Why Seemingly Unstable Authoritarian Regimes Are Stronger Than We Thought
More often than not, it is believed that domestically unpopular authoritarian regimes among their own population are ticking time-bomb and that soon, a democratic government is on its way. If the majority of the population is strongly opposed to such regimes, then there is no way they could sustain themselves, right? This would have been the case in the earlier, but a few key things have changed.
On multiple occasions, seemingly robust authoritarian regimes such as Nicolae Ceausescu’s neo-Stalinist regime in Romania have been known to suddenly collapse, despite having an iron grip on their country. Having enough public dissent can break even the most impregnable iron grip. However, going from the 20th century to 2023, building such an iron grip has become cheaper than ever.
The rise of global authoritarianism has been a recorded tendency since the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In fact, according to Our World in Data statistics, the peak of global democracy was in 1992, in terms of the number of democratic countries worldwide. Why has global authoritarianism been on the rise then? There is one simple cause: it has become cheaper to run an authoritarian regime than ever before, and most likely, will continue to get cheaper and easier in the future.
In 1989, after the Tiananmen massacre in Beijing, the Chinese government started to focus on living standards, and proclaimed that if living standards were vastly improved, then individual freedom wasn’t a necessity for the average Chinese. With regards to the perception of the population, there was some truth in that statement. After more than 30 years, China remains an autocracy, with the population benefiting from the economic development that occurred in that timespan. Not only did the economic development improve the living standards of the ordinary Chinese citizen, but like all adapting dictatorships in the 21st century, it made the re-armament and policing of the state far easier and cheaper. Moreover, public dissent in China has fallen – the trade of freedom for economic prosperity seems to have worked, at least for now.
But what if one takes out economic prosperity out of the equation, would a regime still survive? With economic growth, essentially driven by technological growth, having a rippling effect through the world in the era of a global economy, means that even in hard times, an autocracy is still able to fund the police, military and any other means of potential repression. Essentially, economic and technological growth globally have cut the daily cost of running a dictatorship dramatically. When public dissent becomes a bigger problem, the solution is to simply allocate more resources to repression. Things get even cheaper and easier if the repressive machine, like in Iran, is abundant in ideological loyalists, like the IRGC. Not only are you, as the autocratic regime, able to pay and feed them easily thanks to decades of economic and technological growth, you don’t have to worry too much about doing so, as their loyalty is firm and does not require much resources to maintain itself. Perhaps, the only way one could lose their ability to show loyalty, would be a total inability to fund their basic needs to function as a repressive mechanism. In countries where promises of economic growth and increasing living standards did pay off in appeasing public dissent, the reallocation of additional resources for repressive purposes would not even be an issue.
As technological growth and innovation drives the costs of a dictatorship’s self-defense down, it is safe to assume that maintaining an effective repressive machine for authoritarian regimes will become even easier in the future if preventive steps aren’t taken. Democracies, on the contrary, will not see their vital costs decrease – they would be more preoccupied in appeasing and satisfying their sensitive electorate at all cost. Henceforth, how must the world counter such unfavorable odds that will only get worse and neutralize rogue regimes like that of Iran and Russia?
The only way to make sure that rogue autocracies experience continuous setbacks would be to force them into total isolation. In this case, half-measures (both in the present cases of Iran and Russia) will not be enough to disable the regime. As even the most autocratic regimes are participants of the global economy, they will likely avoid total economic collapse. In cases like North Korea, notorious for both its poverty and lack of basic individual freedoms, the repressive machine has learnt to become extremely efficient (with additional help from China), that even in the darkest of times of famine, the police and the military were fed, equipped, and subsequently, loyal to the state. International isolation of North Korea has not paid off – North Korea continues to be a communist dictatorship and a threat to the entire world. Despite being one of the most isolated countries internationally, trade with China has given the regime a lifeline in the long term.
Henceforth, total isolation in combination with the cutting of any “lifelines” as such to rogue autocracies is key to toppling them. In the case of Venezuela’s Maduro, another impoverished and autocratic regime seemingly on the brink of collapse, did not undergo a regime change in the end due to Venezuela’s oil reserve “lifeline”. Venezuela’s main oil export goes to China and Brazil, the providers of this “lifeline”. The export revenues would then serve the repressive machine. Yet again, the economic collapse did not trigger democratic change, although it almost came to that point in 2018 when the fraudulent presidential elections triggered anti-Maduro protests.
Overall, isolation and the cutting of lifelines for authoritarian regimes need to be far more severe now than ever before, as it is getting cheaper to maintain a strong domestic repressive force. In the case of Russia, many in the West underestimated the regime’s grip on the country. Not only is the regime relatively popular domestically, but the repressive resources of the regime are far more abundant. In case of the regime losing popularity, this resource abundance is a good plan B. Economic hardship will have to be far worse than it was in 1991 during the collapse of the Soviet Union, in order to trigger major domestic change that would eventually lead to the regime’s total collapse and long-term peace in Ukraine and all of Europe.
