What is a spin dictator? What does tyranny look like in the 21st century? Why is populism on the rise? And how do we reinvent democracy?

Sergei Guriev is the co-author of Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century. Guriev is Provost and a professor of economics and at Sciences Po in Paris. He is a former Chief Economist of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, London, and a former Rector of the New Economic School in Moscow in 2004-13.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET

Tell us a little bit about your own personal encounters with spin dictators.

SERGEI GURIEV

In Russia, I ran a university, a new economic school. And as an economist and a public intellectual, I was engaged in interactions with the government, including with Vladimir Putin. And there, of course, the situation was that Russia was already a nondemocratic country, meaning that it was a country where elections were not free and fair and partial censorship was already in place. Yet in those years, we could express ourselves openly, not on national TV, but at least in newspapers and on radio. And that eventually brought me into trouble with Vladimir Putin, who at some point suggested that I talked too much and I should not be in the same country. He's never expressed that clearly to me. He passed this message through various common friends. I was also interrogated. My office was searched. And at some point, common friends told me, "Look, you shouldn't be here." And I bought a one-way ticket for the next day and just left Russia.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET

When you see all of this energy and struggle for power and these unnecessary wars that we could solve with diplomacy, what are your reflections on the environment?

GURIEV

It breaks my heart to see that this is an existential issue for our civilization. And instead of focusing on environmental transformation, on sustainability, we have to deal with these unnecessary costly wars which destroy a lot of resources. And what is very, very painful as an economist, if you compare the forecast made for global GDP in 2022 made before the beginning of the war, and right after the beginning of the war, the difference would be 1 trillion. And this is exactly the problem with what we are facing today. We need to focus on green transition, and instead, we focus on how to stop Putin from killing people.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET

Spin dictators are dangerous because they disguise themselves as democratic leaders. You even analyze the difference in clothing from dictators of the past who dressed like military leaders.

GURIEV

The dictators in the 20th century used military or paramilitary uniforms to project brute force and fear. Today, the situation is different. Successful dictators pretend to be democrats, so they put on civilian suits and travel to Davos to talk to the business elite. They talk to democratic counterparts to pretend that they are like them. And that's exactly the challenge to understanding that these are still non-democratic regimes. We still need to. do something about them because otherwise, we see the encroachments on democracies. And we see also the weakening of our democratic world.

If you think about Viktor Orbán, he started off as a democratic leader, but eventually turned his country into a place where the opposition doesn't have an equal chance to come to power. Another one would be Donald Trump. Trump will very much try to come back and basically, these leaders build a spin dictatorship, want to gain power and stay in power using propaganda and misleading and false information. And so far, American institutions have stood up to those challenges, but who knows what happens next?

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET

And tell us about the programs at SciencesPo and how do you teach the citizens and leaders of tomorrow.

GURIEV

We feel a great responsibility in that we train the citizens for the future. We train the leaders for the future. And SciencesPo is a unique institution in many ways. And one of those is it plays a disproportionately important role in training the social, political, and business elites in France. In no other country, do you have just one single institution which is so important for training the political elite. And that's why we feel a great responsibility. That's why we always ask ourselves what else we can do to make sure that people who will run this country 20 years later actually know what they are supposed to do?

And we make sure that our student body is diverse. So we don't have this disconnect between elites and the others, but we also think about the subjects. So we teach more and more about environmental transformation. On digital transformation, we have special research programs on discrimination inequalities, and we teach courses on this. And of course, we also involve a highly international faculty and student body. This is, again, something that is a part of my strategy as a provost. We need to recruit more international faculty because we already have internationalized our student body. We have about half of SciencesPo students who are either international or binational. So this is also an important part of our strategy to become not just an institution in France, but also an institution for the whole world because of all these issues: climate change, digital transformation, inequalities, geopolitics, and crisis. These are all global issues that have to be addressed not by one country, but by the international community.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET

Another thing on the rise is populism. Could you discuss the drivers for those movements? What puts our societies and democracies at risk?

GURIEV

About 15 years ago, we still didn't have 3G, 4G, 5G internet, that only started about 15 years ago. And then only 10 years ago we saw the real rise of social media with Facebook giving you a like button and becoming a dominant means of telecommunications. And we show in our work that the spread of 3g, 4G mobile, broadband internet, and social media have also contributed to the rise of populism. Why? Because a populist message travels faster and more broadly and more convincingly on social media simply because of the model of social media. Where the idea of creating the social media space is to make sure that your retention is kept, and of course, attention is more likely to be attracted by critical, negative, and outrageous messages. These are anti-elite messages. These are actually quite often also false messages, but they travel faster on social media. And so social media has also contributed to the rise of populism.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET

There are those who advocate for a truly transformative democracy, where citizens don’t just vote very once in a while but are fully engaged. What kind of possibilities do you see in terms of that digital engagement of a truly engaged populace?

GURIEV

How do we reinvent our democracy? And indeed, the model where you have a representative democracy, then once in four years you vote and delegate, this is a model which is much better than dictators. People criticize Western democracies, but as somebody who lived in a non-democratic country, I will tell you that I'm not surprised that people don't move us to Russia, right? Life is better in a democracy, even if you have criticisms. But there is a major problem here, which is when you vote, do you actually invest in thinking about who you vote for? And the answer to that is most people remain ignorant about the programs of candidates and about the problems of society.

And so we need to engage people more in the deliberation of our problems. And indeed, whether digitally or offline, there are now many more experiments and many more ideas on how we can complement representative democracy. Some people even say, "Replace representative democracy." But a compliment for me, it's a more complimentary representative democracy with deliberative democracy where we take, for example, what's called a mini public, take a thousand people or maybe 150 people randomly picked, so these are not elites. These are normal people who are randomly picked, who are asked to think about a specific issue, and talk to each other, talk to experts, talk to politicians for several months, and propose a solution. And this is something that has been used a lot now in Western countries. In Ireland, there was an issue, for example, of abortion and gay marriage, which was discussed like this. In France, after the Yellow Vest movements, President Macron first launched a great debate at the national level and then created an ecological, social, and economic convention to think about what we can do about climate change in a just way. Because one of the things we faced during the Yellow Vest movement was Macron's promise to impose a fossil fuel tax, which would be good for fighting climate change, but was done in a technocratic way without thinking about people who are left behind. Without thinking about distributional consequences. And this is, again, something that populists would pick up, pointing out how elites are disconnected from the public. And so we need to involve everybody in this discussion. And I would say that likely we've now seen that mechanisms experiments like this can work. And of course, digital technology can do even more for this because it's cheaper to launch operations online, and you can involve more people.

THE CREATIVE PROCESS · ONE PLANET

As you think about the future, the economics of transformation, the importance of an open society, and the kind of world we're leaving for the next generation, what would you like young people to know, preserve and remember?

GURIEV

I think young people should not panic. I think we are in a very difficult situation. But we do have amazing technology. We do have a way to invent more technology. And as an economist, I believe that we should remain optimistic. I think there are many things we can do, both in terms of taxing dirty production, but also subsidizing clean production, and investing in infrastructure, that itself can create incentives for the green transition. And in that sense, I think we should work more together. We should learn more in order not to panic. We should also understand the exact challenges, the numbers, and the science, and listen to the experts. But what I can say as a political economist is, of course, the political system is stuck in the status quo. And in order to refocus the priorities of the current political class, you need to become politicians. You need to participate in politics. You need to talk to experts and try to come up with constructive solutions. And what I like about young people is they are very much aware of those issues. And they're very mobilized, especially regarding the issue of environmental transformation, which I think is what creates hope.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this episode was Anna Sewald.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).