If books could meet and talk these two would have a lively and complementary conversation. The authors have much in common, too, not least their interest in the history and politics of central and Eastern Europe. They have long been severe critics of Putin’s Russia – and Putin returned the compliment by sanctioning both of them in Autumn 2022. One began as an historian and has reconfigured himself as a public intellectual with numerous subscribers to his substack blog. The other started as a journalist and has evolved into an historian of quality. Each has expressed admiration for the work of the other and their latest books deserve our attention also.
The key inflection point in Timothy Snyder’s “On Freedom” and Anne Applebaum’s “Autocracy Inc.” is the same: the resonating impact of Putin’s aggression in Ukraine. In two earlier books, the authors had already started ringing alarm bells. In “On Tyranny” (2017), Snyder articulated 20 pithy lessons from the 20th century to avoid history repeating itself in the 21st whilst Applebaum pointed to what she saw potentially as “The Twilight of Democracy” (2020). The critical task in each case was to learn from a Europe which one hundred years earlier had polarised around political extremes and which showed signs of doing so again.
In Snyder’s and Applebaum’s latest books, the war in Ukraine is the wake-up call to wider issues of liberal values and the survival of functioning democracies.
Timothy Snyder’s “On Freedom” is as much autobiographical and philosophical as historical. The sign-off location above the author’s name in the book’s preface is the “Kyiv-Dorohusk train, Wagon 10, Compartment 9, 6.10 am, September 10, 2023”. Much of the book was written in war-torn Ukraine. His thinking on the essential characteristics of freedom has been shaped by his own life story from boyhood in Ohio, through his later academic inquiries and journeyings and following a recent near-death experience in hospitals in Germany and the US.
His considered thoughts were framed, honed and tested out among Ukrainians in eastern Ukraine though his underlying focus is on how true freedom might be re-realised in modern-day America. But his conclusions are informed by his experience as an historian of Ukraine and of the fundamental inhumanities of both Nazism and Soviet communism in Eastern Europe with Putin’s Russia as the latest manifestation. His key reflection is that, if freedom is to be a vital force, it must be more than just an absence or evasion of constraints – “negative freedom” – and be driven, among other things, by an assertion of personal sovereignty, factuality (“the grip on the world that allows us to change it”), “available mobility” and solidarity with others if it is to be “positive freedom” as it should be in the US as elsewhere. That said this isn’t – thankfully – a book about Trump though the former President stalks between the lines.
For Snyder, Ukrainians in February 2022 were determined not only to push out the Russians because they were invaders of their country, but because they wanted their own “positive” freedom. Though his voice is undoubtedly authentic and deeply felt – acutely so after his own skirmish with a hospital death – there are times in the writing when Snyder can seem a bit portentous and a little prone to platitudes.
Snyder’s a far more personal book than Applebaum’s and less sharply focussed on the world of – to quote her subtitle – “dictators who want to run the world”; but both authors sense in the different political arenas they address a political urgency and a late, perhaps a last, chance to escape lengthening and menacing international shadows.
For Applebaum in “Autocracy Inc.” the canvas is broader and her urgency less philosophical. In sharply drawn and succinct chapters she deftly shows how autocracies from Russia to China, Venezuela to Zimbabwe with Iran and others alongside, have dug themselves in behind tyrannical methods at home and sanctions-busting alignments abroad. Power and its retention is the only goal they really have in common. To these unambiguous autocracies, Applebaum adds a second concerning category, what she calls “hybrid” states, comprising the likes of India and Hungary who play their own national games, seeking economic and other advantages where they may whether from autocracies or democracies.
But it is the autocracies that Applebaum highlights as the real manipulators intent on sustaining a world of mutual backscratching, financial chicanery and trading link-ups. Furthermore they are not content to play opportunistic games within the international system as it is, they want to re-shape that system to their advantage. “Mutual respect” becomes code for “don’t interfere” with their sovereignty. International humanitarian laws crafted after the Second World War are adjusted where possible or ignored if necessary. The autocrats want to bend the international system to their wills.
Applebaum illustrates well how the autocracies play games and mimic the ways of the democracies for undemocratic purposes. Elections are a sham, judges selected for their pliability not their commitment to the rule of law, national resources are plundered or offered to third countries in return for favours done. Financial rewards flow to compliant oligarchs and onwards to secretive offshore financial centres whilst banking, legal and other facilitators in faraway democracies play along for their own rewards.
“Autocracy Inc.” warns of an expanding pattern of geopolitics in which autocracies are seemingly immune to pushback by the democracies and intent only on retaining power and using it for their own kleptocratic ends. Their enrichment is a product of unconstrained power and unconstrained power is their overriding goal. Even worse, the autocracies not only look after themselves but lend support to other autocracies as well. This menacing mutuality has been part of the picture generated by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an unscrupulous political and economic suborning not only of other autocracies but of ”hybrid” states, too.
Applebaum is particularly adept at exposing past complacency – not least by Merkel’s Germany over the gas pipelines from Russia – on the part of Europeans and North Americans who after the 1980s believed trade and untrammelled internet communication would deliver political convergence between democracies and autocracies.
She doesn’t pretend that pushback will be easy nor that she has all the answers. What she does do is focus down on some key culprits including the banking secrecy which facilitates the “kleptocracies”, the hubris of social media baronies – and prospectively AI – allowed to operate without adequate international regulation, and commercial dealings conducted without regard to their potential adverse political effects.
Applebaum is sharp in her comments on the latter especially: “We no longer live in a world where the very wealthy can do business with autocratic regimes, sometimes promoting the foreign policy goals of those regimes, while at the same time doing business with the American government, or with European governments, and enjoying the status and privileges of citizenship and legal protection in the free markets of the democratic world. It’s time to make them choose”.
Snyder and Applebaum both identify domestic and international turning points made more acute by the impact of Russia’s war against Ukraine. Freedom, Snyder seems to say, can also be mimicked and fall short of a true assertion of personal autonomy and societal solidarity. Authentic freedom requires more than a turning aside from constraints and needs to become more active and positive as the Ukrainians are showing. For Applebaum, the larger picture is that the liberal order created after the Second World War is under threat as autocracies and their international enablers thrive in the shadows created by secrecy, unconstrained new IT and mutual support and profit-taking.
The democracies, she pleads, must wake up to the challenges, including those posed by the facilitators in their own societies, whilst there is still time.
Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World by Anne Applebaum (Allen Lane, £20)
