‘Warfare often coincides with movements towards democracy’

James A. Robinson, economist and co-author of ‘Why Nations Fail?’, discusses the origins of Russia’s vulnerable dictatorship

Authoritarian regimes around the world are closely watching Putin’s ongoing war in Ukraine. The visible failure of the Russian army may be pushing other dictatorships away from aggressive actions against their neighbours. In recent years, the number of democracies in the world has been shrinking. Meanwhile, the number of authoritarian regimes is on the rise. However, Ukraine’s heroic resistance to Russian aggression — and a potential victory in the war — could make the idea of democracy attractive again.

Novaya-Europe talked to James A. Robinson, professor at the University of Chicago, economist and political scientist, about the institutional foundations of Ukrainian democracy and Russian dictatorship, as well as the possible implications that led Russia to war.

James A. Robinson

Economist and co-author of books on the institutional origins of democracy and authoritarian regimes, including “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty” and “The Narrow Corridor: States, Society and the Fate of Liberty”. He is a professor at the Harris School of Public Policy, University of Chicago and the Institute Director of The Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts at the Harris School.

The war that’s going on right now between Russia and Ukraine is one of the biggest between modern sovereign states in a while, but it’s also a conflict between authoritarianism on one side, and a flawed, but democratic one on the other. So it’s a war between different institutions as well. Do you think, based on how authoritarian states make decisions, that because of the failure of Russia to clearly defeat Ukraine, we can expect a stop in the global process of democratic backsliding, or more awareness of the pitfalls of authoritarianism?

Yes. It gives incentives to sort of differentiate yourself from these authoritarian regimes, and it shows the perils of forming coalitions with governments like in Russia, like Putin’s regime, which many would-be authoritarians have been doing. I think that’s right. And it reveals the true nature of the regime, the risks of moving in that direction, and the sheer kind of hypocrisy of a lot of it.

If you look at the history of democracy, warfare often coincides with movements towards democracy. I think that’s clearly what’s happening in Ukraine. It’s leading to the kind of differentiation of the Ukrainian identity, relative to Russian identity, an emphasis on Ukrainian language, Ukrainian culture, distinctiveness of Ukrainian history. Maybe that’s all a bit invented in some ways, but these histories are all invented. The idea of English identity was invented, too. It will push Ukraine in a much more democratic and inclusive direction, it seems to me, and hopefully will have the same consequences in other parts of Eastern Europe, like Hungary, where people may be re-evaluating the way things have gone in the past decade or so.

There’s long been a theory that authoritarian regimes are better and faster at mobilising resources for war. But this seems to not have proven true in Russia’s case, seeing as its infrastructure and technology have been less effective than it hoped. Does that say something about the nature of authoritarianism?

Yes, that’s what happened in Russia. The authoritarian regime has worked by allowing for enormous amounts of corruption, misallocation of resources, and financial extraction by politically connected elites, which has undermined the military capability in ways that were not anticipated or understood. You have a classic example of a very personalised dictatorship: Putin surrounds himself with yes-people who tell him what they think he wants to hear, so he doesn’t really get good information.

A great example of this is actually the First World War. The Germans looked very successful to start with, when the military took over the state. And in England, meanwhile, the trade unionists were going on strike and people were saying, “Look at the Germans, the military took over. We have such a mess in England, we’re never gonna be able to fight this. We need a much more autocratic model!” But the fact of the matter was that the military in Germany had their strategy, and they couldn’t shift from it. When the strategy didn’t work, they just tried to double down on it, and they got stuck. And in England, it was a mess, people complained, but they learned, they adapted.

Democracy is kind of messy, but you have to learn and have dissenting opinions, then you have to correct your course and that’s what finally brings military success. Democracy is also ultimately better at mobilising people behind a legitimate collective project in a way you can’t really have under authoritarianism. Why is Putin using all these prisoners? Because he can’t get people to go and fight voluntarily.

Going more into the roots of Russian authoritarianism, I’m interested in how some of your research relates to various periods in the post-Soviet space since 1990. You’ve written about how reforms can stumble when reformers aren’t strong enough to expropriate powerful stakeholders, so they have to co-opt them or invite them into the government. What kinds of challenges can this create for a young democracy that still has to deal with powerful interests from the past regime, like Russia did?

The Russian case is a fascinating example of a failed transition from extractive to inclusive institutions. Like the Arab Spring, in some sense. Egyptian President Mubarak was overthrown and it looked like this authoritarian regime had collapsed and there was going to be democracy. But the army had underpinned the autocratic regime and had never lost their power or their resources. When the moment was right, they acted. In fact, it was the army that got rid of Mubarak: they didn’t want his son to become president because his son was not a military man. Now, the army is back in control completely. The army sort of stepped back, but they still had the underlying power, what I call a de facto power. They were just biding their time.

