The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [52]
Such rigid conceptual frameworks may have helped in understanding Stalinism, but this is too simplistic of a perspective to explain much of what is going on inside today’s authoritarian states, which are busy organizing elections, setting up parliaments, and propping up their judiciaries. If authoritarian regimes are bold enough to allow elections, for reasons of their own, what makes us think they wouldn’t also allow blogs for reasons that Western analysts may not be able to understand yet?
“Institutions, students of authoritarianism often claim, are but ‘window-dressing,’” writes Adam Przeworski, a professor of political science at New York University. “But why would some autocrats care to dress their own windows?” Why, indeed? In the last thirty years, political scientists have unearthed plenty of possible motivations: Some rulers want to identify the most talented bureaucrats by having them compete in sham elections; some want to co-opt their potential enemies by offering them a stake in the survival of the regime and placing them in impotent parliaments and other feeble, quasi-representative institutions; some simply want to talk the democracy talk that helps them raise funds from the West, and institutions—especially if those are easily recognizable institutions commonly associated with liberal democracy—are all the West usually asks for.
But it seems that the most innovative dictators not only organize sham elections but also manage to surround themselves with the gloss of modern technology. How else to explain a 2009 parliamentary election in the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan, where the government decided to install five hundred Web cams at election stations? It made for good PR, but it didn’t make the elections any more democratic, for most manipulations had occurred before the election campaign even started. And such a move may have had more sinister implications. As Bashir Suleymanly, executive director of Azerbaijan’s Elections Monitoring and Democracy Teaching Center, told reporters on the eve of the election, “local executive bodies and organizations that are financed from the state budget instruct their employees for whom they should give their vote and frighten them by the webcams that record their participation and whom they vote for.” Russian authorities, too, believe that the kind of transparency fostered by the Web cams may bolster their democratic credentials. After devastating summer fires destroyed many villages in the heat wave of 2010, the Kremlin installed Web cams at the building sites for new houses, so that the process could be observed in real time (that didn’t stop complaints from the future owners of the houses; living in the provinces, they didn’t have computers, nor did they know how to use the Internet).
Institutions matter, and dictators love building them, if only to prolong their stay in power. The relative usefulness of the Internet—especially the blogosphere—has to be analyzed through a similar institutional lens. Some bloggers are simply too useful to get rid of. Many of them are talented, creative, and extremely well-educated individuals—and only short-sighted dictators would choose to fight them, when they can be used more strategically instead. For example, it is much more useful to build an environment where these bloggers can serve as symbolic tokens of “liberalization,” packaged for either domestic or foreign consumption, or at least where they can be counted on to help generate new ideas and ideologies for otherwise intellectually starving governments.
Not surprisingly, efforts to institutionalize blogging have already begun in many authoritarian