SERGEI GURIEV - Economist - Provost of SciencesPo - Co-author of Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century

Interviewed by Mia Funk

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).

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A Black geographic perspective for me was really helpful in trying to clarify how we can simultaneously understand Blackness as a global project, that is anti-national, that transcends borders, but that also takes on really specific meanings and practices in different places, engagements with Black geographies that are looking just beyond the framework of North America.

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Co-chair of the Board for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration

Global restoration really means finding and empowering the millions of local communities, indigenous populations, and farmers who are promoting biodiversity. Restor is a digital platform, sort of like Google Maps, but for restoration. So rather than seeing coffee shops and supermarkets, you will see conservation projects and Indigenous-led restoration initiatives. And that means you can find a currently on Restor - I think we have around 140, 000 - so you can go on there for free right now and find thousands and thousands of these amazing heroes of nature. And you can zoom in and you can see every single tree on the ground. You can see every bush and you can fund them or you can buy their coffee or you can go visit their projects and do ecotourism. There's a myriad of ways that we can all support their efforts by also improving our own lives.

We need to be cutting our emissions so that we can allow nature to thrive and help us along the way. For far too long people have been squabbling about emissions. We should do this or we should do that. Climate change is way too big for us to be squabbling about things. We need to do everything now. When we grow the same crops every year, the soil gets more depleted and all the nutrients are lost. I've heard quotes that if we cannot find agricultural systems that rejuvenate the soil instead of depleting it, we are signing our death warrant. It's like we need to be promoting healthy soils if we're going to have any agriculture in the future.

PETER D. DITLEVSEN

Professor of Physics, Ice, Climate & Earth at the Niels Bohr Institute

What happens if we lose the Greenland ice sheet and pass the tipping points and Earth systems shut down?

If that shuts down, roughly speaking, the climate of Northern Europe would be like the climate of Alaska. So, climate models that actually simulate what happens when it's shut down, would say that England becomes like Northern Norway, which means that food security and things like that will be threatened because you cannot grow many crops in Northern Norway. And other models say precipitation changes, so places that are wet might become dry, and so on. So, these are of course severe consequences for Europe, but in some sense, this is going in the opposite direction of global warming. We're all talking about we're getting into a warmer world, but I'm talking about a cooling here. But the warm water that does not then flow from the tropics into the North Atlantic will stay in the tropics. And there, you're not contra-balancing global warming. There you will have the heating on top of the global warming. And that I see as maybe the largest problem we have is that the tropics become even warmer. And we have to realize if you live in a place where mean temperatures are maybe late thirties Celsius and or rise to the forties livelihood becomes very difficult.

DR. BARRY SCHWARTZ

Psychologist · Author of Why We Work
The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

In 2004, the internet was just getting started in a major league way, and already the choice overload was a problem. I would say that from the modern perspective, 2004 seems like the 18th century, and as near as I can tell, all of these changes, every single one of them has made the problem substantially worse. The idea that you can get information to help guide you through - well, yeah, but what information do you believe? What's trustworthy? What's being motivated by an opportunity to sell you something? So there is a haze, there is this fog that we're operating in. And I think we just sort of give up in resignation and look at recommendations and hope that they're legitimate because how else do you get through the day?

KOHEI SAITO

Author of Slow Down! How Degrowth Communism Can Save the World
Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism

The Green New Deal presents itself as a kind of radical policy. If you look at the content, it's just simply the continuation of what capitalism wants to do. It's a massive investment in new, allegedly green industries, with the creation of more jobs with higher wages, but these are not the things that socialists or any environmentalists should be actually seeking because we recognize that capitalism is basically the root cause of the climate crisis and the misery of the workers. If so, I think it is high time to imagine something radically very different from business-as-usual capitalism.

The Long Tradition of American Jewish Critiques of Israel & Their Suppression

American Jews were interested and involved in Palestinian rights all the way back to 1948. There's this idea that it came about just now or in the 1970s, but actually as long as there's been a Nakba. As long as there's been Palestinian refugees, there’s been American Jews concerned with that, too. I would say that a lot of times these American Jews were very well informed and spent time in the region, and they came to these conclusions often not in the United States, but over there where they were talking to the Israeli left and meeting Palestinians and seeing a situation that they don't feel is ethical or sustainable.

BEN FRANTA

Founding Head of the Climate Litigation Lab
Senior Research Fellow at University of Oxford’s Sustainable Law Programme

For 40 years, the American Petroleum Institute has hired economists to argue it would be too expensive to try and control fossil fuels and that climate change wasn't that bad. The same go-to consultancy firm has been involved in every major climate policy fight from the very beginning and hired by the fossil fuel industry, but what are the courts going to do? It's not just the historical deception. It's an ongoing deception.

MICHAEL STICKA

President/CEO of the GRAMMY Museum

It's actually right in our mission statement that “we celebrate the music of yesterday and today to inspire the music of tomorrow.” And we do it through our exhibits. We have 35,000 square feet of galleries. We travel exhibits, really, all over the world over the world for the past 15 years. And through our education programs, we really focus on the next generation of music's creators and leaders. We do that through really specific curricula that is designed to educate particularly young people, K-12, about the business of music, especially for those who want to go into the industry.

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