Why Authoritarian Regimes Rise and Fall: Stephen Kotkin

[00:00:00]it's a pleasure to see you all here on this lovely Upper Valley day my name is Bill walor I'm a professor in the department of government here at Dartmouth and there's plenty of seats up here no one will ask you questions there'll be no uh pressure if you come up close to the uh to the front if you have to leave early we'll understand um and it's my great pleasure toh welcome to Dartmouth and introduce today's speaker who is step codin who's a professor of history and international Affairs at Princeton University a holder of many distinguished and important posts at that institution and a scholar who in many ways is perfectly perfectly positioned to talk to you about this today's subject which is trying to understand authoritarian regimes which may seem to be teetering on the edge but seem to last forever and may seem to be like the rock of jalter and always to be with us only to collapse immediately how could with what scholarly background and and credentials does Professor ccken arrive at this subject well I were I to uh exp talk about them at any depth uh uh it would take far too much time away from his uh his his his remarks but just let's mention a few things he has studied From the Inside Out in a groundbreaking monograph uh the Dynamics of stalinism from the inside he studied the collapse of the Eastern European Soviet regimes in 19 1989 which nobody expected he studied things uh uh uh he studied and written uh authoritatively on contemporary politics in such uh non-perfectly Democratic countries as Putin's Russia he has addressed it from a contemporary perspective from a ground up perspective from a top down perspective from a Global Perspective and from a deep historical and contemporary perspective few Scholars uh can manage uh that task as Steven ccken has and so it's my great pleasure to to welcome you to Dartmouth and uh look forward to your comments Steve thank you thank you for that introduction thank you for the invitation this is my first time up here so a nice opportunity I've known Professor Walford for a long time we were Princeton colleagues together in the early days and he's known as the one who got away he slipped through our grasp and now you're the beneficiaries but I have to say we miss him I'm going to give a very simple presentation because it's now 4:30 and you've probably been dealing all day with complex ideas and you've probably had more than a day's worth of complex ideas and so now it's going to be time to simplify a little bit I'm going to introduce a couple of extremely simple propositions illustrate them a little bit and then if you're still here we'll have question and answer my first simple proposition is that authoritarian regimes are simultaneously very powerful and brittle that this is inherent characteristic of authoritarian regimes they're not powerful for a while and then they get brittle later they're brittle all the way through they suffer structural problems that even when they're strong give them these inherent weaknesses and therefore they can collapse at any moment or not collapse we'll get into that in a second my second proposition is that when authoritarian regimes collapse they're replaced by authoritarian regimes some other version of themselves because the stuff that makes up the new regime are usually the shattered pieces of the old regime I used to give this talk and lose everybody right at that very moment but having now lived through Egypt the past couple of years audiences have all of a sudden become more receptive to this question of what if anything replaces an authoritarian regime so those are my two simple propositions I believe in truth and packaging and now I'm going to go through a little bit and see if I can illustrate those points and then I'll leave the individual cases for the most part for discussion so if you want for example to discuss the China regime today the Saudi regime the Iranian regime the Russian regime in detail I'm very happy to do that those and others the UAE Singapore but I'm going to speak a little bit more generally to try to get some general patterns established rather than the nitty-gritty of specific regimes but I'm very eager to discuss whatever specific regimes might be on your mind so we don't really have very many dictatorships anymore there's no Hitler there's no Stalin there's no ma there's no baby Doc and papa do there's no Batista there is still Castro but not much antonescu chesu pki do Fus I have a list of about 75 dictators on the sheet of paper who are just from the 20th century so those regimes are mostly gone and this has been a big problem of interpretation how do you understand a regime that doesn't have a dictator and we've been using vocabulary like for example semi democracy kind of a democracy electoral moral democracy ought to be a democracy there's whole vocabulary a normative vocabulary of democratization to characterize the world's regimes because they're no longer dictatorships I mean obviously they're not mal it's not Stalin right and yet what are they for about 20 years the social Sciences lost their way on these questions I've been teaching at Princeton for 23 years and for the past 23 years I taught the only course on authoritarianism in the social sciences at Princeton there were several hundred courses on democracy and democratization graduate students came to me to write dissertations on democratization in Central Asia for example after the fall of the Soviet regime of course I refused to get involved in such topics because I'm not in the literature department but anyway now there's another course besides mine on authoritarianism at Princeton and I predict that this will now become a trend but for about 20 years democratization and democracy were the dominant tropes in the social sciences and as I say we kind of lost our way on analyzing authoritarian regimes there's been a Revival like this geometric just in the past coup couple of years if you are subjecting yourself to for example the political science journals you would know that once upon a time in fact political science actually cut its teeth on authoritarian regimes one of the great social scientists of our time Juan Lin in the 1960s was Disturbed that people were calling the Franco regime in Spain hitlerite or fascist and so Juan Lind while Franco was still alive while the regime was still in power Franco lasted till 75 tried to make a distinction between totalitarian regimes I.E the Hitlers and the stalins and the ma and authoritarian regimes and it was a very important effort because Franco was something else he wasn't a Hitler regime there was something else there the problem with Juan Lin's definition is it was what the Franco regime didn't have that distinguish it from the totalitarian regimes it was mostly a negative characteristic it wasn't the kind of thing that was easily generalizable it didn't have a strong single party it didn't have a strong ideology it didn't have this and it didn't have that therefore it was authoritarian so ly as I say one of the great social scientists of our Epoch and tackling an important problem which is how to characterize all those regimes that are not necessarily totalitarian but are something else so I believe we're still with that problem today now there have been many many other efforts since Juan Lin Juan Lin himself made other efforts for example he tried sultanistic regimes which he took from Mox vber and got accused of orientalizing orientalizing the problem of authoritarianism with sultanistic regimes there the Calo phenomenon which runs through the Latin American literature and there are many other attempts to characterize these things which are non-democratic and they're not democratizing but they're not totalitarian okay so we have this problem of how to deal with these regimes China Russia Singapore Dubai Iran some would even say Pakistan I certainly would and many others besides okay so let's start out rather than with a definition which will just get into trouble because I myself could rip it apart let alone you and the audience let's start out with what I would call a discernable structure