 Hello everybody. You are very welcome to today's IIA webinar. I'm Seamus Allen, a policy researcher here at the IIA. Today, I'm delighted to be joined by Charles Dunst, Deputy Director of Research and Analytics at the Asia Group, a business advisory firm. Charles is going to speak to us for about 20 to 25 minutes, and then we'll go to a Q&A and discussion. You can join the Q&A and discussion using the Q&A button at the bottom of the screen and we'll come to your questions and comments once Charles has finished. Today's event and the Q&A are on the record and you can join the conversation on Twitter using the handle at IIA. As I mentioned, Charles is the Deputy Director of Research and Analytics at the Asia Group. He's also an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and Charles has been a far correspond in about nearly a dozen different countries throughout Asia and in Europe and wrong on those insights helped Charles to write his new book, which I have here in front of me. Defeating the dictators, how democracy can prevail in the age of the strongman. It's a really interesting and insightful book, and I really enjoyed it, as you might be able to tell from how battered my copy is. I got it in my local bookstore here in Cork, so it should be available in good bookshops throughout Ireland. Charles is going to speak to us about this book and on the topic of how democracy can be reinvigorated in an age of rising authoritarianism. Thank you so much for being with us here today, Charles. I'll hand over to you now. The floor is yours. Great. Thank you, Seamus. Thanks for having me and thanks to the Institute for Hosting. It's it's really great. I appreciate everyone joining during the summer. I know we're heading into holidays, so so I really appreciate it. It's a real privilege to share my book with all of you. So I've been speaking at several events like these over the last six months. The book came out in February and I've done events, you know, in person in the UK, in person in the United States, a bit virtually with India, South Africa, really all over the place. But I want to open by discussing a theme I've picked up in all of these engagements. I noticed it first at one of my first events in February at Westminster and a glamorous kind of old room in the British parliament. There were 100 people there, mostly parliament staffers and think tankers, all people working either in democratic government or supporting democracy from the outside. These were all people who care deeply about their own country's democracy and generally about promoting democracy abroad. They are generally people I would consider ideological allies. I opened my presentation by asking how many of them had been to cities like Shenzhen, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, Singapore, you know, but 50 of them raised their hands. And then I asked how many of you felt that things generally worked better in those cities? Was Singapore's metro system better than London's? What about the Dubai airport? Did it did it work better than Heathrow? Did you feel like that the UAE was better governed than the UK? Those same 50 people raised their hands to almost all of those questions. And troublingly to me, a similar scene has played out in other book engagements I've done around the world, both virtually and online. If an Indian journalist asked me why democracy is a better system, if the Gulf States and Singapore seem to deliver better for the people than the US and the UK do. But perhaps most striking was the conversation I have with the South African radio host earlier this year. He's the host of the country's leading afternoon radio show and opened our interview by posing a poll to his listeners. He asked how many of them would give up some of their democratic freedoms for, I quote, a country that works. It was somewhere around 99 or 98 of the people who called in said they would. And those results floored me initially. But the host that he understood why so many South Africans frustrated with their own democracy that doesn't really work in their view would rather live in a high functioning autocracy. And for them in Africa, Rwanda is that country. Whereas for whereas maybe in the Middle East, it's the UAE in Saudi Arabia or maybe in Asia, it's Singapore for South Africans. They they think Rwanda is the high functioning autocracy. And this kind of consistent, constant sentiment I keep hearing that of wanting to live in the UAE or wanting to live in Singapore, wanting to live in Rwanda is that to me is the crux of the problem at hand and why I wrote defeating the dictators. I find it incredibly damaging for advanced democracies, both at home and abroad, that a significant number of our own citizens seem to think that some form of autocracy, whether in Singapore or Rwanda, is working better than their own democracies. Because if citizens do not believe in democracy, they will vote for ill for illiberal would be autocrats willing to hollow out liberal institutions from the inside. And there are already a number of serious influential scholars on the fringes of the left and right who are calling for some form of autocracy precisely because they believe democracy isn't working. This is much more of an of a European kind of issue and our European school of thought, but you have some European scholars who have argued that climate change is quote bigger than democracy. And that only an autocrat can usher in a green future because some type of dictator will need to be able to pull the strings to ban you from taking a certain number of vacations to lower emissions or regulate which type of car you can buy all things that are difficult to do in democracies in the US. You've had several Silicon Valley types say that America should become more like Singapore. Well, of course, folks in the UK have on the right have argued for the UK to become a Singapore on the Thames and this is to say nothing of kind of the explicitly far right illiberal anti-democratic politics. But this loss of confidence in democracy is a problem in the developing world, too, because more and more people they are seeing