By Lucan Alumad Way
Professor of political science at the University of Toronto. He is coauthor (with Steven Levitsky) of Revolution and Dictatorship: The Violent Origins of Authoritarian Durability (forthcoming).
As Russian rockets bombarded Kyiv on the night of Thursday, February 24, the world appeared to be on the cusp of a dark era. Many worried not simply about Ukraine but about the security of Europe. Would Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked attack inspire similar aggressions by other authoritarian powers against vulnerable democratic neighbors? Would China seize the moment to move against Taiwan? Would we descend into a period of expansionist authoritarian rule? Such scenarios could still come to pass. Regardless of what follows, Russia’s brutal assault on Ukraine has already generated one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in Europe since World War II.
At the same time, there is considerable evidence that Putin’s attack on international norms could ultimately strengthen the liberal world order. It has so far generated a unified and vigorous response from Western democracies, many of which have been suffering significant dysfunction and persistent authoritarian threats for more than a decade. The war has also been far more costly for Russia than Putin expected—both on the battlefield and as a result of unpredented Western sanctions.
The invasion will almost certainly weaken Russian geopolitical power by entangling it in a fruitless and bloody quagmire, demonstrating the limits of Russian military power and reducing Europe’s future dependence on Russian energy supplies. Finally, the war is likely to sow divisions within the loose coalition of authoritarian states that emerged in the early twenty-first century to combat democracy’s advance.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine comes after more than a decade of serious—but often subtle and ambiguous—attacks on democracy. First, authoritarian populists in Europe and the United States emerged from within the democratic system. They have mostly refrained from attacking democracy directly via military coups, overt assaults on civil liberties, or (with the notable exception of Donald Trump in the 2020 U.S. presidential contest) attempts to steal elections.
Instead, the main challenge to Western democracy has come through less visible efforts to politicize state bureaucracies and to infiltrate previously independent media outlets. Thus Viktor Orbán in Hungary and the Law and Justice party in Poland have not jailed oppositionists or attempted to steal elections, but instead have flooded state bureaucracies with loyalists. These governments have not arrested journalists but rather have muzzled them by helping allies to take control of media companies.
Reliance on such nonviolent, ostensibly legal measures to monopolize political control has obfuscated their assault on democracy. It took eight years of authoritarian abuse by Orbán for Freedom House to cease labeling Hungary as Free. And despite the significant erosion of democratic norms in Poland, Freedom House still calls that country Free today.
In a similar vein, Chinese and Russian efforts to shape regime outcomes outside their borders have also been ambiguous, more focused on degrading the quality of democracy than on dismantling it wholesale. Russian information warfare targeting numerous Western democratic elections since 2014 has been aimed mostly at stoking tribalism and polarization rather than directly attacking democratic institutions.
Within the former Soviet states, Russian actions have been varied. Under President Vladimir Putin, Russia in the 2000s worked behind the scenes to support pro-Russian autocrats such as Ukraine’s Viktor Yanukovych, on the one hand, but also to undermine anti-Russian autocrats in Georgia and Kyrgyzstan, on the other. In the early 1990s under Putin’s predecessor Boris Yeltsin, the Russian government happily backed the pro-Russian democratic opposition in Ukraine.
Until recently, Russia’s most serious assaults on the liberal order involved the invasions of Abkhazia and Ossetia in Georgia in 2008 and of Crimea in Ukraine in 2014. These attacks targeted areas far from the center of Europe, however, and thus did not appear to threaten core Western interests.
Moreover, pro-Russian sentiment was already high in these regions, so Putin could plausibly claim that the Russian incursions were supported by significant portions of the local populations. Furthermore, in Crimea, Russia’s involvement was initially disguised and involved limited violence. The 2014 invasion was undertaken by “little green men” with no insignia on their uniforms.
According to some, this operation inaugurated a “hybrid” that relied less on conventional forces and much more on the “extensive and well-coordinated use of intelligence, psychological warfare, intimidation, bribery, and internet/media propaganda.”
The last decade, then, has been a period of democratic malaise. While the world remains far more democratic than it was during the Cold War, autocrats have taken the initiative, and have done real damage to relatively established democracies such as Hungary, India, and, most significantly, the United States. The attacks on pluralism, however, have been confusing, piecemeal, and gradual. Until now, we have witnessed a slow encroachment, not an all-out assault.
