Autocracy and Democracy in an Era of Nationalism

on behalf of dean sandra peert who could not be with us this evening and the entire jepson faculty let me welcome you to the fourth event of this year's jepson leadership forum series moving people the perils and promise of nationalism thank you for joining us those of you here in person and the actually several hundred of you watching online as we welcome anne applebaum to the university of richmond my name is ken ruccio for those of you who do not know me i currently hold the deceptively lofty title of distinguished senior lecturer here at the jepson school where i teach courses focused on democratic theory political leadership and the current state of affairs in american democracy i'm also president emeritus of washington and lee university and the former dean of the jepson school in a long time higher education administrator and faculty member of both those institutions this year's forum features scholars activists and experts discussing the moral ethical and legal implications of global migration and asylum together we are exploring how communities navigate the economic social and cultural transformation of a world with and without borders and walls we have no idea how timely and relevant tonight's presentation would be when this event was planned about a year and a half ago tonight's event as many of you know was rescheduled from its original date to allow ms applebaum to cover the extraordinary and most unfortunate time in history as the war in ukraine unfolds voices like hers provide information and clarification to people around the world just this morning she testified before the senate foreign relations committee we thank you anne for taking the time to be with us tonight in fact as you will soon see we have adjusted the focus of the program tonight so that we may take full advantage of anne's knowledge and expertise on the immediate issue of ukraine as well as democracy and autocracy and after we have an introduction of anne here in a few minutes i'll have an extended discussion with her and some of my questions will come directly from students in two of our jepson classes one a freshman sophomore seminar and won an upper-level course on the future of democracy both those classes have read her very important book the twilight of democracy one of the students in those classes is nico ellis he will tell you a little bit more about our speaker nico is a junior majoring in leadership studies and political science a native of pennington new jersey he is a member of the gary mcdowell institute student fellowship program and is currently interning in the office of virginia house of delegates representative betsy carr after college he hopes to attend graduate or law school and pursue a career in public interest and environmental law please help me welcome nico to introduce ann thank you for that introduction dr rucio and now it is my pleasure to introduce tonight's esteemed guest anne applebaum miss applebaum is a staff writer for the atlantic and a pulitzer prize winning historian she's also a senior fellow at the johns hopkins school of advanced international studies and the agora institute where she co-directs arena a program on disinformation and 21st century propaganda for 15 years she was a columnist at the washington post where she also served as a member of the editorial board she worked as the foreign and deputy editor of the spectator magazine in london as the political editor of the evening standard and as a columnist at slate as well as the daily and sunday telegraphs from 1988 to 1991 she covered the collapse of communism as the warsaw correspondent of the economist magazine and the independent newspaper she is currently covering the war in ukraine for the atlantic miss applebaum is the author of seven books including gulag a history which won the pulitzer prize for non-fiction in 2004 she also received literary literary awards for her books iron curtain the crushing of eastern europe published in 2012 and red famine stalin's war on ukraine published in 2017. in her most recent book twilight of democracy published in 2020 miss applebaum investigates the struggle between democracy and dictatorship in addition to her books miss applebaum's writing has appeared in the new york in the new york review of books the new yorker the wall street journal the new york times the financial times the international herald tribune and many other news publications she has lectured at yale harvard stanford columbia oxford cambridge and many other universities so please join me in giving a warm welcome dan applebaum well and welcome and thank you very much for for joining us we are we're planning to have a conversation uh this evening ann has kindly agreed to navigate some of the very very important topics that are going on around us and we'll we'll just kind of see where this leads um so let me uh start off in first of all by thanking you very much as i mentioned you're you were testifying this morning before the senate foreign relations committee you'll be back on the road soon after you finish here so it's a busy time for you and a busy time for the world thank you well i appreciate the warm welcome um i do always like to visit universities when i'm invited i think it's you know it's the best atmosphere for conversation and so thank you for having me i'm happy to be here and and i forgot to mention it's obligatory at this point's wish the university of richmond basketball team good luck all right i'm sorry all right i wish you good luck in the basketball tournament whichever one it is but but i don't know about professional basketball tournament i gather there are some there there aren't that okay i haven't been focused on it yeah so i i want to um start off we we've talked about running through a series of topics and we're going to get to everything from vladimir putin to ukraine to autocracy and democracy but i want to start off this way one of the things that has most impressed me about your writing is your ability to tell a big story about conflict about societies about war by talking about stories of the people who are most directly affected so i think i wanted to start off the evening by by really asking you to give us some sense of what must be happening on the ground with the people in ukraine right now and and a little bit more even what's going on in poland countries you know very very well from your work what what must it be like you're talking to your friends uh tell us about that so thank you for that question one of the things i do try to do in my writing is show that there is a relationship between these big ideas that often get debated at universities in a very abstract way i was just talking to some students at dinner about what