The Dictators Who Want to Run the World, with Anne Applebaum (Part 1)

thank you thank you very much indeed thank you very much indeed and welcome to this fabulous venue um uh I'll just run through if I could the structure of the evening before we get going um and that is that an and I will chat for about an hour and then you and she will chat for about half an hour we'll see how the timings go yeah we'll see how the timings go I should say an is convinced that if she and I talk for an hour there'll be people sloping out the back so it's up to you to stay in your seats please um I'm not going to do a long introduction of an apple Bal you obviously know who she is otherwise you wouldn't have come here tonight um the list of books is long the list of awards is very long uh we're here particularly to discuss her new book uh autocracy Inc um which is sitting high up on bestseller lists and I think it's fair to say um although we will be discussing it it walks handin hand with her previous book Twilight of democracy um it can get a bit gloomy at times in appleb land um but there is also lots of Hope and lots of provocative thought as well um a quick point about questions at the end a question has a rising intonation at the end a statement does not and we are looking for questions for an and I will um ask for clumps of questions when they come there are also people watching at home um and or at their offices or anywhere it might be online um please put your questions in as well I have a screen in front of me I will try and uh take as many of them as I can um and the very last thing is if you do see me at any point squinting horribly at my page it's because I've I've annotated it with my terrible handwriting it's not that I've got bored of anything that you or an is saying I'm just trying to work out what my brilliant question should be um let us uh kick off now as I say um we'll have a chat for about an hour and then we will uh go into questions from the audience both here and online and finally uh just to reiterate and we'll be signing books at the end up here on the stage um so do stick around for that if you so desire let's start off um and with the big picture of the book that you have written um you had a a big idea behind the book explain it if you would to the audience so first of all thank you all so much for coming um for filling this amazing Church um uh makes me feel more important than I am I think um the book describes a a network it's not an alliance it's not an AIS it's a network of countries of governments who work together uh for for their for for transactional reasons um it is not United by ideology so it includes communist China nationalist Russia um Theocratic Iran bolivarian socialist Venezuela uh North Korea and a handful of of other countries um who don't share a common vision of the world who don't believe they're building the same kind of society um but who do have a set of common interests um these are all countries that are autocracies I use that word specifically uh be precisely because they're all so different they have different titles and different names but these are all countries whose leaders feel they should be able to rule without checks and balances without without transparency without the rule of law they control all the levers of power in their societies either as individuals or as political parties or as in a couple of cases small groups of Elites uh and they and they object strongly to people who think they should be more closely examined or they should be or they should be um U blocked um they and towards that end they push back against opposition inside their own countries but increasingly they also push back against the language of democracy the language of Rights and the language of transparency around the world and so maybe I can sum it up by saying they they don't necessarily have the same goal but they have the same enemy and the enemy is us you um pretty much everybody in this room uh people who live in the Democratic world I try not to use the word West in the book because I think it's broader than that and also I would like to include the Democratic oppositions um in in those countries anybody who speaks about rights who speaks about transparency who speaks about the rule of law these are the people who they need to push back against um physically militarily but also ideologically and in other ways and that's the that's really the cause that knits them together is it is it fair to say the difference between the autocrats that you're looking at now and the autocracies of the 20th century is that word network that you used I think it's the word I mean obviously there have been autocratic alliances before um I think it's a network of as I said ideologically dissimilar uh dissimilar uh regimes although it's there's there are a few other things they have that are different too so mostly we're talking about very very wealthy people we're talking about billionaires um previous generations of dictators didn't have you know se you know billions in secret bank accounts and property all over the world or not many of them did um that you know so they have a they have a global reach and a set of global context they also have a an access to technology that is new so they have both surveillance technology obviously and maybe we can talk about that a little bit more um they they have they have common methods of doing propaganda of using the internet they collaborate actually on their propaganda sometimes just by imitation and sometimes deliberately and so they have they have technological means of reaching people that I don't think prior Generations did so so those things make them a little bit different and they through their networks reinforce each other in various different ways yes I mean the the and this is a they're also interested in one another's fate in a in in a very precise way I mean actually the best I I talk about this a little bit in the book but one of the best examples and it happens to be a current example is Venezuela so Venezuela is a country that was the richest country in South America is now the poorest probably produces more refugees than Ukraine um it it h it has all kinds of Natural Resources oil and so on but it has a government that has that is led by a group of people who would