Authoritarian states have powerful reach — even in Ireland
From left, Russian president Vladimir Putin, Chinese president Xi Jinping, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and Pakistani prime minister Shehbaz Sharif arrive at a military parade to commemorate the 80th anniversary of Japan's World War II surrender held in front of Tiananmen Gate in Beijing, China, last month. Picture: Alexander Kazakov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP
Last month, China’s Xi Jinping, Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un captured the global spotlight by appearing together in Beijing for a military parade.
None of them has ever won a fair and competitive election, permitted a free press to investigate the policies or practices of them or their governments, and or allowed political opponents to question, let alone challenge, their political rule.
Yet here they were confidently strolling and chatting while the US president typed stream-of-consciousness into his phone and European leaders seemed divided over how to handle new global realities. The event signalled to many onlookers a changing global order.
As we explore in our new book, , authoritarianism is back in a new and potent form.
Not only has China risen to be a global superpower, but it has done so while cracking down on the more liberal atmosphere that characterised the country amidst globalisation in the 1990s and 2000s.
Russia has decisively rejected the West and descended into a costly war overseen by a personalist imperialist dictatorship, while North Korea has been ruled by the same family since 1948.
Add to this group the financial power of Saudi Arabia and other Gulf monarchies, Turkey’s slide into autocracy, and India’s embrace of illiberalism, and the resurgent tide of global authoritarianism seems overwhelming and the defining geopolitical reality of current times.
What is curious is that the authoritarian resurgence has grown and now thrives in a global context shaped by the West, with the United States and European Union in the lead. Under globalisation, liberal political ideas spread rapidly, with NGOs, activists, media organisations, and universities all able to spread democratic ideas and norms in a relatively open global political environment.
In turn, autocracies like China and Russia were seemingly joining a global market for trade and investment that demanded rules and transparency, a free flow of information and new digital technologies, and increased people-to-people linkages facilitated by cheaper air travel and an easing of visa restrictions. These are all developments that seem anathema to maintaining strict authoritarian rule. So what happened?
Part of the answer is that authoritarian states learned to survive and then repurpose global interconnectedness.
In 2000, then US president Bill Clinton observed that China was trying to crack down on the internet and chuckled this was bound to fail because doing so was like “sort of like trying to nail jello to the wall”.
Fast forward 25 years. Through trial and error and swapping best practices with one another, autocracies learned how to use internet technologies to bolster their rule. The democratising spirit of the internet and the freedom of expression afforded by social media could not only be tamed, but even harnessed to bolster authoritarian control and repression.
And in response to the reach of global media outlets like CNN and the BBC, they founded their own global state propaganda, while placing restrictions like refusing to accredit and denying visas to foreign journalists covering their own countries.
Another part of the new authoritarian push is that they now actively leverage the global linkages between autocracies and democracies that deepened in the 1990s and 2000s. For a long time, it was touted that engagement by Western companies, universities and sporting organisations with authoritarian countries would eventually encourage liberalisation and domestic reforms.
Instead, authoritarians realised that they have leverage, too.
Consider higher education. Facing funding shortfalls from their home governments, established universities located in liberal democracies, including some of those here in Ireland, launched ambitious plans to “internationalise”.
Initially, this meant attracting more foreign students to pay higher feeds to study here. Before long, universities experimented with opening branch campuses abroad — often in non-democracies like the Gulf monarchies, Singapore or China — as another revenue stream.
These arrangements were often justified as a means to bring the benefits of free inquiry and research to the world, even as the authoritarian host was paying for all or most of the cost of these partnerships.
What transpired more often than not, however, is that the domestic laws in the authoritarian host limited what the university could teach and its staff research.
Even more disturbingly, the university’s entanglements with lucrative campuses in dictatorships opened debates about commitments to academic freedom standards and academic practices on the home campus. Rather than the liberal democratic university transforming its authoritarian partner, the influence now often runs in the other direction.
Finally, autocracies learn from and teach one another how best to confront threats to their rule. After the 'Colour Revolutions' in post-Soviet countries, for example, authoritarians in the region saw NGOs and independent civil society not as activists, but as pressing security threats and political tools of the United States and Europe.
In Russia, NGOs receiving foreign funding were stigmatised as “foreign agents” or outright banned as “undesirable organisations”.
These practices spread throughout the post-Soviet region and beyond, with this blocking legislation sometimes literally copy-and-pasted with minor changes from one jurisdiction to another. These tactics have been so successful they are now spreading to liberal democracies themselves.
What does all this mean for a small country like Ireland, that proudly has aligned with liberal democracies and projects itself into the world as tolerant, open, and economically connected?
A world in which authoritarian powers wish to rewrite human rights norms, international economic rules, and technology standards in their image would be dangerous for Ireland.
An open international political system governed by rules and liberal principles allows Ireland to survive and thrive as a democracy, while attracting global companies, cultural institutions, and leading researchers.
And this is why the United States’ turn to an aggressively nationalist foreign policy that imposes politically motivated tariffs and steps back from supporting its allies now compounds this growing illiberal threat.
In this moment of democratic retreat, Ireland can no longer assume it will passively benefit from the prevailing international order. Instead, it must defend its liberal principles while strengthening ties to like-minded democracies. It must also keep investing in its own civic institutions, media and research institutions to strengthen its resilience to these new illiberal influences in this changing world.
- Alexander Dukalskis is associate professor in the School of Politics & International Relations at University College Dublin.
- Alexander Cooley is the Claire Tow professor of Political Science at Barnard College and the former director of Columbia University’s Harriman Institute for the Study of Russia, Eurasia, and Eastern Europe.
- The authors’ new book, , was recently published by Oxford University Press.
- The authors spoke at an event hosted by the Institute for International and European Affairs in Dublin today, Thursday 9 October.
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