The specter of elected despotism

By Melik Kaylan

How Vladimir Putin and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan beat us at our own game.

A specter is haunting Europe, and the world — the specter of elected despotism. In Egypt, Turkey, Russia, Georgia, Iran, and even as far afield as Venezuela, a new order is challenging the Western model of liberal democracy.
Turkey’s recent election shows this phenomenon is replicable and contagious, not absolutist in the form of fascism or communism but a hybrid that mimics democratic protocols. We keep thinking that we must be patient, that these are states in transition, that they’ll get there in the end because the positives inevitably overpower all else, resulting always in liberal democracy. Instead we keep seeing something that confounds us: a state frozen in permanent transition, itself a political destination with its own inexorable momentum.

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Take Turkey, which fits the archetype precisely. There’s a government — Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s AKP — that cannot be voted away because elections are never fair due to vote rigging, gerrymandering, or total control of media. Not without a popular uprising at least, like Ukraine’s Euromaidan or the previous ‘Color Revolutions’ in Ukraine, Georgia and Kyrgystan. But the new order has learned to neutralize that process. Street opposition gets hit early and hard every time. Hence Gezi Park and everything that has followed in Turkey. Post-election, Erdoğan has doubled down: We’re already seeing mass arrests of Gülenists — followers of a moderate Islamist leader, in exile in the U.S. — and more opposition media raided. Following Erdoğan’s example in Turkey, in Georgia the government has just taken over the main opposition TV channel, Rustavi 2.
We all know how it works, because the pattern repeats so recognizably. One-party media. Crony oligarchs. Legitimate opposition equated with terror. Unidentified assassins enforcing state repression. Relative affluence in exchange for freedoms.
An improved consumer economy, constantly threatened by fifth columns, which also threaten the faith, the family, stability itself. Instability is often incited so the party leader can act as strongman-savior. Sisi, Erdoğan, Putin, Khamenei. It works. In Egypt, the police and military abandoned law enforcement and the public voted a general into power to stem the chaos. God knows they needed it. In Turkey, Erdoğan warned before the June 7 election that the country needed his leadership. When voters rebuffed him, he created enough strife that on November 1 they increased his mandate to stop it.
In truth, this should really be called Putinism. When Putin initiated his incremental populist coup over Russia, before the second Chechen war in 1999, nobody dared stand against the universal triumph of Western political standards. But two historic events foreshadowed the ensuing changes. Tienanmen Square in China, and the collapse of order across the Russian Federation with all the attendant horrors of loose nukes, ethnic strife, economic implosion and regional fragmentation. Putin’s response was to recreate a war, just as Erdoğan pushed the PKK to violence. As most people even in Russia believe, Russian security services engineered the famous apartment house bombings in September 1999 and blamed it on the Chechens. Putin promptly re-invaded Chechnya with sympathetic support from the world and bombed Grozny to dust having first allowed extremist Islamists to come in and commit atrocities. Journalists stopped going there, and couldn’t report Putin’s own atrocities. He had a free hand thereafter, throughout Russia. He invented the Putinist model at a time when no smaller country could withstand isolation and opprobrium from the West. But the West wanted Putin to succeed and he knew it. The example of Tienanmen Square, a decade before, endured vividly.
For all the criticism of Beijing’s brutality in 1989, China was rewarded by the West for restoring order. Vast inflows of outside investment followed and fueled the Chinese economic miracle. We chose to believe, for the first time, that maybe stability and free expression don’t go together. In benighted countries you had to sacrifice freedoms to allow wealth creation. In Russia, Putin learned from the lesson. He offered his oligarchs a choice: wealth or political freedoms. He also knew the West wanted his oil, wanted to sell cars and buy natural resources. It wanted stability first. It was willing to make the Faustian pact. Putin sweetened the deal with intermittent plebiscites even as he smothered the democratic institutions that make elections meaningful. His petro-dollar boom, with the West’s complicity, sweetened all he touched.

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Putin set the course of elected despotism and its predictable patterns. For example, the West must consider you indispensable for now, as it does with Sisi and Erdoğan et al. In Venezuela, a Sino-Russian ally, Hugo Chavez quickly emulated the model. He soon realized that the West needed him: During the Iraq War his oil flowed to the U.S. while he daily heaped insults on Washington. And Iraq followed by the Arab Spring fed the myths that have legitimized elected despots. The West exports chaos disguised as freedoms. The despots resist and create wealth for their people. You can have either politics or stability but you can’t have both. That’s their argument, presented as a kind of self-evident law of natural consequences. But they have authored the law —Assad funneled jihadists into Iraq to forestall the stabilizing of democracy. Russia invaded Georgia to neutralize President Saakashvili’s pro-Western successes, then Ukraine to prevent an open society from taking root.
We stand snookered. Our own media has lost sight of the stakes and temporizes with quasi-despots. Putin’s bombing of hospitals goes unremarked in Syria while the world seriously debates if he’s the solution to ISIL. Erdoğan’s election gets legitimate treatment, with breakdowns of voting patterns and percentage shifts. We are told that even in the Kurdish areas, voters shifted to AKP in significant numbers without the context that they did so under Erdoğan’s implicit threat of further violence. This is no small matter. As a strategy it works. You can bully voters into acquiescence. It worked for years in Ukraine when Moscow shut off gas supplies in winters and the public voted to mollify the threat. It worked in Georgia when Moscow made public preparations to re-invade before the 2012 elections and Georgians opted for the pro-Moscow candidate.
It confuses us that not all the despots are allied with each other. Putin and Erdoğan could go to war over Syria. They are, however, aligned against the Western model in their methods and in the endless bogey-invoking of outside forces. We know the phenomenology: it’s time to recognize the “ism,” diagnose the symptoms and evolve a counter-process as we did in the Cold War. The much-maligned U.S. State Department under Secretary John Kerry and his highly media-literate deputy, Richard Stengel (a former editor of Time magazine), is re-embracing public diplomacy as a major weapon in the West’s arsenal by dramatizing such issues, as in the Cold War. Europe would do well to follow suit.
For in the long run, ideas must do much of the work. More than trade. More than weapons. When Putin speaks at the UN about Iraq and Libya and ISIL as the West’s failures, we need counter-arguments. Political liberalization doesn’t generate chaos. Chaos is manufactured by bad actors to prevent it from happening. In the future, a shared Western narrative must help citizens of such places identify and isolate such actors before they gain momentum.
The West should acknowledge blame where blame is due. Open discussion is the alternative we have to offer. But we have to make our ideas heard. Neither Erdoğan nor Putin should be rewarded for providing a “stable investment climate,” and their citizens must know why. On the other hand, when China offers a country money and the U.S. offers lectures on LGBT rights, we will lose every time. We face hardheaded strategic competitors and reality counts. As ever, despots win in the short term. These days that short term seems to be getting longer and longer.