prefer to see their country join the category of failed States rather than to give up power um they probably should have fallen years ago it's very unpopular government um it's so unpopular that they're now as I understand it very nervous about the the the the lower levels of the army whether the Army is is loyal anymore um but nevertheless it's remained in power and one of the one of the most important reasons it's remained in power is because it has the Venezuelan regime has had weapons from Russia it has had investment from China from Chinese Chinese companies into into Venezuelan State companies and state linked companies um it's had the secret police reinforcements from Cuba um and it's even had this is I think one of the most interesting relationships on the planet um it has a very close and intense relationship with Iran and if you think about it why should a left-wing populist government in Venezuela have a close relationship to a theocracy in Iran they have nothing to do with one another historically culturally geographically or any other way but they do have a really important common interest and that's evading sanctions um and they have helped one another evade sanctions the um Iranians have helped the Venezuelans with oil and gas technology Venezuelans in turn have we we believe have offered visas and other kinds of documents to Hezbollah activists so that they can travel in Europe I mean they've they've found a realm of common cause that that turns out to be very important and so as a as a group you can say that autocracy Inc has kept Venezuela going it's probably kept belus going I mean you can point to it I I write in the book about Zimbabwe but you could point to some other other other weaker autocracies who've been booed by this by this network um you write in the book nobody's democracy is safe um when you look around the world do you see specific countri countes teetering or do you is that an argument more broadly that the idea of democracy is being eaten from the from the bottom so I think it's important to understand that that no democracy is ever safe you know there's no such thing as a as a as a political system that's guaranteed to last forever that's just that's not how politics work and when you look at people you I mean for example when you look at the founders of the US the people who wrote the US Constitution they didn't think democ y was guaranteed you know the in fact our the the very somewhat bizarre US Constitution the Electoral College all of our complicated voting systems a lot of that was put into place as a guarantee against the demagogue whom they imagined would eventually arise to try to upset the system uh of course they their imagination was based on their reading of classical literature they were thinking about Caesar and they imagined somebody like Caesar coming along and so they put in these checks that's what the checks and balances were for that was what the uh that's what the Electoral College was for not that it ever worked that way or not that it serves that function anymore but you know obviously the purpose was not so that Michigan gets to decide who wins who wins the presidential election you know or that every year most campaign money is spent in Georgia that wasn't in the mind of the of the of the author of The Constitution um but but but that the over the last several decades C since the second world war but even more so since the end of the Cold War um we in our societies have been so fortunate and so lucky and so relatively prosperous and so relatively stable I mean we can all point to ups and downs in the last few decades um that I think we've forgotten that no nothing is is is guaranteed you know the there's no curve of historical inevitability um you know everything that happens tomorrow depends on what people do today and so it's it's just useful once in a while to remember that that that so I so by the way I don't think it's inevitable that dictatorship wins but neither is it inevitable that democracy wins we did think there was an inevitable curve and back in the '90s we did we did well there seemed to be a sort of progress there's even actually there's even this is too this is too much detail to go into there's even a there was a theory in political science if you've had a certain number of free elections then you'll be you will be um you'll be a democracy forever ever and there was also as you say and I this I write about a little bit in the book this burst of confidence in the 9s when there was a huge wave of democratization not just in Europe which is probably what people here remember most but in Latin America and and around the world uh you know uh the fall of Communism inspired a um you know wave of democratic Transitions and it and it it felt to many people like this was inevitable and there's the famous Frank fukuyama uh end of History the thesis which he says was written the wrong way and no everybody misinterpreted it and actually I heard him recently at an event and somebody asked him something about the end of History this book he wrote 30 years ago and he said I'm asked that question twice a week I've been answering it twice a week for 30 years I can do it again tonight you know or you could give me a break and but but the reason why his essay on the end of History was so popular and was so was swept up I think it's because it's what people wanted to believe and somehow it felt like it could be true and everybody wants to think we live in the best of all possible worlds we live in the best possible Society sooner or later everybody will want to be like us and that's I think that sense of inevitability also allowed us to be irresponsible in a way I mean if we're always going to be a democracy and there's nothing really you have to do to keep you know keep it going or participate you know then you can get on with life you can go and make money or paint paintings or write books and you don't have to worry about politics because there's a class of politicians and they'll deal with it and it's not you don't have to participate and I think that was a that was a dangerous assumption so it was that assumption that I think eventually got us into trouble we let a lot of things happen by roote Allied to walking alongside that theory that democracy was the sort of inevitable