they read and we talked about you know communitarianism and utilitarianism and you know these different arguments about society um and sometimes we um forget that these ideas really do shape and mold things that happen um so the war in ukraine is the result of a set of very bad ideas putin has a philosophy he has an ideology he has a kind of rationality of his own and within that logic what he's doing makes sense to him and it's of course had this shattering effect on many millions of people so um so that wasn't mine oh that's mine sorry i thought i'd knocked over my microphone um and so he so and so for example when i wrote about um i wrote a big piece a couple of months ago for the atlantic magazine on the nature of modern autocracy but but the piece is actually structured around a couple of individuals who are in both cases in several cases very ordinary people who who ran into the deep injustices in their society and became dissidents even though that wasn't their how they imagined their their lives would go um so yes i do try to try to look at that um you know you ukraine um you know we are watching really i mean we're watching a war happen but we are also watching you know a moment when a nation is really transforming itself and so people who didn't know they had it in them to be soldiers or who had it in them to be part of a resistance movement have suddenly discovered that they do and i am um i have several ukrainian friends and they are all there they have not left i do know others who have left usually people leave because they have small children one of my friends who was there sent me a note today she was describing how she's in a she's in southern ukraine interviewing people in kind of small towns and villages that have been affected by the war she's a journalist and she said one of the most extraordinary things is how people really do understand what's happening to them in a geopolitical context they understand this is a war between western ideas and um you know and and and and sort of you know russian soviet imperial nostalgia um they understand that it's a kind of clash of civilizations or a clash of different world views and they understand that they're playing a role in that clash and that it's therefore incumbent upon them to choose sides and these are you know these are farmers and school teachers and ordinary people who suddenly you know see this about the world um and and i think most ukrainians are undergoing some version of that i mean even those who've left or who want to leave or who um who who haven't stayed to be to be part of the you know the resistance which has many different facets i mean they're of course people who work in the food distribution industry who have to stay because if they all left that would be disaster i mean not everybody is staying to be a fighter people are staying to continue to participate in the society and make it function and that's just as important actually right now as fighting and so i think you know people have suddenly you know things are suddenly in very sharp contrast and people understand you know themselves and their relationships to their country and to their neighbors in a different way than they did before i mean that's something that happens in very extreme moments i mean if you read about what happened during the occupation in warsaw during the second world war you hear similar kinds of stories um so you know i think the exposure to an extreme event like that um changes have you been surprised by the determination and the resistance in ukraine so i'm not entirely surprised um it's funny i i told this anecdote to you before we before earlier but i'll repeat it again so i have a friend a colleague who's one of the great experts on the russian military in um in washington and i was at a little meeting with him about two weeks before the war in which he was explaining what he thought was going to happen and essentially his version of what would happen was very similar to what the russians thought would happen namely that the ukrainians would cave within 48 hours there would be a puppet government put into kiev and of course he thought this because he was reading all of the russian material he was reading about the russian army he underst you know he follows the careers of various generals i mean really intimate knowledge of of how their with their military strategy and how it works and so on and i said well what about ukrainian resistance i mean this is a country that is famously kind of a grass roots up organized country they've always been very bad at organizing this the state you know they're you know their their government is always kind of weak and ropey but they're very good at civic organization and civic movements and i said maybe this is a country that's going to create a a real um a real resistance and he sort of laughed at me he said oh you know you live in a bubble you know you're surrounded by your ukrainian friends and therefore you think that's going to happen and i said to him maybe you live in the bubble you know you you read russian you know military documents all day long um this is an american by the way so it's you know um you know and now i and so it wasn't that i it's not that i'm entirely i mean i'm only surprised because so many people told me that something different was gonna happen and people who really know things you know not not random people um but i but i'm not entirely surprised so one of the facets of ukrainian-ness that's interesting is that it's a nation that is in effect it was a kind of colony first of the polish um polish empire the commonwealth it was called then later the russian empire and ukrainian-ness has always developed in opposition to the state um in opposition to the nobility i mean it was a little bit different at different times um and it has this tradition of um you know people suddenly coming together in emergencies um and you know i did know that and i know i knew that that was possible but of course so many people told me i was crazy that i had to i had to dampen down that that that expectation so i'm not entirely surprised now so let me let me kind of broaden that circle out a little bit um to talk about the the refugee uh crisis uh that that is going on right now and i think at last count was maybe three and a half million that they said do i have that number right have left or so i've heard sort of 1.7 million so far but who knows i mean it may be higher than that a lot a lot of people so they're they're headed to a variety of countries although poland a country you live in is is probably the primary one right now so can you can you talk a little bit about the refugees the uh impact on the neighboring countries the the people in the neighboring countries and how they