Anne Applebaum: Autocracies Don’t Believe In Rules or Norms

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: Now, earlier this week, Andriy Yermak, President Zelenskyy’s chief of staff, told me that Ukrainians are “fighting for our land, country and for all of democracy.” That is an issue our next guest tackle. Anne Applebaum is staff writer for “The Atlantic” and she’s a Pulitzer prize-winning historian. Her latest article, “There is No Liberal World Order” argues that unless democracies defend themselves together, the forces of autocracy will destroy them. And she joins Michel Martin to discuss this existential struggle.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MICHEL MARTIN, CONTRIBUTOR: Thanks, Christiane. Anne Applebaum, thank you so much for joining us.

ANNE APPLEBAUM, STAFF WRITER, THE ATLANTIC: Delighted.

MARTIN: You’ve been writing with some urgency for some time now about what you see as threats to democracy, democratic institutions worldwide. In fact, you’ve said very bluntly that the autocrats are winning. Why do you say that?

APPLEBAUM: Our idea of an autocracy that it is a strong man, you know, maybe he controls the police, maybe there are a few dissidents, you know, he has some propaganda newspapers is very outdated. Nowadays, autocracies work together. The state-owned oligarch-controlled companies in one country invest in the state-owned oligarch-controlled companies in another. They share surveillance technology. They share intelligence information. They work together and help one another in different parts of the world. They help one another evade sanctions. They have similar goals namely to push back against the democratic activism in their own countries. And very often, to undermine or attack democracies around the world, especially America and Europe, but also elsewhere. And so, what we’re really dealing with now is it’s not a formal network, it’s not a block, but it is a semiorganized almost like a corporation, you know, autocracy.inc, which is now putting up barriers to democracies trying to undermine them, trying to, you know, alter the rules of the game, really, in the world. And you know, of course the most blatant and grotesque and violent evidence of this is the war in Ukraine.

MARTIN: How is what we’re seeing in Ukraine fit into this broader pattern? Because I think that people have been, you know, appropriately so, very focused on the immediate, physical suffering of the people of the country, the huge refugee outflow as a consequence of this sort of onslaught. But how does the Ukraine campaign, how does Russia’s attack on Ukraine fit into this broader pattern?

APPLEBAUM: So, Russia’s attack on Ukraine is really just the most egregious example of something we’ve seen a lot of in the last few years, namely the fact that autocracies no longer believe that there are any rules to follow or any norms that need to be met. So, whether it’s hijacking planes, whether it’s poisoning their citizens and other citizens, whether it’s kidnapping or whether it’s really assaults on their own people as we’ve seen, for example, in Venezuela or in Burma. Whatever the offense is, they no longer feel any restraint. There’s no — human rights norms don’t interest them. International law doesn’t interest them. They’re willing to defy all of that. And this — the Russian invasion of Ukraine is just the most blatant version of, you know – – of that. I mean, look what Russia has done over the past several years. It’s poisoned dissidents both at home and outside the country. It’s — you know, it’s kidnapped people. It’s murdered people. It’s — you know, the Russian state is — has no qualms about assaulting anybody. And now, you know, having met no real resistance, they’re now — you know, they’ve now carried that to a much higher level in the invasion of Ukraine.

MARTIN: And also, I guess, I think what you would point out, assaulting people, poisoning people beyond their borders.

APPLEBAUM: This is something that some have called transnational repression. In other words, when the organs of an autocratic state reach across borders and attack either their own citizens or foreigners and violating local laws, violating national law, and this is something that’s been happening repeatedly in a number of countries around the world. And have so far met no real resistance from the West or from the Western democracies. And so, you know, they feel kind of impunity. You know, they’re able to continue committing these crimes and nobody is particularly bothered by it.

MARTIN: Well, that, of course, invites question is, why are they facing no real resistance from democracies? I mean, obviously, in the United States, we became well acquainted with the former president’s seemingly infatuation with the Russian president. But your writing recent — especially in your most recent article, you say that this actually goes beyond that, it actually pre-dates this, this refusal of the West to take this seriously. Is there a moment that you could identify where this sort of refusal to take this seriously became most obvious? And why do you think that is?