autocracies, not democracies as models. Southeast Asian policymakers yearn for China's double digit growth or Singapore's effective governance. Not the United States is perceived political chaos. And across the Middle East, people say they would rather they'd rather live under a UAE style governance than maybe the UK. And many South Africans, as I found out, would prefer to live in autocratic Rwanda to their own democracy. How does defeating the dictators fit in here? I mean, put simply my book aims to do what I think far too few autocracy focused books have done, which is offer a tangible roadmap to combatting autocracy at home and abroad. There's a lot of literature, I think, lamenting what's gone wrong and why people are buying into autocracy, but there's much less literature on how to fix it. And my roadmap centers on providing good governance, where democracy already exists, because good governance can counter the autocratic impulse at home and make our system more attractive abroad. So bear with me as I quickly, quickly run through this roadmap. The book looks first at ancient China and modern Singapore, which democracies can emulate to make our own systems meritocratic. Ancient China actually invented the concept of a meritocratic civil service system, which basically every modern bureaucracy is now based on to some extent. Second, I look at France, Malaysia and Singapore on one end, as well as Singapore and the UAE and the other, to see how and why governments must hold themselves accountable. Third, I focused on the unlikely suspect of Vietnam, a one party state, to see why we must reestablish trust in government. Fourth, I examine mostly the private sector in the West to understand the importance of making long term plans and how democracies have, in recent years, failed a bit on this front. Fifth, the book moves on to Denmark, which I think many people understand to have the best social state in the world. And I looked at Denmark's struggles with the safety net to detail the importance of modernizing our social assistance system for the gig economy in particular. Sixth, I looked at the United States to explain why we must invest more in the people and technology that will define our shared future, that is in human capital. Seventh, I looked at the Asian Miracles of China, South Korea and Japan to detail the importance of building better infrastructure from of literal roads to digital ones. And finally, I explain why advanced democracies, I mean, thinking really the broader West, so Europe, North America, along with Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, I explain why we must recommit ourselves to opening our doors to immigrants. Something that I think North America and parts of Europe have done relatively well, but that rich democracies everywhere must do better, both for practical and ethical purposes. And this roadmap is decidedly non-interventionist. We're not non-interventionist. It's not arguing that we should go around the world trying to forcefully democratize countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. It's more so focused on my belief that democracies must take steps to ensure that we are once again the world's model of good governance and economic success. Because when we offer a roadmap to prosperity, our people will be less likely to vote into power leaders with autocratic tendencies. Our prosperity will then make other countries more likely to follow our example in the long term. Well, I mean, I guess why you might be wondering is this book necessary? I mean, of course, autocracies don't run the world. They very much still rely on Western, the Western financial system and Western technology. As Russia has found out, the bleak future of an autocratic global order has not come to pass. Thanks both to a democracy's astounding resilience and autocracies own internal contradictions. But democracies are struggling and autocracies do seem to be besting us on things like COVID response to social safety and that's infrastructure and certainly democratic citizens, as my experience talking about the book has demonstrated, they wonder why efficiency and quality of life in their country seemingly lag behind maybe the richest parts of China or Singapore, the Gulf States. Some people both in democracies and abroad would say that we've embraced too much tumult for our own good. Modern democracy, modern autocracies, meanwhile, are fundamentally flawed, but many have proven themselves quite durable. Some have survived, have survived, have not just survived, but thrived. I mean, think China, Singapore and the Gulf States in particular. What's critical to explain is that these countries are not like the Soviet Union, whose system never performed effectively, let alone well. Part of the reason the West won the Cold War is because Soviet liberalism was never successful. It was the highest stage of underdevelopment. The system never achieved legitimacy at home or abroad because it never worked. The same cannot be said of autocracies today. China is already the world's largest economy when adjusted for purchasing power or parity. Countries like Singapore and Vietnam have successfully married authoritarianism with market economics. To some extent, autocracies account for 35% of global income, compared to only 12% in 1992. And for the first time since 2004, there are today more autocracies than there are democracies. These successful autocracies, successful autocracies described are of a similar type. They are authoritarian capitalist countries in East Asia and Arab Gulf, as well as Rwanda. They all combine relatively free markets and reasonably secure property rights. Some, but not all, count on natural resources for their wealth. The Asian ones, particularly China, are blessed with historically high quality if undemocratic institutions and social structures that leaders were able to rediscover after colonialism receded. Again, they are nothing like the Soviet Union. The economic success of today's liberal governments should make clear then that autocracies are not necessarily brittle. There is no guarantee that China or Saudi Arabia