seem to be coping with it right now so the the because of the particular nature of this wave of refugees the reception of them so far and this is very early days you know we're like a week into this refugee crisis um in the so far the rep the reception of them is unbelievably warm partly it is because these are mostly women and children and some elderly people and there is a you know there is a feeling that they're genuinely escaping a disaster there's no suspicion about them trying to want something else which is what you sometimes get with refugees or with migrants and there is an instinct to help people and and almost all of the refugees in poland and poland has a large number because poland has the longest border with ukraine also polish and ukrainian are close enough that there is a lot of they find it easy to understand one another i think same with ukrainian and slovak but um but so there is a you know there's also there's now a tradition of ukrainians working in poland that's been true for the last decade so there are a lot of people have contacts and friends there but almost the entire um you know cohort of refugees in poland are almost all staying in private people's houses so there's i mean actually there's been very little there are very few camps i mean there may we may eventually get there because we're going to come to a limit where there aren't aren't more houses so they're mostly saying with people there's a system whereby refugee agencies you can call them and give them your phone number and your address and they'll send someone to you and so but that's mostly organized by ngos you know by refugee charities there's one very good one in poland um and you know i for example have a polish friend who's out of the country this year they're spending some there she's spending the year abroad and so they they organize for their house where they normally live in warsaw to be given to refugees and then you can just do that by making some phone calls so that's that's how it's working and as i said one of the things i i just said this also at dinner i mean one of the things i learned during the covet crisis is that making judgments about how people are going to feel about something during the first weeks or months of the crisis is a mistake because people as the as it goes on people's people's opinions change and so right now there's this feeling of you know we have to help people i mean the polish government has passed a law saying that um all the ukrainian refugees immediately get the equivalent of a social security number so they can all work all the children are automatically admitted to school um and there's also a um there's some kind of payment i mean it's not very much money but there's a little bit of money that's going to them so there's a you know big you know it's an enormous you know enormous effort is being made but it's mostly privately organized so let me let me uh kind of move from the the the individual people being most affected to talk a little bit about the people who are making decisions that affect those people and get kind of your impressions of the leaders and policy makers who are central to the story and and let's start with um one that i i'm sure you're familiar with uh president zielinski what can you tell us what you know about him uh again were you surprised so he i am more surprised so i i um i don't know him at all intimately but i've been in rooms where he is i've seen him speak in public i've met his chief of staff um he is somebody who um you know who's whose career was as a he was quite a famous comedian i mean i didn't know what the equival who the equivalent would be here maybe jon stewart or somebody like i mean he was a he was a famous well-known comedian an actor but a comic actor i mean he wasn't shakespearean um tread you know didn't do shakespeare and tragedy um and as i was just saying at dinner you can look up zielinski and dancing and there's a sort of ukrainian dance televised dance contest program and you can see zielinski in a kind of hot pink you know jumpsuit you know he won this contest um so you know so he was somebody who liked to make people laugh i mean he wasn't you know a serious figure what's very interesting about him though is that he he did launch a television series and it's called servant of the people it was a you know it was a seven part seven season series um and in that series he plays an ordinary ukrainian history teacher who accidentally becomes president and in the series he he's he's filmed he's a sort of you know he lives with his mother and his wife has left him and he's a sort of pathetic figure and everybody's mean to him and and you know and then at some point during the school day he starts ranting about corruption okay and one of his students films him and the film goes viral this is in the plot of the movie um and and it's so popular that he's elected president and so one day he wakes up in the morning and someone's knocking his door and there's you know i forget i don't know what his name is in the movie but you know you're hella good good morning mr president and then suddenly everything changes and people are you know worshipful of him and part of the joke of the movie of the series rather is it's making fun of ukrainians over respect for power you know so he's somebody who appealed to people by a little bit by mocking the political system and he was elected i mean he was elected because of the series you know there's no question that they were people were voting for that kind of president you know that's who they wanted an ordinary guy who's accidentally president he wasn't really an ordinary guy he was a famous comedian but yeah and as president he was people had mixed feelings about him until last week and i saw him right after he was elected he he was at a there was an event that he spoke at a sort of conference that he spoke at where he he basically did a kind of comedy routine it was a sort of routine with someone and someone pretended to be him and then they swapped places and so you know and it was fine but i remember afterwards people saying this is maybe a month after he won um people in the audience say well that's all very well and you know it's very jolly and amusing to have a funny president but you know this country is at war and how is he going to behave and so nobody really knew how he would behave and i think he has risen to the moment i mean surely his acting and television skills help him but i don't think that what you're seeing is fake either so so what he is what he is trying to do is to speak to people not as a kind of great figure on high but as an ordinary person i mean if you've seen him in the last few days he's wearing t-shirts and sort of vaguely green in a sort of military way