so let's give the kind of overview pattern discernable structure of just about every authoritarian regime first reliable instruments of violence and repression reliable instruments of violence and repression that's absolutely essential you have to have motivated well-fed thugs they have to be ready to do various forms of Dirty Work often on extremely short notice if you don't have that or they're incapable of rising to the call when summoned either you don't have an authority Arian regime to begin with or you don't have it anymore so the fangs let's call that the fangs reliable instruments of violence and repression number two you need cash flow you have to have steady cash flow maybe it's the sale of hydrocarbons that you use you sort of extract out of the ground maybe it's diamonds or maybe you're kirgisistan and you just use democracy Aid to float your authoritarian regime one of my students wrote a dissertation comparing Kazakhstan oil revenues and kyrgistan democracy Aid as the main sources of patronage for those authoritarian regimes and the kiris did very well with democracy 8 they had other trouble okay so you need cash you need cash flow this could be anything counterfeiting counterfeiting $100 bills counterfeiting 500 euro notes whatever it might be because if you look at the budget of an authoritarian regime it's very expensive and it's a cash economy you have you need bulletproof vests depending on the size of your country depending on your aspirations for example if you want to buy the Israeli model of bulletproof vest the expensive model you think AK-47s are cheap they are but those pistols with silencers are unbelievably expensive you put together 10,000 20,000 thugs it's incredible between the bulletproof vest the pistols the silencers the night vision goggles what the expenses are a in the fact that everybody in the regime has a mistress so you need rubies you need emeralds you need diamonds in big numbers really big numbers the import of jewels by authoritarian regimes is colossal and you go down the budget of what an authoritarian regime looks like in practice and it's this gigantic demand for cash because you're buying loyalty you're floating that repressive apparatus and you're buying loyalty in a cash economy and the way you hurt an authoritarian regime is you cut the cash flow that's the single most important policy tool available against any authoritarian regime you cut the aort you cut the cash you deny them access to the international banking system and or you deny them their sources of foreign currency Revenue a lot of them don't have convertible currency so they need foreign currency Revenue which is quite different they need to have something which is ailable on World Markets you unless they counterfeit the money themselves so that's Point number two patronage gets very expensive commodity prices can be extremely volatile they're high and then all of a sudden they're low and you got an expensive regime and you're broke and you can't pay off the goons the thugs you can't pay anybody off so you need a backup even if you're a commodity based the economy you need a backup maybe you hurl a piece of garbage a hunk of metal into the Sea of Japan and demand a ransom for example that's one way to raise a lot of cash the North Koreans have been extremely successful over the years they take a um a refrigerator or a washing machine they put a lot of tin foil around it and it's a satellite and then they put it on what they call a rocket which is this hunk of metal with a flame underneath it and then they fish tail it up into the air and if it doesn't disintegrate yet it then will go somewhere in the water and it'll be a missile launch and then they'll have to be negotiations and they'll need three or four or500 million it's a great gig if you can continue to do it so I'm serious when I say you need cash flow cash flow like the thugs well-motivated well-fed thugs number three number three now it's no small challenge but it's not enough to demobilize potential opponents you got to raise the cost of opposition as high as possible fines jail terms job loss uh kids get thrown out of school no visas to go abroad right you raise the stakes the costs against opposition against political mobilization that's known as demobilizing the opposition that's really important but that's not enough because sometimes the costs are really high and people pay them anyway and then what do you do and the answer is point number three you have to be able to mobilize in the street right you need your own rent a crowd or mobilized crowd ready to go into action as pro- regime mobilization this is a point that's not well understood in Iran in the summer of 2009 there were 3 million people in the streets of tan 3 million that's a pretty sizable number mobilized in opposition 3 million demanding change that regime didn't fold it's still there it's three years later right there were all sorts of talk and prediction about that regime was in trouble but that regime is able to mobilize hundreds of thousands of its own supporters so-called boss Siege so-called revolutionary guards various militia groups some of whom are there because they're paid and most of whom are there because they're they have a belief system and they're paid it's always nice when those things don't dovetail so you need to be able to mobilize serious crowds anybody who doesn't have Pro regime mobilization is not in the game anymore in authoritarianism because you think your thugs are ready to go you think you know you've got them all paid and puffed up they're all fattened up like holiday turkeys and there's not going to be any trouble and nobody's going to hit the streets because you're going to throw their kids out of school or you're going to cut the Visas off and they won't be able to go to London in for the next semester or whatever it might be and then poof the streets are full of people all of a sudden so you need to be able to get your people out in the streets in so-called counter demonstrations Pro regime mobilization okay fourth the fourth characteristic of authoritarian regimes you'll see where this is going if you bear with me I'm not that far from the end you need to be able to manipulate or better yet control life opportunities this is really really important manipulate or control life opportunities right here in the United States We have basically three paths college or university you're on that path right college or university that's the path that you're on the Army that's the other path sometimes paths one and two overlap but often they don't but the the Army is a place where people go they get a job and they get skills and the third path we have in our society is prison those are the basic three Paths of society in the United States College University the Army and prison I'm simplifying a little bit but if you look at the numbers that captures just about everybody so if you can manipulate entrance or non- entrance into one of these life paths for example if you can control University entrance you got a huge lever of power over your Society if you can award or better yet deny University entrance that's a really big deal if you can award or deny entrance to elite units of the army that's a really big deal if you can award and deny trips abroad because you have an exit Visa regime right manipulating or controlling life opportunities is an incredible tool for an authoritarian regime those that are unable even in a small way to manipulate life opportunities find themselves losing control over the situation and perishing now regimes are you know societies are complex but from the top from an authoritarian regime point of view if you're reading along with me the handbook of how to an authoritarian regime which is what I'm presenting to you today it actually looks not so complex you have a certain number of universities and a certain number of University slots and there's a president or a recor of that University and you can summon that person to your office and explain to them you know the procedures for getting into that University or not and if that person doesn't go along you can change the recor it's great if it's a state system