will eventually fail because of their own flaws that the Soviet Union did. It's worth remembering, too, I think, that most of human history has been made up of empires and despots. Autocracy is historically the norm in opposition to democracies, even at the heart of Western civilization. Plato's Republic is an eloquent pitch for authoritarianism, for the rule of benevolent philosopher kings. Even the West does not have natural predisposition to democracy. It is something that we created, certainly, but it's also something that we must maintain. And this state of affairs, I think, should concern Democrats everywhere, small D Democrats, not U.S. political Democrats, because public legitimacy is increasingly conditioned on performance, meaning that because some autocracies today increasingly seem to be performing better than democracies, a distressing number of people looking for new political visions are finding inspiration in autocracy. So our failures at home, coupled with the successes of Singapore and the Gulf, have propped up and left open the door for the autocratic leaning politicians who would use domestic discontent to move us away from liberalism. We have given would-be autocrats a golden opportunity because when people are fed up with their government elites for a perceived failure to deliver on the basics of the good life, they will not only vote these elites out of power, but will replace them with the most anti-elite, anti-status quo politicians on offer. And around the world, such politicians tend to be demagogues with authoritarian tendencies. This is precisely what happened in Hungary, where I lived in 2017 and where left-wing ineptitude gave way to autocracy. There's a much longer story there about how the left-wing government in the 2000s failed and how it led to Viktor Orban. It's in the book, I don't need to explain all of it, but the point is that complacency in the face in the face of popular pain breeds demagoguery. And it's not hard to see how failure to deliver could bring an autocrat to power in your own backyard, my own backyard, which is why we must shut the door and these would-be dictators as soon as possible. And to do so, we'll need to deliver much better governance. Fair to do so, we see more people buy into the authoritarian's dream along by getting more autocratic aggression. The impacts of such aggression are often hard to describe to the general public. I think in Washington or Westminster or whatnot, it's easy to kind of think about, well, just here's the problem of China having more power, but I think often ordinary citizens don't realize how lucky they have been to live not only in liberal systems at home, but in a world largely governed by autocracies. But we're at risk of finding out how bad it will be to live in a world without such rules. As China has grown more and more powerful, Beijing, as I'm sure you all know, has steadily begun asserting its power on the world, seeking to refashion the international order around its own ideals. The Sino-centric order will be one in which global trade and innovation networks that have long focused on the West will flow back and forth to China instead. A world ruled by China will be one in which countries everywhere have little choice but to bend to Beijing's whim or face the economic consequences. It will be a world in which countries must pay fealty to Beijing to both maintain access to key goods like rare earths and export goods to China's massive market, a world in which economic success hinges largely on a country's willingness to appease China. China's decisions in recent years to restrict trade with Lithuania, with Australia, purely for political reasons, offer a glimpse into what this world would look like. And while a Sino-centric world certainly does not exist in full, I think it exists in part. China already has a near monopoly of rare earths. China posted more chip sales in 2020 than Taiwan and already dominates solar panel production. Several countries have such deep economic ties with China that they are unwilling to challenge Beijing on pretty critical political and economic issues. There are, for instance, almost no Muslim countries willing to criticize China's crackdowns in Xinjiang. And while many democracies, particularly those in Europe and Australia, have over the last 18 months hardened on China, citing human rights abuses, Beijing's bellicosity abroad, democracies everywhere are certainly not immune from the pressures of aligning with or at least not aggravating China. And this is true with regard to both kind of richer democracies like Israel and developing countries like Malaysia, whose leaders are under huge pressure to demonstrate tangible advances, particularly in terms of infrastructure or face ousting. Southeast Asia, for instance, needs roads and can't say no when China comes to the table with more money and a willingness to build these things than anyone else does. And these hypotheticals and actual developments, I think, forecast what an autocratic world order would look like. A world of autocracies will not be a world of friendly one-party states like Singapore. It will be of antagonists like China and Russia, whose insecure leaders could pledge us into war and cut us off from the global economy if it does flow through them at any moment. And even if autocracies do not entirely succeed in displacing democracies, the dictators muddling of the international order will leave the world frayed, allowing for more disruptions and more violence. Neither is an attractive option. But one thing I want to make clear, and this has come up in several interviews I've done, and particularly in the United States where I think we've heard increased questions about, well, if we're competing with China, how should we engage autocracies? What's our relationship with Saudi Arabia? What's our relationship with countries or democracy might be declining? What I want to make clear is I think this competition is not yet a zero sum game. Just because the democracies in the West and the broader West need to get our own houses in order, does not mean that China, the United Arab