but he's not wearing a uniform so he's dressed the way other ukrainians are dressed right now and the way the territorial army is dressed the territorial army being the volunteer army the reserves who people who have just joined so he's one of them he's speaking to them as an equal um he you know he's his his his goal is to inspire people to keep going um he and i think it's you know i think it really is a case i think he's inspired not only his country but people around the world um in particular the first couple of days if you remember when he was the americans offered him a lift they offered to take him away actually and he said i don't want to lift i just want more ammunition and this kind of you know it was so surprising to hear it now when we um you know you know people don't expect that of of you know people in that position someone who could get away and who could take his family away is not doing it so his family is there too so so one of one of the things that um for for those of us who are trying to get up to speed on ukrainian history one of the questions for me has been is zielinski articulating and explaining the ukrainian identity or is he redefining it in this moment so a bit of both i mean national identities are always constantly redefined but so ukraine has always had because it was a kind of land colony first of the polish empire was kind of early late medieval early modern empire then later of the russian empire ukrainian identity was always about fighting against the oppressors the nobility you know the the the occupiers more recently it's become very closely connected to the idea of democracy and the idea that ukraine is a country that is european and they mean by that it should be integrated with the rest of the world one interesting point about that for for those of you who are political scientists here are students of political science you know political science makes this distinction between civic nationalism and ethnic nationalism and ethnic nationalism is a kind of nationalism that's about tribal kind of tribalism you know it's about reviving our country and our people and so on and civic nationalism which can also be called patriotism if you want to be nicer about it um is a broader idea of the nation as you know members of the community and people who abide by the laws and so on and although no one ever told the ukrainians about you know civic versus ethnic nationalism zielinski really embodies this civic nationalism he is of course not ethnic ukrainian he's jewish he is also a native russian speaker he's from the southern part of ukraine which is more russian speaking although he does of course speak ukrainian um and so for a nation that is in fact bilingual and in fact has you know several religions i mean they're actually they're ukrainian orthodox they're also ukrainian there's a form of ukrainian catholicism um called greek they're they're sometimes called greek catholics uh but they're part of the catholic church and they you know they're they're in the hierarchy of the pope so it's actually a nation that has these different aspects to it and for that kind of nation this is of course the only form of nationalism or patriotism that works um and he has he is it existed already before he became president i mean he couldn't have become president otherwise because he's not an ethnic u candidate but he is articulating that and explaining it and projecting it and so in a way solidifying that as the real ukrainian-ness so real ukrainian-ness is not that you speak ukrainian and your ancestors were ukrainian real ukrainians is that you're part of this you know you know your country is you know is european and democratic um and you believe in a liberal society and you're willing to fight for it so let's um let's turn to um i want to get to vladimir putin but before we do um some of the other uh european leaders who who have stuck out for you either for good reasons or not good reasons and i think of president of france boris johnson hungary orban are there are there ones that you are looking at at the moment in saying this person is either playing a vital role or should be playing a vital role so probably the european leader playing the most vital role right now is the one you all probably know the least a because he hasn't been there very long and b because he's not very colorful and that's the chancellor of germany olaf schultz who was you know the germans don't like interesting politicians they like their politicians to be kind of boring and old schultz is a you know he was the you know kind of boring he was boring i mean he was a sort of leader in hamburg which is a very successful nice not very interesting well it's actually unfair it's a very pretty city i don't want to be mean about hamburg but but he was you know he he he seemed very solid and you know he would have been a successful you know local regional leader but nobody really had that many expectations from him and you know while again there's who knows what's going to happen next he has already partly i think because he spent a lot of time with putin having never encountered him before i mean so merkel was chancellor for 16 years he suddenly came into the job you know this is his first crisis and he went to see putin he spent a lot of time with him at least once maybe twice um you know listen to putin ranting about history and you know resentment and so on and he he has understood that this is a pivotal moment in history and he has told the germans that and he has you know germany has been a since the war um has been a very vocal advocate of pacifism which sometimes was very admirable but sometimes also shaded into a kind of we're you know we're pacifists and that means we don't really have any morality in our foreign policy at all so we're pacifists and so we can trade and do deals with anybody and we just we don't have arguments um and he has now shifted the argument he has announced that germany will spend you know an extra 100 billion dollars or 100 billion euros on defense and he will you know he will you know bring germany's defense spending up um and he's already begun to talk about the country as playing a different kind of role um i mean it's a little bit late for the ukrainians who asked for german germany actually produces a lot of weaponry um and they asked for german weaponry before the war and the germans wouldn't give it to them because they thought it would be provocative you know and because they're pacifists and now it's late but now they have decided to do it so there's been already this big shift in not just in ukrainian's understanding of who they are but the german understanding you know that actually we're a country that needs to take responsibility for security on the continent