Documentary on CNA, part five/ The problem of succession

2025-11-20 20:41:00, Aktualitet CNA

CNA TV has obtained exclusive rights from renowned professor and scholar of history and geopolitics, Stephen Kotkin, to broadcast his academic lectures.

The fifth part of this documentary talks about the "Problem of Succession".

"An authoritarian regime seems not to be in a legacy crisis, it is in a permanent crisis, there is no secure future in an authoritarian regime," says Kotkin.

Part five of the documentary

It's the legacy problem, life is good, I have mine, you have yours, no one asks questions, my kids are going to school, maybe I have another kid at Dartmouth, they have a lot of expenses, it's 10 times my nominal salary, but I'm not feeling the pain. I have a Maybach to drive around the neighborhood to show everyone that I should be feared and taken seriously. My wife has a piece of jewelry on each finger and my lover has two pieces of jewelry on each finger. My kids have birthday parties in Dubai where whoever, whatever, is the "dog" is the performer.

Exactly and so I'm living in luxury, but you know, how can I be sure that tomorrow I'll be living in luxury too? What's the guarantee that all my loyalty, all the dirty work that I'm doing for this regime will be recognized tomorrow and the day after. I mean, what would happen, for example, if the leader got sick? A new person came in and it was the person that I didn't treat so well before, or whatever the case may be.

The uncertainty of the legacy of authoritarian regimes is paralyzing every day. Not only when Mubarak is 82 and has cancer and no one takes Gamal, his son, seriously, then it's clear as day that you have no future with this regime. If he's 82 and he's sick and the son won't manage the situation, you have a problem, that's clear. But when they're 55, they can still get cancer, when they're 55, there can be a coup, or the price of oil can drop or all sorts of things can happen, so even when an authoritarian regime seems not to be in a legacy crisis, it's in a permanent crisis, there's no secure future in an authoritarian regime.

In China we are expecting a third authoritarian transition, nobody was shot, there were no mass purges, right? There was no violent redistribution of property, that's how successions are usually done in authoritarian regimes, it was quite peaceful, behind the scenes they made a deal, the elite got together and they made a deal and gave portfolios and things and balanced things out. And they had a succession of authority that was peaceful and stable, mechanisms that are not transparent that we don't fully understand, that many people who claim to understand don't even know about, even if they are inside, because I don't know any more inside these regimes than I know outside, that's another point for another lecture.

However, my point is simply that authoritarian regimes have these inherent problems, these inherent problems are something that they can't do much about, they can try, but information degrades, the governing apparatus rots, the uncertainty about the legacy is a psychological problem, and more than psychological, it drives people to take action sometimes when they're afraid of what the legacy might be, they themselves can test their legacy and you have a coup or a putsch within the regime, sometimes because of the uncertainty about the legacy issue.

Okay, in conclusion, so no one should feel sorry for authoritarian regimes, I just want to make it clear, no one should, this is not an attempt to elicit sympathy on their behalf, because they have it hard, but I hope I've made the point clear that authoritarian regimes are not just a lack of democracy, they are not a default.

It's not easy to do and it's not easy to maintain, because it has this inherent tendency to undermine itself when it's successful. The usual problems that we think of authoritarian regimes as having may not be the real problems. For example, the disloyalty of intellectuals, just disloyalty. The number of intellectuals who are disloyal within authoritarian regimes is so small, so small. My favorite is the case study of the Italian fascist regime, and how many professors resigned from their university positions when Mussolini came to power? Do you know who answers that? Google it, it's one of the numbers in the algorithm. Do you know algorithm zero or one? So the things that we normally see as threatening to authoritarian regimes may not be the biggest problems that they have.

The biggest problems that authoritarian regimes have are mostly themselves, because it's a hard thing to do and when you do it well, things get worse, almost every authoritarian regime rots, it performs, it can improve for a while and perform better, but it reaches a point where it rots. There is very little sustainable authoritarianism./ CNA