even had very similar political and social systems."
Despite the lack of a centralizing ideology, the world's autocracies share a "common enemy," she noted.
"The common enemy is…anybody who lives in the democratic world and anybody who uses the language of democracy…of human rights, transparency, accountability, the rule of law, justice," Applebaum said. "That language is threatening to them and, of course, it is most threatening to them when it comes from their own opposition movements and their own internal critics and…dissidents."
In addition, freed from ideology, modern authoritarian regimes have much greater scope to influence political and social developments in open societies.
"Authoritarian propaganda can now reach people in the United States in a way that communist propaganda could not," Applebaum said. "The money that autocratic states have gives them a kind of power that, again, the Soviet Union never had, whether it's to invest as investors, whether it's to buy influence among politicians or…the business community, whether its even in the form of dark money to fund political campaigns."
"All those things give them more tools to influence the internal debates and political conversations of democracies, as well as their economies, than they used to have," she added.
Media outlets like the Kremlin's RT network, Applebaum added, "turned out to be good at…crafting an authoritarian narrative that described autocracies as safe and secure and stable, and democracies as divided, chaotic, and degenerate."
"And some version of that, in millions of forms, is now available on the Internet," she said. "And that…chimed with a part of the American political spectrum that is…feeling disgruntled, that doesn't like social change, demographic change, economic change, and political change over the last couple of decades and is seeking to reverse it."
Authoritarian regimes did not cause the "backlash against democracy" in the United States and other democratic countries, "but they helped give it language," she said. "They make existing divisions deeper."
Nonetheless, these regimes understand that democratic values and language remain in demand. In Venezuela, for instance, people have taken to the streets to call for transparency, justice, and the rule of law despite the country's "really ugly dictatorship."
"People want to live in a society where there's rule of law, where judges are real judges," Applebaum told Current Time, a Russian-language TV and digital network run by RFE/RL. "I think you can see this in a lot of places. It's about the innate appeal of the idea of living in a more fair society where citizens have some influence."
"I think this one of the reasons why the autocratic world has, if you will, rearmed itself or has girded itself against the democratic world in a much more dramatic way than it did two decades ago," Applebaum said.