end point for much of civilization was the thought that if you traded with autocracies they would become bound up with your economic way of life but also your political way of life and you you you write of this very early in the book and it runs throughout the book you think that that was pretty heavily ingrained in the western way of thinking about so here's here's I mean I want to be fair to the 1990s so so people in that you know in the 1990s and and and and and even earlier people particularly Europeans had had this experience so after the second world war you know there were economic deals done first between France and Germany then the European Union was created and so on and so on and their experience was that economic integration leads to some political integration eventually to peace and prosperity and so on and and it was true and it worked uh and in the in the in the 90s that began to happen to Central Europe as well and you could argue that Poland and the Czech Republic and so on also that trade and economic links helped to tie them to to the rest of Europe you know so it wasn't it wasn't that it was it was crazy um it and and also I should say I should add another thing which is that many people in Russia thought that or hoped that they wanted also these economic links to lead eventually to political integration and maybe the democratization of Russia and you can find people who believe that in China as well so it wasn't just like something we imagined um there was however a clear moment after which it was is no longer true and it began to be in my view it was much earlier in Russia than people thought when it was became clear that the the Russian Elite the Russian as we started calling them oligarchs um were taking advantage of trade as a way of you know they they the essential model for gaining power this is how Putin came to power was through stealing money from the state laundering it through Western financial institutions bringing it back to Russia and then using it to win influence and power and we we I mean I'm not sure there was that much we could do about it but we um but we I mean um but we we let it happen we assumed it was okay we turned a blind eye we let them use Western institutions and that was part of what um we know was it was it was part of of course what created the the system that we have now in Russia and it was also what created a lot of cynicism about the language we were using at the same time and I had the reason I learned this from the Russian opposition you the Russian opposition say you all talk about human rights and democracy but you you know you're enriching these guys and you let them buy houses in London using you know Anonymous companies you know why um so that was a that there were there was a moment after which the it was becoming clear that the trade was not creating I don't know Mutual Mutual integration but it was instead building up a very toxic regime um there the story argument in China is a little bit different but you can also say that there and and this I think the business Community has already reached this conclusion um that the there was a moment after which it it was unclear who was benefiting most and you know was this creating political integration or was it simply enriching a Chinese Communist party that had I don't know had had um not not 100% friendly feelings about us you um specifically detailed the agreement to build gas pipelines shipping Russian gas into uh Central and Western Europe uh providing it relatively cheaply to Western Europe again that was seen clearly as one way of drawing Russia in it was seen as a very reliable supplier up to a certain point um do you see it as an attempt to make the West dependent upon Russia so it's a very it's very funny when you look back in this in the history of the gas pipeline it's a very weird story I mean it starts in a the first meetings between it was West German and Austrian um industrialists and what was the sort of the Soviet Ministry of gas kind of people was in a hapsburg hunting lodge and they you know they and at the time there were still you know Russian and American soldiers looking at each other across the wall in Berlin um the Russians had only just recently left Vienna a few years earlier so it was a very weird moment to be talking about pipelines um but it's also clear that from the very beginning there were aside from there the economic benefits and there were some I mean the gas was much cheaper and the the pipeline technology was better than it had been and it was you know very important for German development in particular but also the rest of Europe to have the have the gas but it was pretty clear from the beginning that there were big political interests on both sides that were slightly different so the West Germans um there were a series of West German leaders famously Billy Brun who believed that if we build these pipelines this will be a solid economic interest that will keep us linked and it will and it will prevent War I mean you know and we won't go to war because we'll have these big economic interests so from the beginning he wanted there to be more pipelines and more he wanted this dependency um what the Soviet Union wanted is probably also dependent on who was in in charge at the time but I think they you know they they also saw that there could be a political gain from having this adventage and of course Americans from the very beginning worried that that was the real purpose of it that there was a some interest in in in in blackmail um but what was never really resolved at the time was this weird morality I mean on the one hand at that time this the Soviet Union was locking up dissidents um sponsoring terrorist movements in Europe uh you know um you know creating havoc in various ways and at the same time the the it wasn't just West Germany West Germany the Netherlands lots of other countries who benefited from the pipelines were effectively supporting the Soviet state and keeping it going through buying gas and nobody really worked it out I mean there was a kind of everybody stepped away and said that's a very interesting problem and no one really debated it and some people questioned it as I said lots of American presidents worried about it but then as the you know when the Soviet Union