APPLEBAUM: There are two phenomena. One is the phenomenon of actual fascination with autocracy that we saw in the Trump administration but we also see in some politicians in other democracies. And in addition to that, there is, on the other side of the political coin, there is a refusal to believe that this is real. I think it really dates back, in fact, to the 1990s when you had the beginnings of — very soon, actually, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the beginnings of a revivals of Russian imperialism which got no reaction in the West. You saw it, you know, when there was a kind of theory in that era and it continued in the 2000s that if we just trade with Russia, if we trade China, we will somehow — you know, we’ll convinced them to became part of our institutions, we’ll democratize them by helping them get rich. And all throughout that era, there was this illusion that if we just trade with them, things will get better. And actually, the opposite happened. It turned out that trading with autocracies makes the ruling parties or the leaders wealthy and it doesn’t make them more democratic or more liberal or more likely to abide by international law at all. And so, really, this dates back quite a long way. I mean, maybe an important break also probably happened during the Obama administration when Obama didn’t take the first invasion of Ukraine, the invasion of Crimea quite as seriously. He thought it was a regional problem. It was something that — you know, it was Russia’s problem with Ukraine and it didn’t look to him. And to be fair, it didn’t look like to most people yet like it was a part of a larger pattern. And I think the pattern has become clear, though, over the last eight years.

MARTIN: Talk about Hungary. I mean, it’s just been fascinating to watch Hungary’s leader — I don’t know what you want to call it, sort of this sort of goodwill missions around the world, even — he was even warmly received in Israel by the prior administration of Benjamin Netanyahu. What — and there are elections now coming up in which, you know, reporters are noting how even though in the past Viktor Orban has won elections, which were reasonably free and fair, he has now changed the rules — he’s been changing the rules aggressively to advantage his own party. Would you just talk about that? And this has been happening in plain sight. None of this is a secret.

APPLEBAUM: Yes. I would say it has been a while since there were free and fair elections in Hungary, and the playing field gets more and more skewed all of the time. But, yes. I mean, Viktor Orban offers to many Democrats who are tired of their own democracies or they dislike some aspect of their own countries or they are simply hungry for power, he offers a model. Here’s how, as an elected Democrat — and the first time he was certainly elected, here’s how you can take control of your country’s institutions, undermine the media, undermine the courts, change the constitution, change the electoral laws, you know, manipulate the results of elections and here’s how you can stay in power indefinitely. And that’s a model that many people admire, many Americans — members of the Republican Party admire it. Many people admire it in Poland or in France or in Germany. You know, it’s an appealing model if you’re a Democratic politician who doesn’t think, you know, democracy, who doesn’t think much of your own country or much of your political system. And so, you know, the result in Hungary is going to be interesting to watch. I find it hard to believe that Viktor Orban would allow anyone else to win. I don’t think that was ever really on the cards, but it will never be interesting to watch how it plays out.

MARTIN: And when you say taking over the media, taking over these institutions changing, could you just be a little bit more specific? You mean, literally taking — has literally taken over media institutions or rather his sympathizers have. Can you just be more specific about the way in which he’s really bent on what were independent institutions to his own purpose?

APPLEBAUM: So, what Orban has done, for example, to the media in Hungary is complicated, it’s not the same thing as an outright nationalization. It’s not censorship. Instead, what he did was he manipulated the advertising market so that, you know, particularly, you know, government companies with state-owned companies would spend a lot of money on newspapers that were favorable to him, newspapers that were unfavorable to him or television stations would find the advertising market dried up, you know, companies who advertise in those media or would lose government contracts or would suffer in other ways and would have tax inspections or something like that. And so, essentially, he starved out the independent media. And then, as they began to go bankrupt, he arranged for his cronies for people who were close to him political to buy up those properties. So, it was all legal, sort of, but it was a way of manipulating the market. And it was possible to do that because it’s a relatively small country. And — you know, and because, you know, the business community was quite craven and eventually, they became quite afraid. So, a lot of businesses eventually moved out of the country. I mean, at the same time, he was creating his own set of oligarchs. So, a set of business people who were essentially dependent on him and on his party for their business. They were — they got subsidies. They got contracts. They got deals. And some of them — these were private companies. Nevertheless, they benefited from their relationship to him and those who didn’t have that relationship suffered. So, he twisted the economy. He twisted the media market. And in that way, took it over. So, in practice, in Hungary, there is no real independent television, nobody watches television news that isn’t pro-government. And by pro-government, I mean, viciously partisan, not just kind of bias, but viciously, viciously and aggressively partisan. And there — it’s very difficult to find any media at all that’s in the opposition. There are a few websites run by very brave journalists but it’s certainly not a balanced market, and most Hungarians wouldn’t see anything that’s in opposition to the government at all. And that —

MARTIN: And, of course, the voter rules. And the voter rules, too, sort of manipulating the rules around voter access is also good.

