Autocrats, Kleptocrats and Populists

Lord Hannan of Kingsclere Excerpts

Thursday 3rd February 2022 Grand Committee

[Lord Hannan of Kingsclere (Con)]

My Lords, which keeps us awake at night—the prospect of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan or the prospect of a Russian invasion of Ukraine? Consider the disquieting possibility that both may happen on the same day by prearrangement. The noble Lord, Lord Browne, in introducing this excellent debate, spoke about the coming together of the two great illiberal powers. It is a very real coming together: the largest military exercise that the Chinese have been involved in with another country was conducted last year with Russian troops in north-western China, where J-20 stealth bombers were used. A signal went out that the two countries that have the most to gain from overturning the current world order and from a revanchist and autocratic alternative are working together. That same message has been heard on every continent and in every archipelago.

I spent part of last month in Pakistan. It was my first visit—it is a very beautiful country—but everywhere you see the spore of China, of the Chinese military and of Chinese society. Of course, Pakistan is a special case: its alliance with China goes back a long way, and it has always seen it as a counterweight to India. None the less, I was struck when I heard the Prime Minister of Pakistan, a man of very British sensibilities and education, saying that perhaps multiparty western democracy, which had been held out as the only alternative, was inferior to the more meritocratic Chinese alternative. I do not think we would have heard that 10 years ago, and certainly not 20 years ago. We would not have seen ambitious politicians learning Mandarin rather than English, or ambitious young army cadets studying at the People’s Liberation Army university rather than aspiring to come to Sandhurst.

Around the world, people hear the melancholy long withdrawing roar of western influence. We can sanction Lukashenko—it does not stop him kidnapping and murdering opponents or massing troops on the Ukrainian border. We can sanction Ortega—it does not stop him stealing the election in Nicaragua. The same has happened in Nigeria, in Burma and all over. The only part of the otherwise excellent speech by the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, that I would question is when he said that the jury was still out on whether Tunisia is a democracy. When I see troops in the streets and Parliament dissolved, I do not think that the jury is still out. The last country that could still have been held to be a success 10 years after the Arab spring has joined the rush to autocracy.

We should all guard against the availability heuristic—it is always possible to pick examples of what is going wrong—but it was interesting how the noble Lord, Lord Browne, began by giving an empirical assessment of how democracy is in retreat. In addition to the source that he gave, almost everyone who studies this says the same thing, including the Economist Intelligence Unit, Freedom House and the democracy index. Seven years of solid advance at some point in the past decade have stalled and gone into reverse. I want to explore why that has happened.

Of course, part of it is simply that people no longer care as much about what the western powers think; there has been a change in the balance geostrategically. Part of it, frankly, is due to the pandemic and the associated lockdowns—not just in the obvious sense that we gave up liberties, could not travel and were interned and so on, but in the more dangerous and insidious sense that a common threat of that kind tends to make people more authoritarian. It is a well-observed psychological phenomenon, whether it is a war, a plague or a natural disaster. People coming out of it become more intolerant of dissent and more demanding of the smack of firm government and strongman rule.

Perhaps the most disquieting thought of all is whether, in the scheme of things, it is not the last couple of hundred years of democratic and liberal advance that are the exception. All the things that various noble Lords spoke about—the kleptocracy, the institutionalised looting of state resources, the seizure of power by small elites—was pretty much how every civilisation was run for most of the last 10,000 years. The lot of almost every human being was servitude of one kind or another: back-breaking labour in the fields from dawn until dusk, while small elites systematically looted the state. We are exceptionally lucky to be here in a place and at a time when we have found mechanisms to keep the Government under control and when a measure of law and liberty can flourish, whereby we have elevated the rules above the rulers—but that is not the normal state of play.

I wonder whether we might be coming towards the end of a brief interglacial period between the long ice ages. That is why it is so important to keep educating and elevating the idea that process matters more than outcome, the rules matter more than the rulers and the individual matters more than the collective. That is why we should keep a sense of perspective in attacking different parties within a democratic system. If we lose sight of those precepts, the bleak landscapes stretch ahead of us, dark, cold and grim.