Document in CNA, part six/ Challenges after the dictatorship

2025-11-21 20:42:00, Aktualitet CNA

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

This is one of the first cases in Albania where a media outlet broadcasts a university lecture of this level.

Tonight, CNA TV is airing the sixth part of the documentary titled "Challenges after the dictatorship".

Part six of the documentary

There is very little sustained state authoritarianism, very low. The legacy problem clearly shows this, but the information problem and the governance problem are many different structural reasons for the collapse of an authoritarian regime. We have not talked, but we should talk about the international environment and the ways in which it is or is not conducive to authoritarianism – the hand bites the hand that feeds it.

Big countries do whatever they want, they abide by international law, they take credit for respecting international law, and if they don't abide by the law, they say international law doesn't apply to them in this particular case. They can do really stupid things and go off to do stupid things another day. This is a big country. Small countries don't have those kinds of options, and most countries aren't big countries. Only one small country that I know of gets away with behaving like a big country - I won't name it, but I think you know who I'm talking about.

Intentional but self-destructive inefficiency, debilitating adverse selection – we didn’t even get to talk about the rampant nepotism in key agencies, like the running of the economy and the running of the police forces. Regimes, the more you study them, the more you realize that it’s a wonder they survive, because it’s their own success that undermines them; their very strengths threaten their survival.

Now just the last point – I see I'm running out of time. Is that correct? Yes, well, so on the subject, I thought I would talk about this more, but maybe we'll end here with the issue of what happens when they're done. When they're all smoke and mirrors, right? Mubarak is gone. They sack him, it took him a while, it took him a long time to get the courage, because there had been negative selection at the top of the Egyptian army, there was a bunch of cowards there, and even though they had no future with Mubarak, it took them a long time to get rid of him. It took the courage of all those people who were on the streets day in and day out, which they then used as a pretext to sack Mubarak. Then, of course, that interest group, that professional agency, that professional army is trying to survive, but they have the incompetence, the inability to rule and to run things. However, there are still courageous people in society. Egyptian history could go on like this for a while, or it could collapse, but if it did collapse, if brave people took to the streets again, or if the military panicked and took a plane and fled – that's what they usually did – they took a plane and fled, like that guy in North Africa did, right? I think there was a little bit of trouble, he took a plane and he was the first, the North African one – you remember, the Tunisian one, I think it was.

The problem is that you have to institutionalize alternatives to the authoritarian machine. That's the problem. You need a judicial system. How do you create a judicial system is really difficult – a successful, professional, autonomous judicial system. You overthrow the incompetent, and then where do you go? Say: are you going to open the closet and bring out a judicial system? It's difficult. You need a civil service that performs state functions without taking the money itself. That's a really difficult thing to achieve.

I could go on and on about the things you need. You need media that is not controlled by a single, coincidentally wealthy person, since when you privatize the station, because the dictator of the state has fallen, you have a controlled media again, but controlled in different ways. You have issues of institutions that need to be created, that the authoritarian regime does not have and does not want to have, and that are difficult to create immediately in a transition. That is one of the reasons why you have another incarnation – perhaps stupider, perhaps weaker, perhaps better from an authoritarian point of view – of the previous regime.

You often have a mess for long periods of time. For example, the case of Kyrgyzstan that I was talking about: those guys, they don't even have a police force, it's so pathetic. All that money that came through democracy aid, their interior ministry is still a mess. You often have this mess for a while before someone has the ability to consolidate, to establish consolidation and to maintain an authoritarian regime, which is a perverse achievement.

So it's very difficult to have an institutionalized alternative because the authoritarian regime, while it's alive, denies things like a judicial system or a civil service – the very key institutions that you need. You don't just need hope, you don't just need votes or elections. There are many countries that have parliaments. I remember when Slobodan Milosevic was elected, for example – if he hadn't lost four wars, he would still be there.

This is a difficult problem. It's very difficult to understand. I think that's why we're depending on you to solve this - smart young people who are going to be in situations like this: how do you go from an authoritarian regime that falls, or as in most cases it falls itself, and be replaced by something better, that is long-term and institutional./ CNA