One way of thinking about what happened in Russia is that the security forces, of which Putin was a member, were somehow never dismantled. [Former President of Russia Boris] Yeltsin never had the power or the inclination to dismantle this deep state. And they bided their time. The strategies that were used to try to transition got very compromised, by these oligarchs, by lots of crony privatisation, by the famous privatisation of loans-for-shares, which everyone interpreted as extremely corrupt. The democratic regime ended up looking extremely tarnished. And that created a sort of political basis for Putin to re-establish this kind of authoritarianism.

But there’s many other things going on there. People in Russia seemed to be thinking that Russia was a big global player, and then suddenly it wasn’t. That loss seems to have been very visceral on Putin and these people who were powerful in the Soviet system. So part of this war in Ukraine, obviously, is recovering the idea that Russia is this powerful, big country. I don’t really have a rational theory of this, but it does seem to be important, at least as a mechanism for uniting people behind this project. Though it’s very difficult for me to know exactly to what extent Russians are really behind this project, of course. There’s so much control over the media, which suggests that there are a lot of people who are really opposed to this. Putin has to control them, he has to shut them up, he has to harass them, and he has to arrest them. But it’s difficult to get the balance: is it 20% of people who really bought into this? Or is it 30%? Is it 50%?

Looking at Russia’s situation in the 1990s, and situations like in Egypt or other countries that have tried to democratise, reminds me of your recent book, The Narrow Corridor, and the struggle between the state and society that has to balance itself out to create democracy. Part of that is an organised civil society to counteract the authoritarian impulses that will almost inevitably show up in any country’s history. How would a country like Russia or any other country that’s democratising even go about creating a vibrant civil society that’s able to put pressure on the state?

We do talk a little bit about this in The Narrow Corridor. There’s this definite gradient, where after the collapse of the Soviet empire, the further east you go, the less successful the transition was. I’d think about that in terms of pretty deep history. It almost coincides with serfdom, west and east of the Elbe River. If you go back to the 19th century, east of the Elbe, you had much more intense serfdom. You didn’t have a civil society because you had serfdom until the middle of the 19th century in the Russian Empire, in the Habsburg lands. That collapsed much earlier in the West.

If you think about the transition in Poland, you had Solidarity, this autonomous trade union. Or you can think about Havel, what happened in Czechoslovakia. It was really civil society that led the campaign and the contestation with the system. That didn’t happen in Russia. Somehow, what Gorbachev did brought to the surface all these contradictions in the Soviet system, so it collapsed. But then, there was never pressure from civil society to make that transition in the way it happened elsewhere.

There’s another interesting issue, which [Daron] Acemoglu and I have been thinking about a lot recently: how do we think about culture in this space? I asked political scientist Jesse Driscoll from UC San Diego, “How should I think about Russia? How does Russia fit into my theory?” He said that what I have to understand is that the Enlightenment never got to Russia. He had some very deep sort of cultural argument about Russia and people’s image of society, which diverged radically from post-Enlightenment Western society. It’s deeply historic, I would say, whether it’s to do with culture or just these issues of civil society and power relations. I think you can see that the type of civil society that created Solidarity doesn’t seem to exist in Russia.

The opposite situation is when society is more powerful than the state, basically anarchy, which seldom leads to democracy. Post-Soviet history is marked by wide-ranging corruption. Do you see corruption as something that diminishes the power of the state the way anarchy does? It lets business interests just have their way with politics, right?

I tend to think about corruption as a symptom of institutional problems. Often, what looks like corruption is a way of managing power. I would say that what looks like corruption in Russia under Putin is actually how he manages people, how he gives them resources and makes them dependent on him. It makes the state incredibly weak. And the military incompetence of Russia is an example of that. It undermined the capability and resources of the military. That’s the way President Mobutu managed things in Zaire for 35 years. It’s very effective, but it undermines the capacity of the state because political criteria are used, not bureaucratic criteria or meritocratic criteria. If you look at our book Why Nations Fail, the word “corruption” never actually appears in the book. There’s a reason for that, which is that we consider it a symptom of a political problem rather than the problem itself.

Speaking of Why Nations Fail, I want to turn to extractive economic institutions, a central focus of that book. These are economic institutions which are set up to get as much wealth as possible out of a country, without distributing that wealth evenly. Do you think institutions in Russia today are extractive, and in what ways have and haven’t they evolved from the Soviet era?

They are extractive. Obviously, there are lots of differences in details from the Soviet period, but just in terms of the basic elements they are quite similar. One of the main points of Why Nations Fail is to say that the language of extractive and inclusive institutions spans these differences that people previously thought were very interesting, like socialism and capitalism. We give examples of extractive institutions in Uzbekistan, which might have been socialist under Karimov, and in Sierra Leone, which you could never describe as socialist. The point is that the details of those institutions are very different, but they can all be thought of as extractive in the sense that they block broad-based incentives and opportunities. That’s what’s going on in Russia now with economic opportunities. How is it that all these oligarchs exist? Because they’re given favourable opportunities. They’re given favourable access to resources or access to government contracts or market opportunities in exchange for support, or in exchange for giving kickbacks to Putin and the state.