that's a lot easier because the person's a state employee but you can do that with employment across the whole economy 90% of employment in Kuwait for example is State controlled 90% 90% of the PE of employment pattern in Kuwait are state employees now state employees are subject to State commands and so if you got a nice State company maybe it's an oil company maybe it's a chemical company maybe it's just a car company there's going to need to be a lot of Executives there well you can give people executive jobs or you can not give people executive jobs so the more stafi your economy is the more control potentially you might have over your life opportunities okay that was Point number four if things are scarce and if they're State you got power you can do it all it could be rationing of milk it could get right down to the level of Staples in the diet that you can control if you have mechanisms of control down in well organized mobilized Community leaders anyway the rewarding of loyalty and the punishment of disloyalty housing even milk as I say okay fifth you got to have influence better yet control over the key media you got to own and or manage the television stations it's just an absolute must internet is now also a must before it was a desirable but now for an authoritarian regime it's an absolute must now it's nice if you can voluntarily get armies of people to enforce on a nationalist basis censorship and control over the internet but that's hard work that's like 247 you need to get your story out and you need to block other stories right because censorship is both the denial of certain forms of information and thinking and the promotion of certain forms of information right censorship has a proactive Dimension not just denial if you have no control over the public sphere you're you're playing with fire you don't have to have 100% control there can be all sorts of pockets of things that go on that you don't control small Market magazines little tiny TV stations that don't reach anybody right newspapers that nobody reads right there are places where you don't have to control you can husband your resources if you have limited resources and control over the public sphere by the way after this lecture you get a certificate and you go to try this in one of your own authoritarian regimes you get to go try it in real life that's part of having gotten into Dartmouth I do this myself at Princeton I'm the vice dean of the policy school okay sixth you need you need to have a narrative you need to have a story about who you are and it has to have some purchase in the society you need to have a well and that well has to be a place where you can go obviously when you get in trouble and put the bucket down and bring up some big story the story of foreign subversion that's a big story right somebody from the outside who's trying to get you foreign subversion is huge especially if it connects to funnyl looking people inside your country too like ethnic minorities or religious minorities right that's a great thing to have in the well you can pull that puppy up just about anytime plausible external threat the IMF that's a great one that works for just about every regime the IMF look what they're trying to do to us they're trying to take away our sovereignty they're trying to make us do things for their benefit the US whoever you went to war with in the 12th or 11th century it's all down in that well you're going to put the bucket and lift it up NOS that receive foreign grants NOS what's that that does anybody believe that they're really non-governmental that they're not taking the orders of the governments that give them grants that fund them that then come into our country and try to subvert our values and try to get our young people to work for them naive liberals that's huge too that's always in the bucket they're always a subversive Force they think they're doing good but they're in the pay of of the foreigners and they're subverting our country naive Liberals are huge anyway you get the picture right you need a well it's based upon some nationalist understanding it's based upon a threat you can't be an authoritarian regime without a threat you need a threat a plausible external threat linked to a plausible internal threat right it's just got to be now so these six characteristics right that I just went through um not every regime has all six some have five out of six that's pretty good I'll take that some only have three out of six and you can see that they're rockier and some have all six and some are churning all six on all cylinders those are the regimes you want to do FDI in they got staying power okay now there are other variables that I'm not really going to go into right now but just to show you I'm not so simplistic I'll mention them there's the issue of the degree of institutionalization or not right there are professional armies and then there are unprofessional armies and it matters a lot right there are professional Thugs and there are unprofessional thugs so the degree of institutionalization or not is really important right sometimes you get a predominantly personalist regime that's based on a person and that regime is not institutionalized and so if that person gets like I don't know liver cancer or sclerosis of the liver there's no regime anymore because it's not deeply institutionalized right it's too personal so there's that Dimension which ought to be I ought to go into greater depth too but I'm not personalized regimes have trouble with blunders much more because authoritarian regimes lack corrective mechanisms and if the person blunders a couple of times there's a very high likelihood they'll blunder often and it becomes a big problem that you have especially if they have a son or a daughter and there's a regression to the mean in the genes now this degree of professionalization is really important for the Post regime this is going to sound uh this going to actually skirt the line here but the Judiciary in the apari regime in South Africa is was valuable and the reason it's valuable is because it understood property rights now it understood property rights only for a very narrowly defined citizenry it enforced AP paride regime on the vast majority of the country but if you expand the category Citizen and you apply the property rights law to more citizens you got a Judiciary that could work the Communist ER judiciaries they didn't understand property rights and they're of not much value in a post communist transition because they don't get it it's not that they're defending the rights of party figures to hold property and then they let everybody hold property like the South African regime defends the rights of a handful of people white property owners and then they can defend the property rights of other people because they understand the way law works so institutionalization can be crucially important in what happens when the regime topples when you get those shards and you're trying to put together something else institutionalization or not matters a lot or even when you're trying to overcome the regime professional armies with a security threat are very difficult to overcome very very difficult to overcome because they are the life opportunities they are the ideology they're just it's a rich thing the Pakistan Egyptian cases with professional armies are troubled to overcome stuff like that very difficult it looked like the Chinese Communists regain control over the military by forcing it partially out of business out of the private economy in the 90s it took something as strong as or what looks strong the Chinese Communist part party to as it were domesticate the Chinese military in the 90s and kick it out of a lot of Private Business now we're seeing maybe that was a premature judgment on party control over the Chinese Army analysts in the intelligence Community let alone in Academia where they don't know the information on the inside but intelligence analysts are split on the degree of control or not on the Chinese Army so but in Pakistan where the Army the professional Army exists as the reason of the state because of the threat from India and also owns a great deal of the