and our previous kind of neutral passivist stance doesn't work anymore and a lot will depend on what germany does in the in the coming weeks i mean it is the wealthiest country in europe it's the um it's the you know it's the you know it's the most integrated country in europe i mean it you know trades with everybody um and german decisions you know german also had in germany had enormous trade with russia not it's fame famously they bought all the you know a lot of gas from russia but also other other things as well and so you know they've made the decision to go along with the sanctions at least most of them and they um and they have made the decision to make this big shift and and what they do next and whether he's popular for doing this or whether people get angry at him for doing that is remains to be seen vladimir putin so i i have been watching putin since he first became um president of russia which was in 19 he was first his name first became he was actually the head of the fsb which is their the ex-kgb before that but his name became you know he was mentioned first as leader of russia on um december 1999. and so if you if you read my book which is about my new year's eve party from that night um so that was the night that yeltsin resigned um who was the first democratically elected president of russia and announced that vladimir putin would be you know his was his name successor and so i started paying attention to him then so that makes it um you know two decades ago right um i i worried about him from the beginning because of his background because he was not just because he was in the kgb i mean um people change and so on but because of his continued loyalty to the kgb and to the kgb worldview one of the first things he did when he became head of the fsb was he put up a portrait of and drop off i mean this will mean nothing to anybody but and drop it was one of the last leaders of the soviet union he was also a had been head of the kgb and what andra was most famous for was his belief that it's very important to crack down on dissent even little tiny you know academic discussion circles can't be permitted because we know what this can lead to and just for the to give you some context and drop-off was the soviet ambassador to hungary to budapest at the time of the hungarian revolution in 1956 older people will remember that or know what it is um and so was very paranoid about democracy movements and activism and so on and so during the 1980s you know staged this crackdown putin was of course the kgb was a kgb officer posted to east germany in 1989 and so he watched the fall of the berlin wall but from the perspective of someone who thought it was a great tragedy you know it was a disaster it was the end of the soviet empire in europe it was terrible for him personally you know he had to leave his nice house in dresden um and his friends in the stasi the east german secret police they lost their jobs um and he's and he's spoken about this i'm not i'm not extrapolating he's he said this in biographical interviews and so on um so for so so somebody who was an admirer of a drop off and who perceived 1989 as a tragedy was always going to have a world view that was that would clash with ours and that was clear to me from the early 2000s and i worried about him then even when he didn't sort of early phase when he was he wanted to be part of various western clubs and we made him part of the g8 and he um he you know he kind of talked the language of economics and diplomacy um and appointed people who who who were sort of normal economists to run to run russia um i i i but as i say worried about him from the beginning and also because almost immediately he began hollowing out the you know the admittedly weak but still nevertheless existing democratic institutions in russia so he created a system of it was kind of managed democracy where there were sort of fake political parties that pretended to compete with each other but there weren't real elections and he managed that and sort of created this show of elections and i you know worried about i mean i think what's happened with time is that his original instincts which is that you know democracy and demar and the language of democracy is a threat to russian style and not just actually it's not really even about russians about himself you know about his personal rule you know he is an odd you know an autocrat he's a kleptocrat he's stolen you know millions if not billions of dollars um he's enabled another small group of people around him to do the same they have a political system that they like that keeps them in power and they and although he has you know an enormous amount of power actually by our standards you know he controls the equivalent of the white house the congress the courts um uh you know the fbi the cia the local police um you know exxon shell you know um chevron uh and you know and the wall street journal the new york times and the washington post so he really controls all the levers of power one way or the other and yet he's deeply insecure because he knows he's illegitimate he's never won an election not a real election i mean he's you know people vote for him but we don't know what it means and so he ha and what he appears to be afraid of and he's spoken about this too is street demonstrations you know public outrage um those are the things that can challenge his power and so and also as a as a as a good former kgb officer he very much sees the world as a series of mostly western or american conspiracies aimed at him so when he sees a demonstration in russia he thinks he said this in 2011 in public you know that hillary clinton has organized it you know it's a he you know he saw it as there was there could be no such thing as a grassroots russian movement you know he always saw it as some kind of western game and as i said you know very sadly the west was never strong enough to create a grassroots movement in russia you know sadly but but but and i'll just finish that by saying it helps you though when you once you understand that you understand one of the reasons why he's so obsessed with ukraine because ukraine is a country that has had success i mean actually three big democratic revolutions in 1991 and 2005 and then again in 2014. um in 2014 they scared a there was a ukraine had a president who was not just pro-russian but also increasingly autocratic he was acting against the constitution he was breaking all the laws he was pushing he didn't want ukraine to integrate with europe and that created this huge protest called the maidan which lasted for many days and ended with him fleeing the country so so one one and another and what putin is afraid of is that he's afraid of that happening in russia and he sees ukraine as