The Dictator's Learning Curve: Inside the Global Battle for Democracy (2 page)

The problem didn’t rest with democracy itself. As the Arab Spring reminded everyone in 2011, even amid a global recession, the ideals of political and economic freedom have not lost their saliency. People everywhere still aspire to be free. What changed is the
nature
of dictatorship. Today’s dictators and authoritarians are far more sophisticated, savvy, and nimble than they once were. Faced with growing pressures, the smartest among them neither hardened their regimes into police states nor closed themselves off from the world; instead, they learned and adapted. For dozens of authoritarian regimes, the challenge posed by democracy’s advance led to experimentation, creativity, and cunning. Modern authoritarians have successfully honed
new techniques, methods, and formulas for preserving power, refashioning dictatorship for the modern age.

Today’s dictators understand that in a globalized world the more brutal forms of intimidation—mass arrests, firing squads, and violent crackdowns—are best replaced with more subtle forms of coercion. Rather than forcibly arrest members of a human rights group, today’s most effective despots deploy tax collectors or health inspectors to shut down dissident groups. Laws are written broadly, then used like a scalpel to target the groups the government deems a threat. (In Venezuela, one activist joked that President Hugo Chávez rules through the motto “
For my friends, everything, for my enemies, the law.”) Rather than shutter all media, modern-day despots make exceptions for small outlets—usually newspapers—that allow for a limited public discussion. Today’s dictators pepper their speeches with references to liberty, justice, and the rule of law.
Chinese Communist Party leaders regularly invoke democracy and claim to be the country’s elected leaders. And modern authoritarians understand the importance of appearances. In the twentieth century, totalitarian leaders would often hold elections and claim an absurd percentage of the ballots. Soviet leaders routinely stole elections by announcing they won an improbable 99 percent of the vote. Today, the Kremlin’s operatives typically stop stuffing the ballot boxes when they reach 70 percent. Modern dictators understand it is better to appear to win a contested election than to openly steal it.

We like to believe that authoritarian regimes are dinosaurs—clumsy, stupid, lumbering behemoths, reminiscent of the Soviet Union in its final days or some insecure South American banana republic. And to be sure, a small handful of retrograde, old-school dictatorships have managed to limp into the twenty-first century. They are the North Koreas, Turkmenistans, and Equatorial Guineas of the world. But they represent dictatorship’s past. They make little to no effort to appear to be anything other than what they are. They have been reduced to remote outposts while other regimes have learned to evolve, change, and, in some cases, thrive. No one wants to be the next North Korea.

Totalitarianism proved to be a distinctly twentieth-century phenomenon. It was the most ambitious undemocratic gamble ever
made, and it performed poorly. Arguably, only North Korea clings to the totalitarian method, enabled in large part by its development of a nuclear weapons program and the late Kim Jong Il’s willingness to starve his own people. But modern dictators work in the more ambiguous spectrum that exists between democracy and authoritarianism. Most strive to win their people’s support by making them content, but failing that, they are happy to keep their critics off balance through fear and selective forms of intimidation. “
My father used to say that he would rather live in a dictatorship like Cuba,” Alvaro Partidas, a Venezuelan activist, told me. “At least there you knew if you criticized the government, they would put you in prison. Here they rule through uncertainty.”

From a distance, many of the world’s leading authoritarians look almost democratic. Their constitutions will often provide for a division of powers among the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. There may be important differences among them: some have one legislative house instead of two, some offices are appointed rather than elected, different bodies have varying degrees of oversight. But many of the institutional features of authoritarian states—at least on paper—have close analogues to some of the most boring, humdrum European democracies.