economy is extremely difficult to eradicate okay anyway so those were just sort of sidebars that there are other things that need to be talked about like the degree or not of institutionalization right but there's well there's nationalism popul ISM Law and Order well which is often ignored we often think that authoritarian regimes are cynical but in fact they have belief mechanisms and they have loyalties which are based not solely on payoffs but on versions of nationalism populism and so-called Law and Order right the external threat the subversion okay now it could be the case that having a full-fledged ideology is actually a weakness the Iranian regime for example has this problem where they had an Islamic revolution and when they fall short of an Islamic revolution they get in trouble they get critiqued on the basis of islamism and so having a full-fledged ideology is very empowering it seems but it can also be a point of vulnerability not having a full-fledged ideology but just going to the well when you need it looks like it's less empowering but maybe more empowering okay so let's let's summarize so if you're a wouldbe analyst of an authoritarian regime or you're a wouldbe creator of an authoritarian regime there are such schools that you can go to you need to understand politics and institutions economics sociology and social control culture in the media and of course the International System just for the six attributes that I listed L alone other attributes that I could go into now a really good that is to say a lucky authoritarian regime gets its own populace to conduct most of the surveillance that's a trick that is one great way to measure an authoritarian regime where the society conducts surveillance on itself and reports on behavior that it observes of its citizens or fellow residents whether that's through housing committees or Workforce people people that is to say in the places of employment or self-centering on the Internet or whatever right social control imposed by the society itself that costs a lot less and you get a lot more bang for your book there are only so many policemen in any authoritarian regime but there's a big Society to conduct surveillance on itself so that's one way you measure the sophistication and strength of a regime anyway now here's the problem the problem which is the proposition I started with success brings Decay success brings trouble to authoritarian regimes they constantly undermine themselves on purpose on purpose not because they're stupid or they get things wrong but it's in the nature of who they are and how they operate for example they establish overlapping jurisdictions to make sure that one institution doesn't get too powerful one state agency one min Ministry one bureaucracy doesn't get too powerful so that it could maybe push the leader aside for example so they establish tremendous numbers of overlapping jurisdictions so it's often very hard to get anything done inside the regime because three and five and seven agencies are responsible for the same thing and they're not going to want anybody else to get any credit so they deny the other agencies and Ministries the opportunity to perform their own function so by the desire not to have any one agency get too powerful they can paralyze themselves this happens again and again inside authoritarian regimes assign a second body to watch the first body and assign a third body to watch the second body and pretty soon you've got a moras now at the same time in order to make sure that you're getting information up the pipeline in order to make sure that people are reporting what's going on you need tremendous numbers of rivalries jealousies Mutual hatreds inside the regime the Army has to hate the police the police have to hate the Army the Army has to hate the Navy the Navy has to hate the Army otherwise you never find out what's going on it's because the Navy hates the army that the Navy tattles on the Army and tells you what's actually going on in the Army but these rivalries and jealousies this Cutthroat competition within authoritarian regimes also is extremely dysfunctional extremely dysfunctional the overlap the sabotage very inefficient often debilitating auth aarian regimes become extremely ponderous they start to get fat they start to proliferate agencies they start to have so many investigative bodies that nothing gets investigated anymore because everybody is investigating everyone at the same time there are many other problems that I could go into the so-call cutting off the head of the tallest flower or sometimes what's known as negative selection negative selection is when you're the leader of the club and you want to stay the leader of the club and you appoint as your Deputy the stupidest person in the room besides yourself and that way you're never under threat because that person is just not smart enough to outsmart you and to take power away from you and that's at the top and then at the next level and the next level so everybody is looking for a less competent Deputy than themselves this is known as I say as negative selection you select for incompetence lack of initiative lack of foresight this is a huge problem in all authoritarian regimes I see it where I work all the time yes I don't the fear of The Talented is a big problem a very big problem now there are many other problems that I could go into authoritarian regimes the biggest one though is the succession problem you see life is good I got mine you got yours nobody asks any questions my kids are going to school at LSA maybe I got another kid at Dartmouth it's big price tag it's 10 times my nominal salary but I'm not feeling the pinch I got a mayback for rides around the neighborhood to show everybody that I'm to be feared and to be taken seriously my wife has a jewel on every finger and my mistress has two jewels on every finger my kids have birthday parties in Dubai where whoever it is some doggy dog dog dog dog is the performer right yeah and so I'm living large but you know how can I be sure that tomorrow I'm going to be living large too what's the guarantee that all my loyalty all the dirty work I'm doing for this regime is going to be recognized tomorrow and the day after tomorrow I mean what would happen for example if the leader got sick and a new person came in and it was the person that you know I didn't treat that well before or whatever the case might be the succession ambiguity of authoritarian regime is crippling every single day not just when Mubarak is 82 and has cancer and nobody takes Gamal his son seriously then it's clear as day right that you got no future with this regime if a guy's 82 and is sick and the son is not going to handle the situation you have a problem that's clear but when they're 55 they can still get cancer when they're 55 there can be a coup or the price of oil could go down or all sorts of things can happen so even when an authoritarian regime looks like it's not in a succession crisis it's in a permanent succession crisis and there's never a secure future in an authoritarian regime that's why the money is in lickstein it's in Slovakia it's where whever it has to be because you never know push comes to shove and events happen really quickly and you know they cut off the banking system and I mean so these people they live in a world of succession ambiguity so therefore another measure of an authoritarian regime is its ability to handle authoritarian successions and until recently the Chinese regime was considered the the gold standard in authoritarian succession right dong shaing gave up power while he was still alive and there was an authoritarian transition and then there was a second authoritarian transition that brought that boo who's in now and now we expect a third authoritarian transition nobody was shot there were no massive purges right there was no violent redistribution of property that's how they usually have successions in authoritarian regimes it was pretty smooth behind the scenes they cut a deal the elite got together and they cut a deal and they gave portfolios and things out and they balanced things and they had an authoritarian succession that was peaceful and stable