APPLEBAUM: Yes. So, the other thing that Orban did was he manipulated the constitution. He kept changing the rules about voting. He changed, you know, the rules about how you count the majority in Hungary. They have parliamentary politics, which is different from the U.S. But essentially, he manipulated the system so that even when he had a little tiny majority of, you know, a couple of percentage points in the polls, he would have a huge majority in parliament, which then gave him, you know, the constitutional majority, you know, and enabling him to enact all kinds of deep changes. And so, that was also a part of his system, to change the political system in order to give his political party advantages.

MARTIN: Now, you know, you cannot help but notice the similarities to some of the initiatives taking place in the United States. In the United States, we are seeing similar movements. We are seeing people who are inventing, you know, fraud that doesn’t exist in order to create a rationale for making it harder for people to vote, sort of certain people to vote but not others, you know, changing the forms of identification that people can use. I understand that you spend a good deal of your time overseas. But you’re looking at both countries. I mean, you travel back and forth, and I wonder, do people see these similarities as part of a larger trend?

APPLEBAUM: So, not only do people see these similarities — and by the way, I do spend a lot of time in the U.S. But not only do people see these similarities, there is a part of the Republican Party and particularly, a part of the conservative establishment, that now sees Hungary as a model. You know, CPAC, which is one of the most important conservative conferences, is being held in Budapest for a reason. You know, the, you know, leading conservative commentators, you know, Tucker Carlson from Fox News go to Budapest to broadcast for a reason. They go there because they see the manipulation of democratic institutions as something they would like to do in the United States. So, I think not only are they similar, I think they aren’t — you know, the Americans are modeling themselves on what happened in Hungary or some Americans. I don’t want to say everybody. It’s not the entire Republican Party, but part of the Republican Party sees that as their goal. They also want to create a system whereby they have a part with the minority — support of a minority of the country that nevertheless controls everything indefinitely or at least, you know, for a very long time. So, yes, I think there is a direct relationship. I think it’s a causal relationship. I think what Orban has done has been very influential on the part of the Republican Party.

MARTIN: So, in your latest piece you say, there is no natural liberal border. And there are no rules without someone to enforce them. Unless democracies defend themselves together, the forces of autocracy will destroy them. These are very strong words. Talk a bit more about what are the steps the democratic nations need to embrace now with urgency to fight autocracies, not just here in this instance, but around the world and going forward?

APPLEBAUM: So, I think the immediate recognition that this liberal world order or these norms that we talk about, you know, aren’t real unless we defend them and unless we’re even willing to militarily defend them is a very important realization, and I don’t think it’s quite dawned on anybody yet. That — you know, that’s the first piece of it. The second piece of it is, the way in which we’ve enabled kleptocracy, we’ve allowed corruption to grow around the world and we’ve allowed corrupt people and politicians to infiltrate our systems, to use our banking system to hide their money, our property markets. You know, we’ve allowed their money to manipulate even our political systems. Understanding that and fighting back. You know, ending tax havens, you know, ending the — you know, the shell company. Why do we need to have anonymous companies, for what reason? Ending some of those practices, I mean, those are legal practices, they exist because some legislature pass a law, they can also be de-existed I mean, they can be abolished in the same way. I would say, thirdly, thinking in a much deeper and more profound way about how we communicate to the rest of the world, you know, the idea that there is a marketplace of ideas and the best ideas will win, that’s not true in a world in which, you know, Viktor Orban owns all the newspapers and Vladimir Putin controls all of his television channels. So, beginning to think about how we communicate our values, how we speak to the inhabitants of autocracies and indeed of other democracies, that would be the third thing. I mean, the fourth thing, you know, is usually discussed in a different context. But, you know, there now is a double reason to end our dependence on carbon, on oil and gas, because oil and gas not only are polluting the planet, they are also the source of funding for, you know, several major autocracies, you know, some of the most difficult, bloody and disruptive countries in the world, you know, Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela, these are all countries that exist and thrive because a small of click of people have got hold of natural resources and are able to exploit them because the rest of the world is dependent on them for energy use. You know, time to move rapidly away from those sources of energy and to find something different both because of climate change and because, you know, those things enable democracy. And then, finally, I would say for the inhabitants of democracies, taking this seriously. You know, maybe democracy isn’t just a thing that’s like tap water, you know, you just turn it on and it’s always going to be there or maybe it’s something that’s going to require you to participate in local institutions or to join a party or to help a campaign or to, you know, work even in your local co-op board. I mean, whatever it is, being engaged in public life is not, I think, optional anymore. You know, more people need to do it. They need to understand that democracy only works to the extent that citizens are motivated to support it and participate in it.

MARTIN: Anne Applebaum, thank you so much for speaking with us.

APPLEBAUM: Thank you.