came to an end it was almost like that even that debate just disappeared and everybody said right you know we'll trade with them and we'll have democracy it was almost as if the that ambiguous early era was was forgotten and then when the trading relationship built and built in what you might call the new era of autocracy you see money pouring through places like the city of London um and again you write about this um and you say it may be time to make make the very wealthy choose between autocracy and democracy and when we're talking about very wealthy we're talking about um law firms accountancy firms reputation management firms public relations this this gamut of people who have serviced autocrats and their helpers do you believe that is realistic that this very important sector of society could be made to choose well I mean you know we decide what the rules are I mean the you know we created the world in which money laundering is you know happen is in effect happening we C we allowed the existence of anonymous companies and anonymously purchase properties we you know we created the legal system around the offshore world we can decre I mean it's not like these things are natural you know it's not like they are volcanoes or natural rock formations that can't be moved I mean there they creations of the law and of and of of you know of of of our own customs and so we can decre them and actually we're moving in that direction already it's beginning to happen I mean complicated but uh you know it's a we we it's almost I mean we allowed these things to emerge and they became natural in part of the landscape and maybe there's a moment where we say right why you know why do we need this why why is it why is that legal why why is there one world in which people have to obey the law and you know most financial institutions are highly regulated and they worry all the time about transparency issues and they you know the you know the they they they have compliance officers and lawyers who who you know and yet there is this alternate world that exists alongside where people don't don't worry about it or they seek to avoid it or you know the the point of what they're doing is to avoid not just avoid tax but to hide money or Channel drug money or Channel stolen money and and and we've we we effectively have allowed that to happen when you've been looking at crude phrase democracy versus autocracy do you think now autocracies have got better than democracy in responding to all their environmental challenges and critically cooperating they are no I mean we still manage to cooperate in lots of ways I mean it's not that they're better it's that they um you know they've learned some things from us so you know they learned how to use globalization to their advantage I mean for example you know that that the internet is now a global conversation and it's you know you can intervene in it just as well from St Petersburg as you can from from I don't know Plymouth um so it's a it's a you know they've you know they've they've begun to understand some things and I think they there are some ways in which and this is the jury is still add on this but there's some forms of modern technology that are working to their advantage to obviously surveillance technology if they if they you know it's the Chinese really who've mastered that um could work in their interest um you know and it's really incumbent upon us to think about how to make that kind of Technology compatible with democracy and that's not just surveillance technology but the internet more broadly as well do you think the autocrats themselves this generation I don't know autocrats 2. not are are cleverer than the ones of the last century I mean some of them are very clever and some of them are very stupid I mean you know there's a there's a also I mean look at look at what kind of regimes we're talking when anybody who says autocracy is better has to explain to me why Zimbabwe and Venezuela sure um are better than you know I don't know their you know any of their neighbors I mean um the you know the autocracies are in some ways as economically as different from one another as democracies are too um also just to be clear the book isn't an argument that there are two camps and that the two camps sit on opposite sides of some metaphorical Berlin Wall you the the argument is that there are um there are a lot of mixed countries there are a lot of illiberal democracies there are autocracies that are you know that aren't seeking to undermine the west by you know you can you can look at the Arab world monarchies you could also look at Vietnam which is a country that is not a clearly not a democracy but is also not particularly interested in undermining um America or Europe in fact is I think hoping to trade more with us I mean so there's a there's a range of countries the book is and and the and the solution or the answers to the um to the to the you know the Dilemma created by this network is not some kind of new Cold War I don't believe in that at all I think what we should be doing is looking not at particular autocracies you know as as our enemies I mean that just serves no purpose um but looking rather at autocratic behaviors you know the anti-transpirant in some cases in you know in the case of of you know of the war in Ukraine um you know the use of the illegal use of violence and force I mean we could look at those behaviors and think about how to counter them and some of those behaviors are here I mean they're in London or they're in Washington or they're in Paris so so it's more about thinking about how do we change those things rather than so I I'm not calling for us to go to war with China just to be clear so but you are to some degree calling on go the West democracies whatever you want the Democratic world phras to try and counter The Narrative that is put forward by autocratic networks and it begs the question about why you think autocracies have become so interested in the narrative and in shaping opin in the this is this is this is they've said they've told us I mean this is um both particularly China and Russia have become very clear about the I about the the need to defeat what they see as the ideas coming from our part of the world there's a there's a marvelous document that was produced in