It’s not clear to me, based on what I know, that the logic today is so different from when Putin was a Soviet guy in the 1980s. They were able to take that way of operating and recreate it in this modern market economy. And you see that all over the world, like if you look at the supposed Washington Consensus reforms in Latin America in the 1990s. Why was that so unsuccessful in Argentina? Because the Peronist party was able to adapt to operate in this new environment. The central bank is independent. We have to privatise this stuff. We can deal with that. We can operate in the same way, we just have new instruments and we do it in a different style, or a different tone. But the underlying political logic reproduces itself. It can adapt to the situation. So I would look at these oligarchs and ask, where is all that coming from? It’s coming from exchange of opportunities, restricted opportunities to create profits in exchange for political support and favours. But most people, of course, are blocked by that, and that’s the typical thing with extractive institutions.

What is the relationship of those kinds of institutions to political repression?

Extractive institutions are always supported by political repression, to some extent. Most of these regimes have legitimating ideologies of some sort, but I think you also see they all engage in massive, or potentially massive, repression of society. For example, the Chinese Communist Party has this legitimating ideology, and they put a lot of effort into trying to propagate that, and reclaim historical connections to the imperial state, or Confucianism, or Chinese culture. But they also monitor and repress people.

In my view, there’s something about human society where people value political rights and participation, and they value democratic structures. You see that all over the world, in Africa, in historical Mesoamerica. Democracy wasn’t invented by John Locke, or even Western Europeans. Democracy was invented all over the world in many historical periods, like agriculture. So I think it’s something to do with the very deep nature of ancestral human society. What we know about the earliest human societies is they were very democratic and participatory. So, of course you have to repress that. You have to repress that impulse and that demand if you’re going to run an authoritarian regime.

Your work focuses on institutions that act a certain way to make a country undeveloped or developed, like on a sliding scale. It seems like the post-Soviet space entered the 1990s very developed in some ways economically, but very undeveloped in other ways. I’m wondering how you would approach that, or how you have approached those kinds of situations.

You were mentioning earlier what we call extractive growth, that in some conditions, you can have economic growth under extractive institutions. And we actually use the Soviet Union as an example of that. Where the Soviet Union put a lot of pressure and a huge amount of resources, like in some types of military innovation, it was very successful.

Think about the moon race or rocketry. It was desperately unsuccessful in most things. But it could harness some of the amazing scientific talent in the country, and could be very successful.

Then you get these very odd kinds of economic structures where you have a huge amount of industry that’s extremely unproductive and uncompetitive, but you’re very good at some things. An interesting question is if that’s a transition path to something better. Is that a way towards something? In some cases you could say so. Why did South Korea’s authoritarian leader, General Park, in the 60s and 70s, want a steel industry? Why did he want a shipbuilding industry? That was for military purposes, because he was fighting a war, potentially, with North Korea, and he didn’t want to depend on outsiders for weapons, steel, and things that inputted into the military. That turned out to be quite a successful transition path in the sense that it flowered into a diversification, and that it was a stimulus for industrialization and the expansion of industry and exports in the 1970s.

If you look at China, it’s very similar. China is very successful at innovation in some narrow spheres which are complementary to their security and military projects, like AI. They’re putting huge amounts of resources into technology they think will help them monitor. And the question is, does that have spillovers onto the rest of the economy? Is that going to allow the Chinese to do what the Soviets could never do? So there’s a lot of interesting research on that at the moment. But is that a transition path? I’m not sure I know what the balance of evidence is on that. And it turns out to be different in every country, too. So on one level, I can compare China and the Soviet Union. But of course, there’s an enormous number of specific differences, too.

As you’ve mentioned, war is often a strong stimulus on the future path of institutions in participating countries. What kind of developments in Russia’s and Ukraine’s institutions that have happened as a result of the war do you already see? And how do you think the war could impact their institutions in the future?

There’s all sorts of interesting things going on in Ukraine in terms of identity creation, culture, and institutional strengthening. For example, look at this obsession now with making sure that aid is not used corruptly. That never happened in Afghanistan or Iraq, I think. So just that, that they’re so conscious of this and they realise they have to get their act together, is going to lead to profound institutional strengthening, it seems to me.

Russia, it’s difficult for me to know what’s going on in Russia. Obviously Putin is further consolidating authoritarianism, clamping down on opposition, freedom of the media. What’s the long run trajectory of that? I think we don’t know, or at least I don’t know, whether this is really about Putin, or whether there’s a deeper kind of coalition behind this. I can think of many examples that I know more about, such as Venezuela or Zimbabwe, where people thought this was all about one dictator and that one person disappeared from the scene, and the disastrous model continued.

It’s not clear to me that if Putin died of a heart attack tomorrow, this wouldn’t all continue. It’s a very optimistic narrative that this is all about him. But I’m a social scientist, and social science tends not to be about individuals. It tends to be about deeper kinds of structures and institutions. So that’s my comment on that. Not a very optimistic one. I think it’s clearer what’s going on in Ukraine, if you see what I mean.