the kind of carrier of this western virus of democracy so so that that's helpful because what i was going to ask is one explanation for the invasion of ukraine is is a kind of strategic interest nato beginning to press in russia concerned about aggression from the west another explanation is that it's much more complicated it's a democracy versus autocracy um uh it's the kind of psychology of ruling i mean have i oversimplified those two so there is an argument and i engaged in it quite a bit before the war about putin's motives and there are partly it comes from some people in the u.s who always want to see the u.s as the cause of everything and who have argued that the reason why putin is doing all this is that it's our fault because we expanded nato and i have argued against that um firstly because i believe that if we hadn't expanded nato we would now be having this war in east berlin um you know so i i believe that this this desire for this dislike of democracy and this desire to reconstitute some version of the soviet empire has been there since the early 90s um it hasn't been universal there are many you know excellent and um um impressive you know and ethical and educated russians who do not believe that or want it and i know many of them um but there is a part of the society that has had that you know in sort of in the back of its head since then and it was identified then you know as people were talking about it in the early 90s and in fact the expansion of nato happened because poland the baltic states um you know the czechs and others feared that then and they began their their they campaigned to join nato and the u.s reluctantly agreed the clinton administration agreed mostly because at that time nobody thought it really mattered you know because russia was not a threat and you know what's the difference if estonia is in nato it sounds nice you know nobody thought it was really important and even the russians at that time didn't say much about it retrospectively putin has used this as a kind of club to beat the west and to um you know and to explain what he's doing i i i don't believe so the fact is that right now in the eastern nato states we have uh we actually have a little bit more now because we've sent some people in the last few days but um we've had you know literally nato troops in the hundreds so a few hundred u.s soldiers doing little exercises a few hundred british soldiers in the baltic states i mean our presence has been so light that there is no rational russian general who could look at that and think we were about to invade them so the idea that they were worried about some kind of invasion is i mean doesn't add up um and and you know it's my it's my belief that they wanted that for putin it's both politically useful to have this war with the west or create the west as the enemy rather than rather than ukraine and also as i say i think he genuinely believes that this you know western ideology is a threat to him good let me i want to shift a little bit to uh to talk um about this contest between autocracy and democracy before ukraine before the invasion of ukraine there were well there still are there a series of books of of which you have contributed one called the twilight of democracy the seductive law of authoritarianism available for purchase and signing after our talk but but there are others levitsky and zidlet have how democracies die um uh timothy snyder's book yeah i know well it's showing that i'm on so i'm going to talk loud until we can get it fixed how's that but so the um the the question of autocracy and democracy and the contest between those two what um what is that stake in ukraine you you wrote in your testimony to the senate earlier this morning that should ukraine be under russian rule at the end of all of this that will be a severe setback for democracy worldwide should ukraine not fall to russian rule that will be a strong signal for the strength of the future of democracy it is where do you locate the ukraine conflict in this wider discussion of the conflict between democracy and autocracy so first of all i mean it's interesting and you know important to remember that that spate of books that you're talking about that i was part of and tim snyder and others were inspired um partly by international developments and the rise of russia which actually tim snyder and i have both followed for um he's a very old friend of mine and we've followed it for many years because we're both interested in ukraine and russia but they were also inspired by events in the united states so the fear that um the kind of language and the kind of politics that were that we could see gaining popularity abroad might come here was the was the inspiration for those books so so that's a you know the you know the idea that what putin does is totally unimaginable and could never happen here maybe some aspects of it could never happen here but certainly those the temptation to become part of that kind of political system is in all of us and it's in every society um and not only that the american founders knew that and one of the reasons we have such a weird constitution is because they were trying to write a constitution that would prohibit demagogues from from from upsetting the apple cart and they talked about it at the time if you read the federalist papers which i gather you do read here i was just told that this evening it's it's in there you know alexander hamilton has this description of um you know someday a demagogue will come along and he'll undermine you know so you know so it was all there and they and they of course knew it because they were reading the history of um ancient rome you know and the story of caesar so these are very very old forms of human human behavior um i mean autocracy versus democracy talking about it nowadays is a little bit difficult i mean i don't want people to think that we're going back to a cold war and there's like a you know there's a western bloc and there's an eastern bloc and each one has a clear ideology autocracies nowadays are there are many different kinds right so there's chinese communists and there's you know venezuelan bolivarian socialists and there's you know the russian i don't know what they are nationalists i guess and there's you know iran who are theocrats these are very different ideologies and these are very geographically different societies um and historically very different with nothing in common um they do now cooperate in new ways um thanks to globalization they are able to you know the the kind of corrupt state companies in one autocracy can corrupt you know invest in the another so the russian you know um you know rosneft which is a for a company that was founded on stolen money if it was stolen from another