China in 2013 By the Chinese Communist party and it has this great name and it's called document number nine and it lists you know the The Perils facing the Chinese Communist party and number one it's 2013 number one is Western constitutional democracy and also on the list are the ideas about Free Press there's something about Civic engagement there are series of of of ideas and practices that are that are considered to be very dangerous to Chinese communism and this was this is because the again these are the ideas that if they were to be put into practice you couldn't have a onep party state or you couldn't have one that rules opaquely and and and so they it's you know they began to see this set of ideas as a threat to them and partly it's a it's a threat because it's the language that their own opposition uses so that's the language of the Hong Kong democracy movement or the naldi movement or the women's movement in Iran you know or or you know the Venezuelan opposition you know which is very very well organized and very articulate you know that that's the language that threatens them and so they began to see this as a problem around about the same time this is when uh in 2014 After the revolution in Ukraine the you remember what that looked like this is the revolution in maidon of 2014 this was a popular Uprising that was calling for anti-corruption laws and for joining the European Union by which they meant joining the world of rule of law um it was it wound up scaring the protin DI you know he was a kind of illiberal President of Ukraine it wound up scaring him he ran away from the country you know and then the mob came and sacked his Palace which was full of gold Taps and ostriches and so on you that was Putin's Nightmare and that's what he's afraid of you know and there had been remember there had been a few years early in 2011 there had been a you know kind of popular anti-corruption movement in taking hold in Moscow too so he saw that and he thought right that is the thing that threatens me and that and it was the mo that movement in Ukraine that he identifies with Ukraine by the way it's part of his I think it's a part of the reason why he's fighting the current war that first you know that was the inspiration for the first invasion of Crimea and then for a series of illiberal and worse crackdowns that happened in Russia in the in the year afterwards so they begin to see this language and the possibility of popular Uprising as a as a threat to them and their particular form of power so on on the one hand you have the the risk of importing these dangerous ideas like freedom of speech freedom of Association but the other part of the Nar control of the narrative is also about undermining um democracy undermining the countries I mean and there is you know dozens of examples there is also there's talk about uh a specific attempt to stir up trouble during the recent disorder here in Britain as well um again what is the goal there do you think of autocracies or an autocracy in in trying to undermine so we don't see it this way so we I imagine most people in this room don't wake up in the morning and worry about Putin right we don't worry about Russia you know we don't think about China we don't imag we don't think of them as our enemies or as a threat there are people in Moscow and Beijing who wake up in the morning and worry about us you know they think that the ideas coming from our part of the world could be a threat to them and so they think about how to undermine um you know how to undermine the not just the narratives democracy but actual democracies how to create chaos how to disrupt elections how to support the far right or sometimes the farle how to pump up extremism how to encourage rioting how to encourage protest because anytime we look bad for whatever reason they you know that gives them extra points so they have a in a way they have a they really have just one narrative that matters and then everything else kind of circulates around it and that is you know they want us they want their own populations to be to believe that autocracy is stable and safe and will keep you protected from from change and democracy is violent and dangerous and divisive and you don't want that it's in a way they you know particularly this was particularly a problem for Putin so most Russians until fairly recently thought of themselves as Europeans I mean they they part of European culture and the you know the tolto spoke French and so on um and and so it's been very important for Putin to say no you know Europe is dangerous and and degenerate by which he means sexually degenerate and you know you don't want any part of that divided ugly divisive place you know we have a different separate different kind of culture and so towards that end I mean if there there was a I think this is cited in the book it's one of my favorite political science studies ever was a uh and there not that many that are this much fun but there was a there was I think they they were estonians they did a survey of Russian television and they HED it over a period of time and looked at every single on on two or three of the channels every single news item about Europe and and repeatedly over and over again it was about immigrants murdering people it was about social workers taking away your children it was about I don't know you know homosexuals taking over you know the schooling system I me some of it was true some of it was exaggerated some of it was entirely made up but the idea was to show that democracy is unstable and dangerous and so on so anytime they can poison the idea of democracy at home that's good for them and increasingly it's their it's it's their interest to weaken us as well and if they can weaken us politically then they won't have to fight us militarily so if you you know Putin can win the war in Ukraine just by sewing narratives about you know whether it's Ukraine fatigue or you know or the inevitability of Russian Victory if they can convince us of that then they don't have to win on the battlefield and so they you know it's just much cheaper so they you know they invest um they invest a lot of time thinking about how to do that how do you create you know how do you create instability how do you create u a pro-russian sentiment and and so on and so on