mechanisms that are not transparent that we don't fully understand that many people who claim to understand don't know either even if they're on their side because you don't know any more on the inside of these regimes than you do on the outside that's another point for a different day's lecture anyway so my point is just that authoritarian regimes have these inherent problems these inherent problems are something they can't really do much about they can try right but the information degrades the governance apparatus decays the ambiguity over the succession is a problem psychologically and more than psychologically it leads people to take action sometimes when they're afraid of what the succession might be they themselves might try their own succession and you get a coup or a p inside the regime sometimes because of the ambiguity over the succession issue okay in conclusion so nobody should feel sorry for authoritarian regimes I just want to make that clear you should have this is not an attempt to elicit sympathy on their behalf because they have it hard but I do hope I've made the point that authoritarian regimes are not just the absence of democracy they're not default oh they don't have democracy therefore they're an authoritarian regime authoritarian regimes like Juan lince was trying to say are something that have to be created they have to be established you need to work to get these attributes the six attributes that I talked about you need to have those mechanisms of repression you need to have the cash flow the an authoritarian regime is in fact an achievement it's not easy to do and it's not easy to maintain because it has this inherent tendency to undermine itself when it's successful now the usual problems that we think authoritarian regimes have may not be the real problems you know for example disloyalty of intellectuals exactly disloyalty of intellectuals the number of intellectuals who are not loyal inside authoritarian regimes is so small so small my favorite is the case study of the Italian fascist regime and how many professors resigned their position at University when molini came to power anybody know the answer to this Google it it's one of the numbers in the algorithm you know the algorithm zero or one so things that we normally see as threatening to authoritarian regimes may not be the biggest problems that they have the biggest problems that authoritarian regimes have are mostly themselves because this is a hard thing to do and when you do it well things get worse almost every authoritarian regime decays it performs it can improve for a while and perform better but it gets to a point where it decays there's very little steady state authoritarianism very low the succession problem clearly indicates that but the information problem the governance problem there are many different structural reasons for the decay in an authoritarian regime we haven't Ted about but should talk about the international environment and the ways in which it's conducive or not to authoritarianism you know the hand bites that feeds one day they're loaning you money and the next day they're telling you you got to get on a plane and fly out of there right the international environment can also be very tricky for these regimes it's a friend but then it's not a friend and it can be very Whimsical so that's another destabilizing factor and it's a factor entirely out of their control there are very few small states that behave like big States big States just do what they want and then if it complies with international law they claim credit for complying with international law and if it doesn't comply with international law they tell you that international law doesn't apply to them in this particular case right and they can do really dumb things and walk away to do dumb things another day right that that's what a big state is small states they don't have those types of options and most countries are not big States and only one small state that I know gets away with behaving like a big state I won't mention the name of that state but I think you know which one I'm talking about okay so deliberate but self-defeating inefficiency debilitating negative selection we didn't even get to the part about rampant cronyism in the key agencies like running the economy and running the police force the internal lies because of the disincentives to report the truth the lack of basic information about their own societies they get so good at manipulating the public fear that they think things are good in the country and then they get quote shocked when they find 10,000 or 100,000 people in the streets cuz that's not what they've been reading about their own Society in fact the more you study authoritarian regimes the more you see that it's a wonder that they survive at all because as I say it's their very success that undermines them their very strengths threaten their own Survival now just the final point I see I'm out of time is that accurate yep okay so on the issue I thought I was going to talk about this more but maybe we'll end here on the issue of what happens when they're toast when they go up and smoke right Mubarak is gone they sack him it took him a while it took them a lot to get up the courage because there had been negative selection at the top of the Egyptian Military there were a bunch of weenies up there and even though they had no future with MC Mark even though the whole thing was toast it took him a while to get rid of him it took the courage of all those people who hit the streets day after day right which they then used as a pretext to sack Mubarak and then of course lo and behold that interest group that professional agency that professional Army is looking to hold on right but they have incompetence inability to rule in ability to run things and there are still courageous people in the society right so the Egyptian story could go on like this for quite sometime or it could topple over like that but if it were to topple over like that right if the courageous people were to hit the streets again or if the military was just going to panic and get on a plane and flee that's what they mostly used to do right get on a plane and get out of there like that guy in North Africa did right I think there were there was a little bit of trouble he got on a plane and poof that was the first one the North African one remember that the Tunisian one I think it was the problem is is that you need to institutionalize alternatives to the authoritarian regime that's the trouble right the problem is you need a judiciary how do you get a Judiciary that's a really hard thing to create a Judiciary a successful professional semi-autonomous Judiciary right you topple the bum and then where do you go like to open the cupboard and pull out a Judiciary it's tough you need a civil service you think Judiciary is hard you need a civil service right that perform State functions without taking the money themselves that's a really hard thing to get and I could go on down the list of things that you need right you need media that are not controlled by a single person who just happens to be really rich and when they privatize the station you know because the state dictator was toppled then you get a controlled media again but controlled in a different way right you have issues of uh institutions that need to be created that the authoritarian regime doesn't have and doesn't want to have and that are difficult to create on the fly in a transition and it's one of the reasons you get another Incarnation maybe Dumber maybe weaker maybe better from an authoritarian point of view of the previous regime you often get mush for really long periods of time for example the kirgistan case that I was talking about I mean those guys they don't even have a police force it's just so pathetic right I mean all that cash that came through democracy Aid and their Ministry interior is still mush right you often get this mush for a while before somebody has the wherewithal to consolidate to establish Consolidated and maintain an authoritarian regime which I said isn't a perverse achievement right so very difficult to get an institutionalized alternative for