Authoritarian Recoil: How Dictatorships Tame the Spread of Liberal Ideas

We are witnessing an authoritarian backlash to liberal ideas and norms. This caught some observers off guard because they assumed a high degree of inherent appeal to liberal ideas and institutions. They assumed that socialization stemming from the heyday of post-Cold War liberalism in the 1990s would take on a life of its own and overcome institutional constraints. However, the shaky foundations of liberal soft power have been exposed. This enables authoritarian states so absorb the advance of liberal ideas through a process of 'soft entanglement' in which the purveyors of liberal ideas become entangled in authoritarian institutional configurations that ultimately erode their ability to function as before, or even transform them into enablers of authoritarianism. This theory-building paper outlines the four main weaknesses of the 1990s liberal soft power model that enabled soft enmeshment to operate. First, it did not account for the possibility of backlash from powerful, self-confident authoritarian states. This is a paradox because the 20th Century was characterized by several incarnations of these exact types of states. The appeal of authoritarianism, with its seeming efficiency, stability, and certainty, may ebb and flow, but it is in no danger of disappearing completely. Second, the model viewed the entanglement of profit motives and liberal ideas as unproblematic. It underestimated the solidity of commitments to liberal values – professed or assumed – of some of its agents. Companies, particularly those in the knowledge or entertainment economies, found themselves facing the prospect of sacrificing some liberal ideas and protections in exchange for market access as one compromise led to another. Third, in an age of rising nationalism and particularism, the carriers of liberal soft power became more vulnerable to accusations of foreign meddling or external intervention on behalf of “hostile” powers. To be sure this was always an obvious tactic. Dictatorships – and some democracies – have long tarnished their dissenters with allegations of disloyalty and allegiance to foreign entities. But for reasons that will be explored further below, this accusation is a particular weakness at this moment for liberal actors in illiberal regimes. Fourth, the capillaries of the model, such as media outlets, universities, publishing houses, and so on, could just as easily be filled with liberal or illiberal content. The institutional appearances of liberal entities, when deprived of rights protections and protections against political control by illiberal actors, can just as easily be used to advance illiberal ideas as liberal ones.