oligarch is a big investor in venezuela you know they they share surveillance technology they share political tactics they watch what one another is doing they help one another get around sanctions and so you know when belarus was sanctioned um earlier this you know or last year um you know the russians provided new markets for them and you know so and i think there's quite a lot there was quite a lot of you know yellow russian goods being stamped as russian and then you know exported um so so they they they do work together in some ways and they do have a kind of common enemy which is the same thing that putin identified which is this you know this this language of democracy this language of faith you know about about fairness this this anti-corruption um you know this uh objections to corruption and this feeling that you know an unjust society is wrong and they have they all have to push back at that all the time in in their different ways whether in you know hong kong or burma or you know or zimbabwe and so and so they have some things in common and they share things but they aren't a single block and and and i don't and that's one of the reasons why i think foreign policy is going to be so difficult you know we americans want it to be kind of black and white you know like a couple years ago everybody went let's just have one enemy let's have china you know and you could still hear this you in washington you know a month ago you know we shouldn't be fighting russia we should be fighting china but you know the point is you don't you don't get that choice because the russians don't want to be friends with you you know they don't want to help you fight the chinese you know that's not how it works um and so i think there will you know we will have different kinds of relationships with each one of these countries some will be friendlier some less friendly um but we do need to start thinking much more systematically about what we how we imagine the world in the long term and what kind of strategy we have as the leader of the world's democracies i'm trying now to train myself not to use the expression the west because you know by democracies i mean south korea i mean japan i mean taiwan i mean some of the the south american democracies who have done um you know some who've have really sacrificed a lot to push back against venezuela um so there's a you know but i but if we're the leader or the or the potential leader of this group i would like us to think more strategically about what we can do together whether it's fighting back against kleptocracy and preventing the use of money laundering to you know which affects all of our countries or whether it's finding new ways to communicate with the autocratic world i think there's a lot we can do as a as a sort of team good um let me shift gears and and um ask you i've heard you talk about this before in 1989 which is when you were for lack of a better way to put it your political coming of age you were a young journalist you had you were studying in in england and left to come to poland decide uh here understand the story um and right around that time the berlin wall was coming down i i i wondered if if you could talk about that experience at that time and how that has um influenced your later interpretation of events that we're seeing right now what sort of lens did that create that um helped you interpret things uh today i don't know that it might have created a lens so much as a um as an understanding of the power of that language i mean so i witnessed the collapse of the soviet empire um and and i and i did so surrounded by people who were really really happy that it was gone so i did i did not have vladimir putin's point of view um and you know the the both first in poland which is where i was living but also i traveled in the whole region i traveled in the czech republic and in in ukraine actually my first trip to ukraine was in 1990 and so the the experience of watching it fall apart and and watching how something that seemed so permanent i mean it's hard for you all you know everybody younger than 40 probably to imagine but it it felt like this permanent part of the landscape is this big red patch on the map you know and it didn't change and to see that it fell apart because of um you know because the idea you know again this was how ideas become real because the ideology was insufficient because people didn't believe in it anymore because nobody wanted to support it because other ideas were more attractive you know it was a very important lesson to me in how political change happens it probably did make me at least for a decade or so overly optimistic about how how similar kinds of democratic movements could work elsewhere i still do believe that any country can eventually become a democracy this is you know i don't think there are hard and fast rules like some cultures don't make it possible i don't believe that because cultures change and countries change and places change and you know you can create change but i was probably over optimistic about the possibility of democratic change for a long time um in the last decade or so i've become much less so you know and i now see how much of that period was and what happened was shaped by the kind of luck and the fact that mikhail gorbachev who was then leader of the soviet union did not want to use violence um uh and it was the lack of violence you know the refusal to use that which which shaped that era i mean it was a real peaceful revolution but it didn't you know it could have gone otherwise right i mean there are some ways in which what's happening now in ukraine is the continuation of that you know if you know if it's the sort of what we're paying for having had such a peaceful transition you know somebody was dissatisfied with it and yeah so i so i want to um now move ahead on on that same kind of question about 30 years now and and ask you to kind of imagine what students today those who are 18 to 22 year olds how the current context will shape the ways in which they view politics democracy and and when you think about it the students who are in college today they vaguely remember the 2008 financial crisis they certainly remember the pandemic trump's election the recent racial reckoning of last summer and now ukraine and january the 6th and january the 6th i've got that one right there how how might that experience in those events influence the way that that they view politics i i slightly feel that this is a question for them yeah you know guys you know um and not for me did you know in 1989 how how that was going to influence you today yeah no i mean and i mean the funny thing about 1989 so i was 25 i was a freelance journalist and i kind of thought and and i was having i had these articles