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Author Anne Applebaum.Maciej Zienkiewicz/Supplied
- Title: Autocracy, Inc.
- Author: Anne Applebaum
- Genre: Non-Fiction
- Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
- Pages: 224
Nearly a decade ago, in 2015, the American sociologist Larry Diamond warned that the world was living through a democratic recession – and had been for nearly a decade. Last year, he argued we’re still in one.
In a 2023 talk, Diamond argued that a mere 43 countries with a population above one million were democracies, which represents a significant drop of roughly 20 points since 2006. While the world is fixated on Donald Trump and the United States – indeed a story for democratic decline and a slide toward autocracy – self-government is under threat in parts of Asia (notably, in India), sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe.
With the rise of right-wing reactionary politics, affordability crises, inequality and the stagnation or decline of the welfare state, democracies are doing a poor job of defending themselves. It’s against the backdrop of democratic decline that Anne Applebaum has written Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World – a book she dedicates to “the optimists.”
Applebaum argues that contemporary autocracies bear little resemblance to the “cartoon image” we have of them in our mind of a lone strong man atop a police state.
“Nowadays,” she writes, “autocracies are run not by one bad guy but by sophisticated networks relying on kleptocratic financial structures, a complex of security services – military, paramilitary, police – and technological experts who provide surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation.”
Autocracy, Inc. offers a valuable account of contemporary disinformation, particularly, the technologies, tactics and networks that make it an effective tool in shaping domestic and foreign politics. While it’s an effective and dangerous tool for autocracies, disinformation is also no doubt a tool used by Western states, producing a transformed battlefield. It’s a kind of struggle by other means between, and among, democracies and autocracies.
Autocracies are, by nature, enemies of democracy and vice versa, Applebaum argues, suggesting “the enemy is us.” Nonetheless, the existence of autocracies and their success is bound up with the democratic world – or what one might more precisely label the liberal world. Our institutions and wealthiest denizens often aid and abet, wittingly or unwittingly, autocrats or quasi-autocrats, including Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Alexander Lukashenko in Belarus, Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela, Xi Jinping in China or Narendra Modi in India.
Setting aside her individual assessments of states, her insight into the particularities of these operations and their interconnectedness is the most compelling and valuable part of Applebaum’s book. That’s especially so when coupled with her critique of 1990s and 2000s democratic optimism about the future, the idea that free trade and technology (what we ought to call technocracy) would deliver global utopia.
In a book that runs short on pages for its subject’s complexity – 176 pages of text in the hardbound edition – Applebaum recounts the strategies and tactics of Autocracy, Inc. These amount to a sophisticated series of financial, technological, military and police operations at home and abroad. Autocracy, Inc.’s swift pacing makes it accessible but leaves on the table deeper discussions of the claim we’ve entered a new Cold War. Applebaum rejects this assertion and the idea that realist conceptions of international geopolitics explain the moment.
Where Applebaum raises critiques of democracies complicit in the rise and success of autocrats, including the United States, she doesn’t spend nearly enough time tracing the historical or institutional roots of contemporary autocracy, nor the role the U.S. and other Western democracies have played in shaping, for the worse, global affairs since the end of the Second World War.
It is globalized finance and globalized capitalism that have helped autocracy to rise and flourish, systems whose centres are found in New York, London and Frankfurt, rather than Moscow, Beijing or Caracas. And while Applebaum mentions global tech giants, there is plenty more to be said about how Western tech companies have enabled autocrats in the past and how some still do.
As Applebaum writes, “when Americans condemn Russia, Ukrainian, or post-Soviet corruption, they rarely reckon with the role their fellow citizens have played, or are still playing, in enabling it.” Autocracy, Inc. features several instances of incisive self-awareness and critique of the West, but one might expect more.
One might expect more to be said about how past and present colonialism has shaped, or misshaped, institutions in the developing world. And one might expect, beyond a passing mention of the U.S. torturing those the country euphemistically labelled “enemy combatants,” a more thorough look at the long 20th century’s proxy wars, coups, spying, propaganda and extrajudicial assassinations carried out, or instigated, by America and its allies.
The Manichaean framing of Autocracy, Inc. – autocracies versus democracies – distracts from its insights, from Applebaum’s deep journalistic work of connecting the dots and explaining who’s who in the autocratic world. In that sense, the book would have benefitted from being exponentially longer and broader or shorter and narrower in scope. But this book will no doubt encourage the conversation to continue.