Take, for example, Russia. Even as Vladimir Putin became increasingly authoritarian,
he never did violence to the Russian constitution; he worked in the seams of Russia’s political system, centralizing power through channels that could at least appear to be democratic. Thus, critics could complain that the Kremlin’s requirement of minimum voting thresholds to win election to the parliament—each party must capture at least 7 percent of the vote—is a cynical ploy to block opposition candidates. Indeed, it was. But Putin could point to similar requirements in the electoral systems of democratic stalwarts like Poland, Germany, and the Czech Republic. Likewise, in Venezuela, Hugo Chávez has proposed replacing the direct elections of governors with presidential appointments for regional leaders. Again, it is a transparent attempt to centralize political power and eliminate opponents. And it is also a feature of some of the world’s most placid democracies, countries like the Baltic states of Estonia and Lithuania. The point is that on their own these revisions are not abuses of power.
Many of the features of a modern authoritarian regime are individually not at odds with a healthy democracy. A discrete piece of a government’s mechanics can be highly ambiguous. After all, even aspects of American democracy—like the Electoral College and the Federal Reserve—are undemocratic. You must, instead, look at how a modern authoritarian political system works in practice. To do so, you must get up close.

Few know better how dictatorships have remade themselves than Ludmilla Alexeeva. The eighty-four-year-old human rights defender is one of the last Russian dissidents who can trace her resistance to official Moscow to the late 1960s, to the early days of the Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev. Even now, frail and unable to walk far without assistance, she spearheads a movement to win Russians their right to freely assemble. On the morning I sat with her in her apartment in Moscow, the phone rang off the hook. (“
Human rights defenders are in demand today,” she said, laughing. “We are very popular in our country.”) When she began as an activist, the risks were grave. A Soviet dissident needed to be “prepared to sacrifice himself or one day find himself in prison or in a mental clinic. Nowadays, the same person must face that he can either be made disabled or murdered.” Once the regime would have arrested someone, and he would never be heard from again. Now he has an accident or appears to be the victim of a random attack.

Likewise, the Soviet citizen had few legal protections. That is not true of Russians today. “The Russian constitution guarantees the same set of freedoms and rights as any Western constitution,” says Alexeeva. “But actually only one right is really observed—the right to travel abroad, to leave.” The effect is that many people who might have opposed the regime simply left. Thus, while
the dictatorship of the Soviet system required closed borders, the authoritarianism of Putin’s Russia aims to sustain itself with open borders and passports. The world may have changed, but the savviest dictators have not been sitting still. As fast as their world may have turned upside down, as fast as the old rules may no longer apply, so too did the most skilled regimes learn and adapt.

At its root, a dictatorship’s most inviolable principle is the centralization of power. It is that principle—the control of the many
by the few—that makes today’s authoritarian regimes increasingly anachronistic. In every venue of modern life, hierarchies are falling, institutions are flattening, and the individual is left empowered. The central tenets of dictatorship become more outmoded every day. Thus, in a world of unfettered information and open borders, authoritarian regimes are conscious, man-made projects that must be carefully built, polished, and reinforced. The task is less complicated for the pariah states that have chosen to fall into a defensive crouch and hold the world at bay. They may endure for years or decades, but it is hard to see how they are not imprisoned by the walls they build to protect themselves. More complex are the modern dictatorships that choose to interact and open themselves to the very pressures that have imperiled others. They seek to blend repression with regulation to gain the most from the global political system without jeopardizing their grip on power. There is a deliberate architecture to the modern authoritarian regime, and it requires constant repair and refurbishment. And not just because of abstract forces of modernity. Because, as dictators have become more nimble, so too have those who threaten to tear them down.

This book is the story of a global contest, a struggle with battles and skirmishes that are often hidden from view but are transpiring every day. But as much as is written about U.S. democracy promotion or UN intervention, today the struggle between democracy and dictatorship is rarely, almost never, a conflict between or among nations; it is a contest between people. The truth is that sovereign states are usually too slow to act, even when they see a regime teetering on the edge of revolution. The United States did not abandon its autocratic allies in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 until the last possible moment and remained hesitant to push against a despised regime like Syria. Even in 1989, as the Berlin Wall came down, American diplomats worried about what the new political landscape would bring, going so far as to caution former Soviet states against declaring their independence. It is not that the United States’ role does not matter. It does; indeed it can be decisive. But like it or not, it is rare that the United States’ interest in democratic change—even a change that might remove a reviled strongman—is not balanced by competing interests or fears of the unknown. Seldom do the variables line up as they did in the final
months of Muammar Gaddafi’s Libya, where the international community managed to agree to move against a hobbled dictatorship with few friends on the verge of committing a gross humanitarian tragedy.

