Centre for International Security
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At the beginning of the twenty‐first century, the large democracies of Western Europe experienced some of the most prosperous and peaceful decades in human history. Specifically, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Germany experienced high and stable quality of life, democratic accountability and state capacity between 2000 and 2019, according to the 2022 Berggruen Governance Index. While all four of these countries are among the top performers in the Index, substantial problems lurk beneath the surface. Notably, each failed to capitalise on the low interest rate environment in the decade following the global financial crisis of 2007–2009—albeit in different ways and for different reasons in each country. In particular, low investment in infrastructure and key technologies, the persistence of stubborn regional inequalities, and resulting sluggish GDP growth have prevented the ‘Big Four’ in Western Europe from improving further and future‐proofing their existing gains.
Much of Latin America has experienced a renewed ‘lost decade’, failing to substantially expand quality of life since the late 2000s. While the outcomes of governance performance across the largest countries – including Brazil, Venezuela, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina – have discrete causes, common themes like internal conflict, corruption, and overreliance on natural resources plague the entire region. Put more generally, the inability to turn democratic accountability into a state mechanism able to deliver economic growth and public goods in a sustainable manner is a liability affecting all five countries. To explore the difficulties that the large Latin American countries have faced in the twenty‐first century, this article examines results from the 2022 Berggruen Governance Index, and then presents three key issues facing the region: insufficient state capacity, flirtations with authoritarianism, and economic inequality and inflation. While the challenges remain substantial, increased regional integration may offer one way out of the predicament.
AbstractThe United States—often hailed as the ‘oldest democracy in the world’ and the ‘leader of the free world’—has fallen on hard times. In addition to recent headline‐grabbing political events that have highlighted its political dysfunction, data from the 2022 Berggruen Governance Index (BGI) reveal that overall state capacity and democratic accountability have been declining for years. Although public goods provision has remained on a steady course, the US still trails much of the developed world. We find this struggling performance is largely the result of neglecting three types of infrastructure: civic, physical and social. Specifically, we argue that the crisis became particularly pronounced due to an insufficient response to the 2008 global financial crisis. Although some recent political achievements could slow the decline, more drastic action will be required to reverse these troubling trends.
Does more media censorship imply more regime stability? We argue that censorship may cause mass disapproval for censoring regimes. In particular, we expect that censorship backfires when citizens can falsify media content through alternative sources of information. We empirically test our theoretical argument in an autocratic regime—the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Results demonstrate how exposed state censorship on the country's emigration crisis fueled outrage in the weeks before the 1989 revolution. Combining original weekly approval surveys on GDR state television and daily content data of West German news programs with a quasi-experimental research design, we show that recipients disapproved of censorship if they were able to detect misinformation through conflicting reports on Western television. Our findings have important implications for the study of censoring systems in contemporary autocracies, external democracy promotion, and campaigns aimed at undermining trust in traditional journalism.
International sports events and repression in autocracies: Evidence from the 1978 FIFA World Cup
(2023)
How do international sports events shape repression in authoritarian host countries? International tournaments promise unique gains in political prestige through global media attention. However, autocrats must fear that foreign journalists will unmask their wrongdoings. We argue that autocracies solve this dilemma by strategically adjusting repression according to the spatial-temporal presence of international media. Using original, highly disaggregated data on the 1978 World Cup, we demonstrate that the Argentine host government largely refrained from repression during the tournament but preemptively cleared the streets beforehand. These adjustments specifically occurred around hotels reserved for foreign journalists. Additional tests demonstrate that (1) before the tournament, repression turned increasingly covert, (2) during the tournament, targeting patterns mirrored the working shifts of foreign journalists, (3) after the tournament, regime violence again spiked in locations where international media had been present. Together, the article highlights the human costs of megaevents, contradicting the common whitewashing rhetoric of functionaries.
Autocrats depend on a capable secret police. Anecdotal evidence, however, often characterizes agents as surprisingly mediocre in skill and intellect. To explain this puzzle, this article focuses on the career incentives underachieving individuals face in the regular security apparatus. Low-performing officials in hierarchical organizations have little chance of being promoted or filling lucrative positions. To salvage their careers, these officials are willing to undertake burdensome secret police work. Using data on all 4,287 officers who served in autocratic Argentina (1975–83), we study biographic differences between secret police agents and the entire recruitment pool. We find that low-achieving officers were stuck within the regime hierarchy, threatened with discharge, and thus more likely to join the secret police for future benefits. The study demonstrates how state bureaucracies breed mundane career concerns that produce willing enforcers and cement violent regimes. This has implications for the understanding of autocratic consolidation and democratic breakdown.
Social constructivism
(2023)
From a social constructivist perspective, NATO is not just another alliance or security institution, but the institutional embodiment of the transatlantic security community, which is based on a collective identity of liberal democracies. This collective identity serves as the main explanatory factor for social constructivist research dealing with NATO’s creation, its specific institutional design and its unique culture of consultation. It also helps understand NATO’s persistence after the end of the Cold War, its enlargement and its (liberal) out-of-area operations and missions in the post-Cold War period. Constructivism has become one of the key theoretical approaches in NATO research, offering a broader view of the Alliance and accounting for empirical anomalies that competitors fail to explain. Still, constructivist research has arguably not yet reached its full potential and could offer additional insights into NATO’s past, presence and future. These lacunae are addressed in the chapter.
In Germany, the Russian war on Ukraine is widely perceived as a “Zeitenwende,” a watershed moment undermining key foreign policy beliefs. Despite mounting evidence contradicting them, German elites previously failed to adapt core beliefs regarding Russia and the use of force because these beliefs were not only deeply embedded in largely uncontested identity constructions but also shaped the definition of economic interests, which in turn made ideational adaptation more costly. Moreover, Germany’s extraordinarily beneficial geopolitical situation in the post-Cold War era meant that the country could afford not to learn. Although the “Zeitenwende” will trigger significant change, it is unclear which lessons exactly Germans will now be learning and how far that adaptation will go. Given Germany’s key position in Europe and its previous role in shaping the European and transatlantic policy toward Russia, the results of these learning processes will significantly shape the emerging European security order.