Hello, I am Ivan Krastev, a founding board member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the board of trustees of the International Crisis Group and a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times.
I want to talk to you about a concerning trend that is reshaping the world we live in. I’ve said before,
"Authoritarianism is not pretending anymore to be a real alternative to democracy, but we can see many more authoritarian practices and styles basically being smuggled into democratic governments."
Today, I want to explore what that means, how it applied during the past, and why it is alarmingly relevant now.
In the past, authoritarian regimes openly positioned themselves as direct competitors to democracy. During the Cold War, countries under authoritarian rule claimed that their systems—whether they were communist, fascist, or military dictatorships—offered a better alternative to democracy. They argued that their centralized power structures provided stability, order, and progress that so-called "messy" democracies could not deliver. However, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the global rise of democracy in the late 20th century exposed the flaws in that argument. Authoritarianism seemed to lose credibility as a legitimate alternative to democratic governance.
But authoritarianism didn’t vanish. Instead, it evolved. Today, it no longer tries to compete with democracy by offering a different system.
