(This is an archived extract from the book Patterns of Power: Edition 2)
Authoritarianism can work against the interests of the people by suppressing individual freedom:
· If the State tries to control too much, the danger is that the political system can lead to the suppression of economic freedom, marginalisation of minorities and imprisonment for dissent. The film The Lives of Others provided a moving portrayal of what life was like under a totalitarian communist regime (in this case, East Germany before the fall of the Berlin Wall).[1]
· Planned economies are dysfunctional (3.3.6). The Berlin Wall was built to prevent people fleeing communist East Germany, as economic migrants, to find a better life in the West.
· Loyalty to a non-democratic regime can be bought; those who are essential to the maintenance of power, like the military, are well-paid. Many authoritarian governments, in Africa and elsewhere, have used economic wealth to prop themselves up.[2]
· Even in a theocracy, where idealism might have been thought to prevent such practices, there have been examples where it was suggested that the clergy looked after their own interests at the expense of the wider population.[3]
The unavoidable criticism of authoritarian systems is that unsatisfactory leaders might be able to stay in power for a considerable period, even when they are no longer providing acceptable government.
© PatternsofPower.org, 2014
[1] The 2006 German film Das Leben der Anderen, which was written and directed by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, was released by Sony in 2007 with English subtitles under the title The Lives of Others. It won several awards. On 13 April 2007 The Guardian published a review, which was available in May 2014 at http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2007/apr/13/worldcinema.drama.
[2] An Economist article, The black curse, published 19 April 2007, reviewed John Ghazvinian’s book Untapped: The Scramble for Africa's Oil, noting that: “In the past, all that oil wealth has done for Africa is to entrench chronically corrupt politicians who squander the money while throwing their impoverished citizens a few prestige white-elephant projects to keep up the pretence of “development”.” The article was available in May 2014 at http://www.economist.com/node/9033425.
On 14 January 2010, the Economist, in an article entitled Democracy’s decline: Crying for freedom, quoted Transparency International, a corruption watchdog, as saying “all but two of the 30 least corrupt countries in the world are democracies (the exceptions are Singapore and Hong Kong, and they are considered semi-democratic). Autocracies tend to occupy much higher rankings on the corruption scale...”. The article was available in May 2014 at www.economist.com/node/15270960.
[3] Shahrough Akhavi, Religion and Politics in Contemporary Iran, pp. 95-97. The Iranian clergy resisted the Shah’s proposed laws on land modernisation, at least partly, because they were major landowners.