the reason that the authoritarian regime while it's alive is denying things like your Judiciary or a civil service the very key institutions you need you don't need hope alone you don't need votes or elections alone there are a lot of places that have parliaments I remember when Slobodan mosovich was elected for example right if he hadn't lost four Wars he still be there so this is the difficult problem is it's very hard to figure out I guess that's why we're dependent on you to figure this out you know smart young people who are going to be in situations like this how you get from an authoritarian regime being toppled or as in most cases toppling itself being replaced by something better that's long-term and institutional anyway we'll end there thank you very much for your time would you like me to uh take questions for you you want to just point it raised hands as you wish you're the host you tell me how you'd like to do this why don't you just take your own questions folks please sure um has there been an example in history where an authoritarian regime has been toppled and the people have created a holy Democratic regime on their own without forign intervention sure sure there are such examples and there are even debates about the cases where it looks like foreign intervention but some people in the debate say that the foreign intervention wasn't the decisive factor and those few cases where there's been success give hope that it can be done or replicated in other cases so the obvious successes West Germany and Japan post World War II those are the two two most important successes and then there's a debate in both of those cases whether the US occupation was or was not a decisive factor or whether the society themselves established stable market economies and stable democracies right it's a difficult debate to resolve I'm not going to rehearse that debate right now but those are the two most important cases from which this literature begins there's the case of turkey during and after atat Turk that's considered a really important case there's the case of South Korea also considered a crucial case and there's the case of Taiwan right those are the most referred to cases where you had a serious you know for real authoritarian regime and then you got something much better which is now a stable of rule of law order right there are a couple of other cases but those are the main ones in the literature and then there are many more cases where you didn't get that and so people try to isolate what the factors were in those successful cases and see how they can be applied right do you need foreign occupation or not which was part of your question right or do you need foreign pressure or not to democratize right and the answer is that the establishment of the rule of law part the Constitutional order that's the key variable that people spend less time figuring out or have less to say about they can tell you where the elections came from where the new political party system came from how they got a parliament for example or in some cases a quasi Parliament right but a lot of places with parliaments or quasi parliaments don't have the other pieces the rule of law the Judiciary and the Civil Service the Civil Service which is it's always a degree mostly non-corrupt right let me can I have a parenthesis right here so corruption is obviously a deeply misused term and Corruption can sometimes actually uh be something other than corruption and so we have to be very careful when we use the term corruption but this will concretize the problem so a Japanese uh civil servant in the ministry of Roads goes to China and and he makes $10,000 a month in Japan and he meets his counterpart in the ministry of roads in China and the ministry of Roads guy in China he makes $1,000 a month rather than 10,000 as a salary and his house is 10 times larger so one tenth the salary and 10 times larger the house so it's not really uh polite to ask but the Japanese civil servant can't resist and he says you know I mean you make 1/10th of what I make and yet your house is 10 times larger there's something that I don't understand and he takes them over to the window and he says you see that road he says yeah I see that road 20% meaning he siphoned off 20% of the state allocation to his own pocket for building the road and then the Japanese civil servant goes to Nigeria and gets to Nigeria and meets the counterpart in Nigeria and the Nigerian civil servant makes $100 a month not 10,000 like the Japanese civil servant and not a thousand like the Chinese one and his house is a 100 times larger than the Japanese guy's house which means it's got three rooms I lived in Japan for two and a half years and once again he poses the question gez you know how is it possible that you make only $100 a month and your house is so big and he takes him over to the window and he says you see that road out there and the Japanese civil servant like me has to stand on tippy toes and looks out says no I don't see any road out there and the Nigerian says that's right 100% so in one country you have a road and in another country you don't have a road so that's what you got to talk about when you use it terms like corruption it's not an absolute question it's whether you got the road or not and then whether the road is quality enough road that it won't collapse on you and whether your kids if there's a a uh earthquake your kids won't be trapped in their school right it's it's not built out of sand Etc there's all sorts of ways to measure these things rather than in the usual dollar terms of corruption so that's a big problem for authoritarian regimes also in this transition phase because sometimes the transition can involve a lot of expropriation of property but there are those cases maybe he'll figure out what was the key factor and how it can be applied to other cases so um are there authoritarian regimes that are supported by the United States and how do you feel about it if there are I think there were but yeah well you know I mean I don't work for the government so I'm not involved in any of that type of direct activity myself but I am a citizen of the country and I pay taxes so I have responsibility in that sense so uh you pay decent money for this education here at Dartmouth would be my guess if the prices here are anything like the prices I know back home but I'm going to give you a discount on this one now this is this is called geopolitics 101 this should do for those of you who are ready for international relations degree geopolitics 101 so geopolitics 101 is it's really really costly to oppose the United States really costly the costs are astronomical you can ask the Nazi regime you can ask the Soviet regime right you can ask the Japanese it's very costly to oppose the you can ask contemporary Russia they're paying this price for reasons that you have to figure maybe you can figure out why the Russian regime likes to oppose the United States at every turn it's very costly it's also really beneficial to be on the same side as the United States it canot always be beneficial sometimes it can also be ugly to be even on their same side but if your choice is between paying the cost of opposition to the United States or trying to be partner with the United States you take the partnership that's geopolitics 101 you can ask the Chinese regime they figured this out long ago they don't like Washington very much they don't like American policy very much but they're not going to pay the costs of direct confrontation with the United States they're going to be allies and partners and reap all the benefits and pay none of the costs because they think that eventually perhaps it redounds to them and they can play their own game not just the American game they can maybe even change the rules so most countries understand that having some type of beneficial relationship with the United States is a good thing if they can do it so the United States supports to use your term uh Democratic regimes and non-democratic regimes all over the world and it also undermines them sometimes because geopolitics 102 is that nobody can figure this Washington thing out and they change