you know it was on the front pages of british newspapers and and i kind of thought you know that life would now just go on being like that you know i didn't have that much of an imagination that you know i also didn't realize how lucky we were that it was such a happy story i mean okay not happy for putin but really happy for almost everybody else and there was no violence um there was this peaceful transition to a you know in most cases a better system and there were there were problems in some places yugoslavia which is a place that often gets forgotten um you know there were there were parts of it that didn't go so well but generally speaking it was an enormously positive and optimistic story um and you know young journalists just starting out now don't get these positive optimistic stories to write about and i i i feel for them i mean i i do think that the the the combination of january the 6th and the ukraine war which of course we still don't know how that's going to come out will be very defining because those are both about democracy and about whether we can have it and whether it can exist in the 21st century given the pressures of the nature of the modern economy and social media and the backlash against globalization and so on so um i think those those two events and this quarrel you know democracy and autocracy both domestically and abroad will be the defining argument for the next two or three decades because there there's a harvard institute poll that um let me see if i get this right so 7 of those 18 to 29 year olds believe uh the us only seven percent believe the us is a healthy democracy uh 27 believe it is somewhat functioning 52 of the youth in america believe democracy is either in trouble or we have a failed democracy so so there there is a kind of context already for uh for that yeah i mean of course the funny thing about those i've seen those kinds of polls i don't know if that went in specific um the funny thing about them is the reasons why people think we have a failed democracy are really different so some you know i don't i don't want to you know i don't know the politics of this audience but you know whether it's because you think you know you know the left has taken over everything and needs and they've wrecked democracy or whether you think it's because the right is wreck democracy i mean there are a lot of different reasons why you might think um think democracy is over so it's it's a it's a funny poll because it's it shows more unity than there actually is but right so the reason the people's explanations for that are quite different okay so i want i want to uh close by um asking you to further speculate on the future so um this is get out my crystal ball yeah yeah the conclusion to anne's book which i think i mentioned is available for purchase afterwards and she'll sign you can also buy it on amazon that's true but they can't you won't sign it you won't go with the amazon yeah so these are the last two paragraphs and um i've got a question for anne after these last two paragraphs to sum the precariousness of the current moment seems frightening and yet this uncertainty has always been there the liberalism of john stuart mill thomas jefferson or vaclav havel never promised anything permanent the checks and balances of western constitutional democracies never guaranteed stability liberal democracies always demanded things from citizens participation argument effort struggle they always required some tolerance for cacophony and chaos as well as some willingness to push back at the people who create cacophony and chaos they always acknowledge the possibility of failure a failure that would change plans alter lives break up families we always knew or should have known that history could once again reach into our private lives and rearrange them we always knew or should have known that alternative visions of our nations would try to draw us in but maybe picking our way through the darkness we will find that to get that together we can resist them so in class when i read these last couple of paragraphs i asked the students whether that's an optimistic or a pessimistic vision let me ask you so let me say two things about it one is that you know most people want to you know one really fundamental human desire is for stability and predictability you want to know what the future will be like so that you can plan for it and unfortunately one of the things that democratic politics can't give you is that and so that is one of the it's one of the underlying sources of discomfort in american life um and i don't find that either optimistic or pessimistic i find it it's to be the you know it's the fundamental challenge i mean in exchange for accepting that fear that sense of instability we get all kinds of other things like free speech you know and we get a chance to impact our governments in a way that people in other countries don't so we get other things for it um but let me also say something else which is that i so i am naturally very pessimistic i i mean you don't study soviet history you know if you're not and and and i've had to kind of educate myself out of it and so the conclusion i've come to is that it is very irresponsible for me to be a pessimist because for me to be a pessimist is to tell people like you know my children or like the younger people here you know that there's no hope you know democracy will fail and and i think the point about it's not just democracy but life is that you know everything that happens tomorrow is predicated on what we do today so there is no inevitability it is not inevitable that democracy will succeed and it is not inevitable that democracy will decline and therefore it is incumbent on all of us to be optimists you know we have to act as if it will succeed and we have to work to make it succeed because only if we do that can it happen because if we don't then um then you know then then it then it can go the other way so there is no guarantee of anything um so so so it is necessary to to act as an optimism as an optimist and to and to constantly think about how to be constructive and how to build things great well that that's a wonderful note for us to end on and we could continue the conversation much much longer but i know you have a busy evening ahead of you as well as a busy week or two and we will but you will have a chance to ask anne some questions at the reception afterwards so we invite you to stick around and try to ask her your burning question that i didn't ask that you wished i had but join me in thanking anne for coming joining us thank you you

Channel: University of Richmond

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Length: 60min 44sec (3644 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 16 2022