Autocracy, Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World - Softcover

Applebaum, Anne

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593471202 ISBN 13: 9780593471203

Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • WITH A NEW PREFACE • From the Pulitzer-prize winning author, an alarming account of how autocracies work together to undermine the democratic world, and how we should organize to defeat them

"A masterful guide to the new age of authoritarianism... clear-sighted and fearless.”—John Simpson, The Guardian

"Especially timely."—The Washington Post

We think we know what an autocratic state looks like: There is an all-powerful leader at the top. He controls the police. The police threaten the people with violence. There are evil collaborators, and maybe some brave dissidents. But in the 21st century, there is so much more to it. Nowadays, autocracies work together, from China to Russia to Iran. Corrupt companies and kleptocrats in one country do business with corrupt companies and kleptocrats in another. The police in one country can arm and train the police in another, diplomats band together to bend international rules, and propagandists share resources and themes, pounding home the same messages about the weakness of democracy and the evil of America.

Disapproval and sanctions cannot move the autocrats. Even popular opposition movements, from Venezuela to Hong Kong to Moscow, don't stand a chance. The members of Autocracy, Inc, aren't linked by a unifying ideology, like communism, that can be defeated, but by a common desire for power, wealth, and impunity. In this urgent treatise, Anne Applebaum calls for the democracies to fight a new kind of threat.

A new preface to the paperback edition highlights the increased relevance of these dangerous dynamics in light of the return of Donald Trump to the American presidency.

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 After seventeen years as a columnist at The Washington Post, ANNE APPLEBAUM became a staff writer at The Atlantic in January 2020. She is the author of many critically acclaimed and award-winning books, including Twilight of Democracy, Red Famine, Iron Curtain, Between East and West, and Gulag, winner of the Pulitzer Prize. She divides her time between Poland, where her husband is foreign minister, and Washington, D.C.

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The Greed That Binds

In the summer of 1967, Austrian and West German capitalists from the gas and steel industries met a group of Soviet communists in the quiet confines of an old Habsburg hunting lodge near Vienna. The atmosphere must have been strange. Soviet troops had left Austria only twelve years earlier. West German soldiers still stared down East German soldiers across a fortified border in Berlin. Fears of imminent Soviet invasion had faded, but only thanks to the large American military presence in Europe.

Nevertheless, everyone in the room had interests in common. Soviet engineers had just discovered huge gas fields in western Siberia. New technology meant that gas was becoming cleaner, cheaper, and easier to transport. Pipelines from the communist East to the capitalist West seemed an excellent way for both sides to benefit. The group talked and agreed to meet again. The conversation then continued in other cities, moving from the price of gas to the cost of loans to the technology of pipeline construction. In February 1970, West German and Soviet officials finally concluded the agreement that would lead to the construction of the first gas pipelines from the U.S.S.R. to Western Europe.

Prior to that deal, economic exchange between Western Europe or the United States and the Soviet Union had been minimal, involving nothing much more complex than trade in icons, timber, and grain, plus a few dodgy mining deals. From the moment the hunting lodge talks began in Austria, everyone knew that the gas trade would be different. Pipelines were expensive and permanent. They could not be laid down one day, removed the next, and they could not depend upon the whim of a particular leader. There had to be long-­term contracts, and these contracts had to be enveloped within a set of predictable political relationships.

For Willy Brandt, the West German foreign minister at the time, these predictable relationships were a large part of the project’s appeal. He did not fear that his country would become dependent on the Soviet Union. On the contrary, he leaned on his negotiators, urging them to make the deal bigger. His reasoning was mostly political: he believed that a mutually dependent economic relationship would make a future military conflict unthinkable. As chancellor, which he eventually became, Brandt made his Ostpolitik—­his “eastern policy”—­one of the central pillars of postwar German foreign policy. In subsequent years, the pipelines provided a physical link between Moscow and Bonn, and eventually Berlin, Rome, Amsterdam, Helsinki, and dozens of other European cities. They remained at the center of German foreign policy after 1991, when the Soviet Union broke up and Germany reunited.