on a dime and they're your friend one minute and your enemy the next and you didn't change yourself they changed and it's like you know you go on a date and they say it's not about you it's about me right that's what Washington is like that's geopolitics 102 but already that's getting probably that may be the Master's level the next level up so yeah we support author the International System is conducive to authoritarian regimes that provide stability I think that's a an observable fact and it's also sometimes not conducive because the International System is not a system it's a bunch of individual actors who can be very Whimsical we got any more questions or we're done yes um kind of building off to that question you know I know there's a lot of Doubt America with theb how long you think that s of well there are choices now there's the China Choice that's a really important serious choice that countries have and that gives them much more leverage uh when there's two places to shop instead of one place to shop sometimes the price goes down sometimes the selection gets better right so that's a really important development the f future of all authoritarian regimes is linked to the China variable if you think China is going to be continue to be successful you would bet one way for future of authoritarian regimes if you thought China was not going to be successful continuing going forward or was potentially going to democratize then you would have a different geopolitical environment for all authoritarian regimes they would have a much tougher picture going forward so the China variable or having choice in the system now is really important having said that us power is just is awesome it's really awesome I do the world history since chingas Han chingas Han to the present that's one of the lecture courses I do at Princeton and there's just nothing nothing in history that looks like this this kind of economic dynamism military power and cultural power all combined in an environment where you got Canada on one side Mexico on the other the Atlantic and the Pacific that's just too good to be true so American power is dumb and it gets away with being dumb it can be as dumb as it wants to be and just pick up and go on it can invade countries it can invade the wrong country it can have a financial crisis it can do just so many things to hurt itself and there it goes it's still going strong now there's a technical problem in the United States the United States is technically bankrupt you notice that too the United States is technically bankrupt till about 2030 or so because we have this this thing that's going through the snake so so so the social policy is a snake right and there's this thing that was born between 1946 and 64 and it's this gigantic hump that's passing through the snake and at one point it passed through the university system right and universities tripled in size in the 1960s and70s more College professors were hired in the 1960s and70s than in all previous American history combined when that 1946 to 64 birth demographic that giant thing was passing through the snake and got to the college part College just boomed gigantically but they're done with college now so colleges they're taking those down that stuff is toast those Laboratories those State systems all that stuff is because they're in a different part of the snake now they're in the CAT scan part of the snake those e coupon rides at the hospital and that feif for service medical system right and when they pass through that part of the snake that's it that's bankruptcy we're in that part right now till we put them all in the ground which is a ways off unfortunately it looks like you got you know some people say 2030 but to me it looks like 2045 people are just living too long now 50% of all Medicare spending is the last year of Life 50% 33% of all Health Care spending in the United States is last your life 33% of all Healthcare and 50% of Medicaid those are the sort of basic line statistics so if people were dying not in the hospital or they there was a month fewer in their life this country would have a surplus we would be so rich we wouldn't know what to do with it that's the cost how to get those people in the ground yeah nobody wants to give up the chance at one extra month because you don't know that the last year of life is the last year of life until you know there's a moment when you know and up till then you're just ill right and something like they could find a cure that's the greatest word right in America a cure and so yeah we're bankrupt but bankruptcy is a technical problem the French went bankrupt in the 18th century and it had big consequences very big consequences uh the British took over the world the Ching went bankrupt in the early 19th century and that had really big consequences my God the Ching bankruptcy in the first part of the 19th century then the Narco traffickers came in the uh that drug cartel otherwise known as the British Empire forcing the sale of opium and I mean and one thing led to another and then there was Ma and that was a rough patch right the Ching bankruptcy had very long difficult consequences for China so it's a non-trivial problem to go bankrupt but there are ways to manage finances the reason the British took over the world was because they invented the debt they invented State debt the they tried to get people to pay a little bit more in taxes they called the Estates General and one thing led to another and they Cho the guy's head off right the British they figured the finances out the fiscal military State uh can Ure very large deficits very big expenses you can go to war in two theaters simultaneously you can occupy Japan and Germany at the same time I mean you can do a lot of things and incur a great deal of debt if you have a manageable system and your politics can respond and all sorts of things right the debt in and of itself is not necessarily debilitating it's the ability of the system to manage these types of challenges right so the answer to your question is the degree of optimism one has in the political system to be able to manage this thing passing through the snake at the CAT scan stage right and so the money that's supposed to be spent on you is now being spent on them cuz they have that last year life right if you have any money saved up you should buy an intensive care bed you should go to the hospital there got to be a hospital you guys have a medical school yeah you go to the hospital and you chip in like you know class of 2013 you chip in and you buy an intensive care bed cuz it's just a cash machine intensive care beds are never empty even they clean them sometimes the people are still in them because they generate so much money so much money the value of an intensive a hospital bed is no bargain right I mean if you've ever stayed at something like the the um the Ritz Colton or the Four Seasons and then you go to the hospital you're like oh my God this is more than there is right yes but then you go to the Intensive Care bed section and that's where the big money is and they got the Specialists coming through for their driveby 15 seconds they write a little bit on the chart 1,200 1,800 2800 4,800 they send you for the E coupon rides I mean you're there a day and a half 250,000 300,000 600,000 for a long week you don't even know because you're in an intensive care bed right so they got you so you got to get your you got to get one for yourself you got to get an intensive care bed and you'll you can do anything you want in life you can have as many startups and they can all fail as long as you have the cash coming in from the Intensive Care bed so yeah that's a problem I would say that that's a deep and fundamental problem for a challenge for America but uh American power just to repeat is really awesome that doesn't mean it's good but it's awesome yeah um speaking of American power I seem to be in my drawing a lot of parallels between the points you made about how Maes operate in the way we operate in our uh foreign policy in the United States in respect to like the global interactions between us and other nations can you speak to that bit perhaps you know um how to say