Authoritarian regimes are not particularly fearful of the United States. Why should they be? We are too intertwined. The United States is one of China’s largest trading partners, is the biggest buyer of Venezuelan oil, sends billions in aid to the Egyptian military, and courts Russian diplomatic support on a range of crucial strategic issues. Authoritarian governments rarely fret over United Nations sanctions or interference from a foreign human rights group that can be easily expelled. Indeed, the mere threat of foreign intervention, whether from the United States, the United Nations, or a body like the International Criminal Court, can be a useful foil for stirring up nationalist passions and encouraging people to rally around the regime.

What dictators and authoritarians fear most is their own people; they know the most potent threats to their rule are homegrown. Peter Ackerman understands this as well. In fact, he doesn’t believe a dictatorship is ever “ripe” to fall. In his view, there are no conditions that are more or less favorable for a nonviolent revolution. Regimes that once seemed on the brink remain in power. Dictatorships no one expected to collapse disintegrated in a matter of days. There are no clear correlations to be drawn between a regime’s brutality, economic hardship, ethnic makeup, or cultural history and the probability of revolution today, tomorrow, or ten years from now. What matters is how you play the game. It is a question of skills—the skills of a regime versus the skills of its opponents. The side that engages in the best preparation and demonstrates the most unity and discipline is most likely to win out. That, better than anything else, explains why the people Ackerman invests in are the people dictators fear most.

When observers look at only one side of the coin—the dictators—they see regimes that appear all-powerful. They concentrate on a dictatorship’s massive security apparatus, its divisions of riot police, soldiers, intelligence officers, informants, and paid thugs. They focus on the regime’s tight grip on media, major industries, the courts, and political parties. Perhaps they see a culture of fear, grinding poverty for the majority of society, and government coffers fed by corruption and control of oil fields or other natural resources. And of course there
is the brutality: any regime that has no compunction about jailing, torturing, or murdering its critics will not be easily ousted, so the thinking goes. When they consider all of these conditions, outsiders see little reason to believe anything will change soon. So when the revolution does come—whether it be in the Philippines, Poland, South Korea, Indonesia, Serbia, Tunisia, or countless other places—most experts, academics, and policy makers write it off as a fluke, a rare or unique circumstance unlikely to be repeated. “
There isn’t an expert who has ever predicted one of these [revolutions],” says Ackerman from across his desk. “In fact, they have been in a state of denial until the moment they’ve happened. Then, after the dictator falls and loses, they say, ‘Well, the guy was a pussycat anyway.’ ”

The piece of the puzzle they are missing is an appreciation of the skills of those who seek to topple a dictator. They don’t watch as activists learn how to mobilize a movement, chip away at a regime’s legitimacy, or master the tools of propaganda. They don’t pay attention to how democratic movements learn from each other, bringing new and innovative tactics to the fight.

Two years ago, I set out to witness this battle firsthand. The front lines in this fight are far-flung. I traveled to a range of authoritarian countries—a list that included China, Egypt, Malaysia, Russia, and Venezuela—to look up close at what innovations, techniques, or methods these regimes had employed to maintain their rule. To do so, I met with the people who served the regimes, the political advisers, ideologues, cronies, technocrats, and officials who helped to perpetuate its rule.

I also met the diverse and unexpected army of people determined to overthrow some of the world’s most sophisticated dictatorships. My reporting led me to Venezuelan students, Russian environmentalists, Chinese lawyers, Egyptian bloggers, Malaysian opposition leaders, and Serbian revolutionaries. Perhaps more surprisingly, I discovered that today’s activists and democratic movements are talking to each other, studying each other’s work, and brainstorming ideas. A Venezuelan student leader can fly to Mexico City to have Serbian activists—who ousted their own dictator ten years earlier—teach him how to identify Hugo Chávez’s weaknesses.