Freedom House Report on Modern Authoritarian Strategies and Ideologies

Freedom House Eurasian countries and elsewhere in the world. While today there is nothing that resembles the Comintern of Soviet times, authoritarian countries have devel- oped an ad hoc network of cooperation that has proven effective at the United Nations and in regional bodies like the Organization of American States. Adapting to survive Modern authoritarianism matured as regimes sought to defend themselves against the sorts of civil society movements that triggered “color revolutions” in Georgia, Ukraine, and elsewhere in the early 2000s. On their own, formal opposition parties were relatively easy to marginalize or co-opt, and traditional mass media could be brought to heel through pressure on private owners, among other techniques. But civil society organizations presented a formidable chal- lenge in some settings, as they were able to mobilize the public—especially students and young people— around nonpartisan reformist goals and use relatively open online media to spread their messages. It is now a major objective of modern authoritarian states to suppress civil society before it becomes strong enough to challenge the incumbent political leadership. Yet whereas dissidents were dispatched to the gulag or explicitly exiled by the Soviets, or jailed and murdered by traditional dictatorships like Augus- to Pinochet's Chile, today’s activists are checked by NGO regulations that control registration and foreign funding, laws that allow arbitrary restrictions on public protest, and trumped-up criminal charges for key organizers that serve to intimidate others. Modern authoritarianism has also devised special methods to bring the internet under political control without shutting it down entirely. While old-style dic- tatorships like Cuba long prevented the widespread use of the internet out of fear that online communi- cations would pose a threat to the state's monopoly on information, modern authoritarians understood that a high rate of internet penetration is essential to participation in the global economy. However, once online media emerged as a real alternative to tradi- tional news sources and a crucial tool for civic and political mobilization, these regimes began to step up their interference. The Chinese government has developed the world’s most sophisticated system of internet controls. Its so- called Great Firewall, a censorship and filtering appa- ratus designed to prevent the circulation of informa- tion that the authorities deem politically dangerous without affecting nonsensitive information, requires tremendous financial, human, and technological re- sources to maintain. Other regimes have not attempt- ed anything approaching the scale of China's system, but some have constructed more limited versions or simply relied on inexpensive offline techniques like arrests of critical bloggers, direct pressure on the owners of major online platforms, and new laws that force internet sites to self-censor. Alternative values While modern authoritarians initially mobilized for defensive purposes, to thwart color revolutions or the liberal opposition, they have become increasingly aggressive in challenging the democratic norms that prevailed in the wake of the Cold War, and in setting forth a rough set of political values as an alternative to the liberal model. Examples of this phenomenon include: 1. Majoritarianism: A signal idea of many author- itarians is the proposition that elections are winner-take-all affairs in which the victor has an absolute mandate, with little or no interference from institutional checks and balances. Putin, Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the Venezuelan chavista leadership all behave as if there are no valid controls on their authority, the opposition has no rights, and the system is theirs to dismantle and remake from top to bottom. Disturbingly, the leaders of some dem- ocratic societies have begun to embrace the majoritarian idea. The Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, has instituted a thorough overhaul of the country's constitution and national leg- islation with an eye toward measures that will insulate his party from future defeat. 2. Sovereignty: A number of governments have invoked the doctrine of absolute sovereignty to rebuff international criticism of restrictions on the press, the smothering of civil society, the persecution of the political opposition, and the repression of minority groups. They claim that the enforcement of universal human rights standards or judgments from transnational legal bodies represent undue interference in their domestic affairs and a violation of national pre- rogatives. 3. Dictatorship of law: Initially articulated by Vlad- imir Putin, this phrase has come to signify the adoption of laws that are so vaguely written as to www.freedomhouse.org HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019241