"Democracy is still the model the world strongly prefers"

The main qualitative difference between dictators of the 20th and 21st century is that most of today’s dictators, with the exception of regimes like Syria and North Korea, pretend to be democrats. They don’t refer to big ideologies such as nazism or bolshevism as 20th century dictators did.

To pretend to be democrats, they have to avoid resorting to open mass violence. Instead, they use concealed repression, which means that whenever they put their political opponents in jail, they do it in the context of non-political accusations. A typical example of that is Alexei Navalny: when he was put under house arrest and later in jail, it was under accusations of embezzlement and fraud. 

Spin dictators rely on limited repression: if you put too many people in prison, everybody will understand that you are not a democrat. So in these dictatorships, the number of political prisoners has come down substantially, and they are officially not political prisoners. In the old-style regimes, dictators killed political opponents to terrorise other members of the opposition and the whole society. Today, when they kill political opponents (which they still sometimes do), they deny their involvement.

In short, spin dictators use repression in a very targeted and deniable way. 

What we explain in the book is that in today’s context, spin dictatorships are more efficient than former ones would be, because of what we call “modernisation cocktail”. Modernisation brings economic benefits. If you openly kill your opponents, then it is much harder to go to Davos and negotiate with democratic leaders and with global businesses. The world is also much more transparent: if you torture somebody, you know it might be shown on TV around the world. So it has gotten harder to use old methods. In addition, the benefits of using the new methods of dictatorship are higher, because spin dictators are still suppressing their opposition and keeping control, yet they have access to the global economy, which makes a big difference.

In these countries, educated people with university degrees are much more likely to be aware of the situation. They understand that they are not in a democracy and that there is censorship. The goal of dictators is then to make sure - by using carrot or stick - that these informed citizens do not communicate this knowledge to the rest of the population.

To keep them quiet, they can co-opt the opposition media like Fujimori did in Peru or Orban in Hungary, or they can use targeted repression of journalists and the elites, or they can bribe the elites to let them know that the regime is beneficial to them. However, when the regimes are not doing well economically, which often happens because they run out of economic steam, they have to use limited repression rather than co-optation.

Anti-elite narrative is indeed a populist narrative, yet not all spin dictators are populist and not all populists are dictators. Some are both, like Viktor Orban. A spin dictator who is a populist usually targets part of the elite (the educated pro-Western citizens, legitimate business people, journalists, experts, judges, lawyers, activists…) as being “corrupt” and “cosmopolitan”. They harass the part of the elite who understands that the country is going in the wrong direction and criticise them for “not representing” the people of the country and being too “rootless”. This is a typical populist narrative.

But we have to keep in mind that spin dictators still need part of the elite to help them govern. They need educated people for economic growth. In 20th century’s industrial societies, dictators needed factory workers for economic development, but today, economic development depends on people with university degrees to create new knowledge-intensive sectors.

There are also some spin dictators who are not populists: Lee Kuan Yew from Singapore was the pioneer of this model. These spin dictators still use co-optation, censorship and limited repression but they don’t use populist narrative.

Some populist leaders want to become spin dictators but fail. Berlusconi and Trump wanted to go the way Orban or Erdogan have gone but their countries’ citizens stood up to the challenge and defended the democratic institutions. At least up until now, Italy and the US have remained democracies.

Finally, some populists are not dictators: the populist party Syriza ruled Greece for four years, and then when they lost the election, they simply stepped down.

People who say the internet is a disinformation technology are correct: it is used by populist leaders to gain support. Yet people who say the internet is a liberation technology are right as well: it is much more difficult to censor social media than traditional media, and in many non-democratic countries, social media help increase accountability and transparency - and organise the opposition.

Even Putin has not completely censored YouTube, because that would be widely unpopular. So in Russia today, the opposition and activists can use social media. Alexander Navalny for instance had a Youtube channel that had started to compete with official TV and propaganda, which is probably the main reason why he was poisoned.

It is very hard to close down social media: you need a very strong dictatorship like the Chinese regime (which is neither a traditional regime from the 20th century nor a spin dictatorship but rather a very sophisticated digital dictatorship). The Russian regime has been very innovative in using troll factories and interfering with the elections in the United States or the 2017 French election. So their relationship with social media is ambiguous : it is a threat to them, but they still need it.

In 2022, Putin made Russia evolve from a spin dictatorship to an openly repressive dictatorship. Propaganda reached another level, censorship is now complete. Just for calling the war a war, people go to jail for several years. All independent media are closed. Facebook and Instagram are blocked.

This is a regime in which polls are completely unreliable. The propaganda that says that all Russians are in favor of the war is wrong, we do not have that information. One of the way we can know what the public really thinks is through indirect questions: for instance, in Russia, pollsters cannot ask if people are in favor of the war or not, but they can ask whether the government budget should prioritize spending on education, health care, defense and war etc. To that question, only one third of the Russian people interrogated answered “defense and war”. 

We finish the book on an optimistic note, which is not easy this year. If spin dictators pretend to be democrats, it is because they do not have a better idea. We talk a lot about democracy being under attack, but democracy is still the most popular mode of governance. Everybody prefers democracy to dictatorship, and it is not just an abstract statement: people very rarely move from democratic countries to dictatorships, it is almost always the other way around. It is something we must remember: democracy is still the model the world strongly prefers.

My first recommendation regarding our relations with spin dictatorships is what we call “adversarial engagement” : we tell spin dictators that we know they are dictators, but we try to engage with their civil society (for instance through student exchanges, doing business with legitimate entrepreneurs, talking to activists, judges and experts…). The stronger the educated class and the civil society is, the harder it is for dictators to stay in power, yet they let it happen because of the economic benefits.

We should also put our own house in order and look into the “enablers” of those regimes such as former politicians, PR consultants, lawyers, investment bankers in the Western democratic countries, who act as agents of influence of dictators. They should be at least shamed by democratic powers, or better yet, prosecuted - as many of them are actually involved in money laundering and other illegal activities.

Last, we should defend the international organisations. For example, Russia was presiding the United Nations Security Council just two months ago. Turkey is a member of NATO. Hungary is both part of NATO and the EU. We need to reform international institutions to protect global rule-based order. It may not be easy, but we need to keep in mind the risks those regimes represent for us if we don’t contain them.