A Muted Response
The ambiguous or seemingly distant character of threats to liberalism engendered a limited reaction from the West. First, Orbán’s use of legalistic attacks on Hungarian democracy helped him to limit pressure from the European Union. For years, members of the European People’s Party (EPP)—Hungary’s allies in the European Parliament, including then–German chancellor Angela Merkel (2005–21)—refrained from openly criticizing Orban and shielded his government from punishment for its authoritarian behavior. The EPP took until 2019 to suspend Orban and managed to mobilize sufficient support to expel his party, Fidesz, only in 2021. (Before he could be expelled, Orban quit the EPP.)
In a similar vein, sanctions imposed on Russia after its invasion of Crimea had limited impact on the Russian economy and did not seriously threaten the interests of the Russian elite. The invasion failed to halt European support for the Nord Stream 2 natural-gas pipeline, owned by the Russian state company Gazprom, that would link Russia and Germany. Likewise, few sanctions resulted from Russia’s interference in the 2016 U.S. election.
Europe’s ability to respond to the Russian threat was hampered by Russia’s deep integration into the European economy and society after the Cold War. Trade between Europe and Russia had already skyrocketed during and after the 1991 collapse of the Soviet Union—rising to about half of Russian foreign trade by 2013. While commerce with Europe declined after the invasion of Crimea, it still represented nearly 40 percent of Russian foreign trade in 2020.
Last year, Russia was the fifth-largest partner for EU exports of goods and the third-largest for EU imports of goods. Russian banks were also deeply integrated into the global financial system. Most important, Europe is extremely dependent on Russian energy—especially Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Poland. In 2020, the region relied on Russia for about a third of its energy. Before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, one of Russia’s largest trading partners was Germany, which imported 55 percent of its gas from Russia.
In addition, since the Soviet collapse, wealthy Russians have been flocking to Europe. London, in particular, became an attractive destination for Russian oligarchs due to its developed financial sector (with lax regulatory oversight), strong educational system, and good shopping. In the last six years, about US$2 billion worth of U.K. property has been purchased by Russian nationals accused of corruption or having ties to the Kremlin.
One impetus for the West’s strengthening economic ties with Russia was a belief that increased integration would encourage the country to liberalize further as its economy became more dependent on Western democracies. These optimistic theories of integration, however, failed to consider that economic linkage could also hamper efforts to hold Russia accountable for abuses. As Patricia Cohen and Stanley Reed note in the New York Times, “the flip side of mutual pain.”
This reality has reduced Europe’s appetite for sanctions. In fact, Putin’s regime has been able to dig its claws into portions of the European elite—a phenomenon best exemplified by former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder (1998–2005), who once called Putin a “flawless democrat.” Schroeder has a leadership position in the state-owned Russian oil company Rosneft, which was sanctioned after the Crimean invasion. A consistent lobbyist for Russia’s interests in Europe, the ex-chancellor was recently tapped to join the board of Gazprom.
Putin has also strengthened ties with autocrats in Serbia and Hungary. The Russian government has been a steady ally of Serbia—opposing the NATO bombing in 1999 and rejecting Kosovo independence in 2008. Orbán likewise has close relations with Putin. Russia recently cut deals with both countries to keep their energy prices low.
Finally, an effective response to attacks on liberalism has been hampered by general demoralization and dysfunction within the West. The Iraq War (2003–11) discredited Western democracy promotion in the eyes of many, while the 2008 financial crisis and 2009 European debt crisis revealed fundamental problems in Western economies and governance structures.
The European Union became highly fractured in the wake of the U.K. decision to leave the EU. Acrimonious relations between the United Kingdom and the EU have consumed European politics since 2016. The situation was even worse in the United States, which became increasingly polarized. Instead of promoting democracy abroad, President Trump repeatedly praised authoritarian leaders.
Such dysfunction, argues G. John Ikenberry, may be partly traced to a “crisis of success” after the collapse of communism. Ikenberry suggests that the absence of a common existential threat weakened cohesion within the liberal West and created permissive conditions for fragmentation and the rise of politicians such as Trump and Orbán, who openly question the international liberal order.
The horrors of World War II that motivated a generation of Europeans to unite in conquering the forces of autocracy and nationalism have become a distant memory. While challenges to liberalism and democracy have been very real, they have lacked the clarity that reigned during the Cold War. Threats have existed at a slow boil—with dangers too subtle and gradual to motivate a concerted and unified democratic response.
Courtesy: Journal of Democracy, published by Washington-based National Endowment for Democracy