this politely so the definition of authoritarianism or its absence is limitations on Executive Authority that's the bottom line are there real not just practical but real formal limitations on Executive Authority there are practical limitations on Executive Authority right for example your infrastructure is no good right you have poor roads or poor railroads or poor airports and so you're EX ex cutive Authority can't reach into every village it's not wired or whatever it might be right but I'm talking about formal institutional limits on Executive Authority that's the bottom line in authoritarian regime right if you ask me is it good to expand executive Authority my answer would mostly be no there are very few cases where it's good to expand executive Authority I like limits on Executive Authority I feel much safer as an historian of the world when I see limits on Executive Authority you know enlightened despotism is a great temptation but then they change the despot and you're left with unenlightened despotism so having limits on Executive authority over the long term is better than having no limits and having an enlightened desperate for a while doing great things the problem with big countries is that there's not that many limits on executive power when they're in the international Realm so that was the analogy that you were drawing and I agree with that the only limits on the analogy of executive Authority in the National realm are other countries with a lot of power but that as Professor wfor has already taught you no doubt that creates challenges and instabilities of its own you know when you have a bunch of states that are powerful they can limit each other but then they can also cause trouble for each other and when you have one state that seems like it can impose its will on a system right be a hegemon as it's sometimes called in the political science jargon right that looks like it's better but then there are very few ways if any to control the power of that particular State there are attempts you know coalitions balancing coalitions International institutions but it's so both the heiman problem and the multiple polarity or the multiple centers of power can be sources of instability in an international system so yeah you know there's no Judiciary internationally that can enforce itself without the cooperation of the powers that BAC that's different from uh fully institutionalized limits on Executive Authority inside a country yes do you treat authoritarianism as a phenomenon yeah so so uh modern authoritarianism which was the subject of this lecture uh is the rule of the few in the name of the many there are other forms of authoritarianism that don't claim to rule in the name of the many and we could go through I'm sure you know quite a lot of those cases too having asked the question but there's something about the modern period where they rule in the few in by the few but in the name of everyone in the name of the many there's a mass quality to Modern authoritarianism so that's a distinction any more questions or we get done yes you tell me what do you think I don't even know that's why I ask come on well I am from of China so don't yeah so China has a lot of things going for it a lot of things going for it it doesn't have uh formal limits on Executive Authority but it has informal mechanisms that limit executive Authority there's an enforced Collective rule that dis empowers the leader so that they don't get another mou so the president of China has significantly less power than the president of the United States even though China has an authoritarian system and America has a nonauthoritarian this is difficult for people to grasp because we have you know this democracy democratization mindset but so China has some good things already built into the system it also has Hong Kong which of course is a key secret to Chinese economic success because it had a fully functional rule of law capitalist fin fincial system inside as it were that's very rare Russia had nothing to compare to Hong Kong it also has Taiwan which is another critically important example Taiwan and Hong Kong made up the majority of foreign direct investment in China during the 90s which was the crucial period of economic boom um the problem seems to be in the Chinese case not a recognition that the current system needs to change they recognize that but an understanding of the steps the stages by which you can be stable while you're changing right so recognition that change is necessary is widespread among the political Elites understanding of how change can be introduced while the system remains overall stable is not well understood and so that's the stasis that's where they're stuck they're stuck in figuring out not that they need change but how they get change without upheaval those who are against change at all use this argument very powerfully change is equal to turmoil but even those who are pro change fear destabilizing the situation right so what usually happens in a situation like that is is nothing they just stay where they are because they don't want to take the leap and if they can get away with staying where they are they will or external events destabilize the situation right the thing about structures is that events can intervene unexpectedly right the famous quote of Harold McMillan who will be unknown in this room but was once an important figure in the British political establishment and things were going swimmingly and they said you know what could upset the situation and he said events Dear Boy events so sometimes reluctancy to move and stasis can be upended by ways that people don't foresee like the Soviet Union collapses and all of a sudden you got to figure out why that shouldn't happen to you right and so things can happen around China that could affect the uh calculus of whether to move or not still nonetheless it has to be said that the Chinese story is just really really impressive just a really impressive story 30 years of market economics without the rule of law in total Defiance of American social science is it a spectacular spectacular achievement they have private property without property rights and they have a market economy without the rule of law none of which is possible and both of which have been going on for most of my adult life so that's a really impressive story but the issue with China is not can they continue in the same vein that's never the issue the issue is is there resiliency in there or not in other words when the crisis comes because everything experiences a crisis do they bounce back or does the whole thing fall down it's not the crisis it's the resiliency and the ability to respond to the crisis that we have no idea people are very let's say um there's no consensus the disagreement is very wide on the resiliency that's built into the China system I'm not a China expert but but talking to China experts that's the impression that I get one last question we got three hands up what do you want to do he asked already once you asked once you didn't ask yet I think that'd be fair you said you're talking about mod uh authi today excuse me one second so uh what consider the first uh yeah um you know that's a semi semantic problem and you will get some disagreement on that um many people consider Napoleon the kind of instigator of this stuff where he had an eye to the mass and he was willing to use authoritarian techniques that were populist um so that's one where one place you could start others consider little Napoleon the farest part you know what did Mark say his first time tragedy second time first little Napoleon or Napoleon theii who introduced universal suffrage because he thought the peasants would vote for his authoritarian and they did so sometimes little Napoleon is considered the one sometimes bismar is considered the one uh but bismar uh it didn't work his system uh it was not sufficiently wide political base and so his system came apart the German system came apart so for my own purposes I would say that these are precursors to Modern authoritarianism who introduced the kind of idea of how you do this are we good on that we're good thank you very much thank you