Along the way, Germany’s Ostpolitik also became a theory of change, explaining not merely how democracies could trade with autocracies but how they could slowly and subtly alter them. Egon Bahr, a longtime adviser to Brandt, described the idea in a famous speech in 1963, calling this concept Wandel durch Annäherung (change through rapprochement). If the West could tone down the confrontation, engage with the East German regime, and offer trade instead of boycotts, he argued, then a “loosening of the borders” might be possible. Bahr never called for boycotts or sanctions against the East Germans and rarely mentioned political prisoners, even though he knew the political prisoners were there: West Germany frequently paid for the release of dissidents from East German prisons, spending more than 3 billion deutsche marks on this strange human trade in the years before 1989. Instead of speaking clearly about prisoners or human rights, Bahr deployed what the writer Timothy Garton Ash has called “emotive imprecision” to evade the subject.

Not everyone else was so certain about the pipeline deals. Richard Nixon always believed that the Soviet Union’s true purpose in trading and talking with Brandt and Bahr was, as Nixon put it, “to detach Germany from NATO.” Jimmy Carter, who wanted to prioritize the promotion of human rights over trade, disliked Ostpolitik so much that he imposed a boycott on the sale of some U.S. pipeline technology to Germany after the Soviet Union imprisoned two dissidents, Aleksandr Ginzburg and Natan Sharansky, in 1978. Helmut Schmidt, German chancellor at the time, fumed that Carter was an “idealistic preacher” who knew nothing about Russia. The Reagan administration took a step further, placing export controls on some pipeline equipment following the declaration of martial law in Poland in 1981, blocking American companies from working on the pipeline, and banning foreign companies involved in the project from doing business in the United States, all radical moves at the time.

Nixon, Carter, and Reagan were motivated by neither spite nor pure commercial self-­interest, but rather by questions about the political consequences of trade with an autocracy. Although Germany was the prime contractor, the gas benefited many countries, potentially making the entire continent dependent on Soviet goodwill. Could the pipelines be used as blackmail? Reagan’s defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, worried out loud about the need to limit “Soviet economic leverage over the West.”

Underlying this conversation lay a deeper moral and political question: Did East–­West trade enrich and empower the Soviet state and its empire? From the time of the Bolshevik Revolution, the Kremlin’s foreign policy goals had explicitly included the subversion of European democracies. During the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S.S.R. supported terrorist groups in West Germany and Italy, aided extremist movements across the Continent and around the world, and suppressed political opposition in Eastern Europe, including East Germany. Nevertheless, gas kept flowing west and hard currency flowed east, providing Moscow with funding that helped sustain the same Red Army that NATO had to be prepared to fight and the same KGB that Western security services competed against. If this trade empowered Moscow, was it really beneficial? What were the hidden costs? While the Soviet Union existed, this paradox of U.S. and European policy was never really resolved, and it remained unresolved after the U.S.S.R. broke apart.

In the 1990s, an era when most people expected to enjoy the new peace dividend and spend the rest of the time talking about television shows, the hidden costs of anything were hardly mentioned at all. This was the era of Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History?,” the 1989 National Interest essay that was widely misread as a statement of naive, everything-­is-­for-­the-­best-­in-­the-­best-­of-­all-­possible-­worlds good cheer. Liberal democracy is victorious, sooner or later everyone will want it, and no special effort is required to promote it; just be patient, and the beneficial effects of trade and globalization will work their magic. Fukuyama’s actual argument was more subtle than that, but the simplified version became popular because people wanted it to be true.

And no wonder: The idea that there was something preordained, even inevitable, about liberal democracy had a deep appeal. It made the inhabitants of democracies feel virtuous, since they already lived in the ideal society. It made the businessmen and bankers who were just then beginning to expand their investments into China and the post-­Soviet world feel better too. If the old moral dilemmas about investing in autocracy were gone, then there was nothing special they needed to do to justify their actions.

It was around this time that Bahr’s old phrase Wandel durch Annäherung, “change through...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593471202
• ISBN 13: 9780593471203
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 241
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland