(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)
There are starting to be many books that deal with what we can call the end of history period, that is, the period around the end of the Cold War and a couple of decades into the future. In Scandinavia, Torbjørn Røe Isaksen has written Nobody believes in the present. (2023), while Danish Christian Bennike published at the same time with We once thought on the future (2023), and around the world, everything from The New York Times to Foreign Policy and others have asked whether liberal democracy is dead – or just very sick.
Overall, it seems as if the optimism we surrounded ourselves with in the 1990s and early 2000s was, at best, misleading and at worst, downright dangerous.
Yet few are able to explain the background to and the way in which this global intellectual upheaval has occurred as well as Anne Applebaum. Applebaum's book Autocracy Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World is a surprisingly short and impressively precise account of how the economic ties forged when Austrian and German capitalists met with a group of Soviet communists in a hunting lodge near Vienna in 1967 to discuss the possibility of shipping gas from the Soviet Union to Europe laid the foundation for a global collaboration between autocratic states that undermines the entire set of ideas and values that democracyThe system is built on. "Autocracy Inc.", in other words.
To hold on to power
"The enemy is the democratic world, the 'West', NATO, the EU, their own democratic movements, and the liberal ideas that inspire all of these," Applebaum warns in the opening chapter.
It is very difficult to argue with her. Applebaum points to the ties between countries as diverse as Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Turkey (although to a lesser extent), Zimbabwe and China. She asks what these countries actually have in common, beyond the fact that they are autocrathappen?
The core of communism was actually a promise of a better future for communist citizens.
But when ostensibly socialist internationalists like Nicolás Maduro cooperate with the clergy in Iran, it is not because they have a common ideology nor a common history. It is because they share a common goal, namely to hold on powerone for as long as possible. They have a common 'enemy', namely us, we who live in democratic countries and believe – at least in theory – in liberal values.
Serving kleptocrats
In the decades since the end of the Cold War, these autocratic regimes have developed a set of systems and methods, both economic, political and communicative, that enable them to strengthen themselves at our expense. For where the autocratic regimes of the past were most concerned with controlling their own population, both physically and intellectually, in the form of information controlAccording to Applebaum, today's autocratic regimes have turned what was once domestic policy into a foreign policy doctrine.
Austrian and German capitalists met with a group of Soviet communists...
The most obvious example is Russias attempts to influence Western democracies both with subtle information campaigns and with less subtle sabotage. It has now become so common in the news that it is almost time for us to stop reacting to it. However, Applebaum points out that other autocracies, especially China, is starting to follow Russia, and to a greater or lesser extent is doing its part to spread kaos and confusion in our societies.
The irony is that all of this is possible thanks to our own economic systems. Because when we started talking about buying gas from the Soviet Union in 1967, we opened the door to something completely new: economic contact between East and West. It is almost hard not to smile, unfortunately, when we read today, the day after NATO decided to send warships to the Baltic Sea to protect critical infrastructure from sabotage, that presidents like Nixon, Carter and Reagan were actually unsure whether such commercial ties were a good idea: Could the gas pipelines be used to blackmail the West?
The essence of Applebaum's book is that it , economic contact between liberal democracies and autocratic states would not only prove to serve kleptocrats more than they perhaps served Western economic interests.
A few decades ago, it was hoped that economic ties would help spread democratic values. Today, we know that it has actually gone the opposite way.