Emirates or Vietnam will or must become democracies tomorrow. Nor does it mean that we cannot have positive ties with Abu Dhabi and Hanoi. In fact, I think we can and we should. Democracies need friends beyond their own click, which again, remains relatively small in the grand scheme of global politics. We need strong ties, positive ties with Singapore, the UAE and Vietnam. Defeating autocracy in the long term does not require abandoning all autocratic partners right now. Rather, we should make sure we're using our economic and strategically important relationships with these countries to advance our respective national interests and produce domestic success in our own countries, such as by engaging in mutually beneficial trade. That success will allow our leaders to do more to support democracy abroad. Because domestic democratic success alone will surely boost the civil society leaders and democracy democratic minded folks and autocracies around the world. If we make clear that our system works, more people will flock to it and make democracy work for them in the long term. Clearly, I'm a believer in democracy as protestors in Myanmar have so bravely declared, happiness is not born in the cage. So while some level of prosperity might not require democracy, progress, contentment and freedom do. The world's best still comes from democracies despite our trouble. Indeed, the social science actually paints a very clear picture. If you live in a democracy, you will almost surely receive a better education, become wealthier, live longer and have a richer cultural life in your counterparts and autocracies around the world. Of the world's 25 richest countries, only all but seven are democracies. Only two autocracies rank among the top 20, top 40 in terms of life expectancy. The average Japanese lives almost eight years longer than the average Chinese. The average Italian lives nine years longer than the average Saudi. China and Singapore are the only autocracies that rank in the top 20 most innovative countries. Switzerland, Sweden, the US, the United Kingdom, South Korea, the Netherlands and Finland all outrank Singapore. All of these countries, along with Denmark, Germany and France outrank China on innovation as well. And while some might say otherwise, the world's best art clearly still comes from places where there is freedom of expression as well. There's a reason why people around the world clamor for American films or Japanese novels. I think Haruki Marokami could not have written in 1984 in an autocracy. Jackson Pollock could not have produced his wonderfully chaotic canvases under one party state. There is a reason why Chinese entertainment does not capture the world's imagination in the same way South Korean films like Parasite or pop bands like BTS have. We embrace the volatility, tumult and imperfections of democracy and we're better for it. Meanwhile, the autocracy's success seems increasingly precarious. Several issues have plagued Singapore since founder Lee Kuan Yew died. Citizens, not just migrant workers are struggling to make end meets, ends meet after losing their jobs during a pandemic. Many have signed up for government skills training courses with provided income is barely enough to feed their families. And there are structural problems too. The country's fertility rate is steadily declining, leaving a smaller workforce which will likely lead to weakened productivity, inequalities on their eyes with the government failing to redistribute its stunning wealth even to the same extent as the more conservative United States. And most worryingly for Singapore, people lost a huge amount of faith from the government when Lee Kuan Yew died. The state was largely centred on him and his wisdom. Without him, people are less confident in the future and the government. Recent corruption scandals and other scandals you can Google them. They've already ousted leading politicians in the last few days are further weakening public confidence. And the current Prime Minister, Lee Kuan Yew's son is already in the 70s. He's chosen a young relatively unproven figure in Lawrence Wong as his successor. The Lee family has been a pillar of stability without them Singapore's future looks a little less bright. And China's success could be near nearing its end as well. The Communist Party's goals of improving the economy, cleaning up the environment and meeting its people's ever rising expectations are proving much harder to reach. China's economy is slowing, juicing it is proving difficult and no small part because the country's already deeply in debt and the government is concerned about rolling out much more stimulus. And because of China's massive 2008 stimulus and the package of China enacted already during COVID the country's debt is somewhere in 250% of GDP. Debt like that normally precedes a debilitating financial crisis. But because China controls its banks a crisis is unlikely. That does not mean though that China is out of the woods. If China's officials do not clean up their economic system this debt could weigh down the economy for years with zombie firms and unpayable loans. The economy will slow and housing prices will fall. Many of the loans owned by state-owned enterprises and property developers will become unpayable. At the same time China's income inequality is actually worse than Europe and only slightly better than the United States. China's population is aging rapidly due largely to the infamous one-child policy today pension contributions by workers no longer cover retiree benefits meaning the government has to fill that gap. And if current trends continue China's population will peak at 1.44 billion in 2029 before entering an unstoppable decline and then an era of negative population growth. I think above all though it remains to be seen of China's president Xi Jinping's vision for governance is compatible with economic growth. It is hard for me to imagine at least that he can have it both ways that he can be more common to make certain more control over society while maintaining the high level of economic growth that the Chinese people have come to expect. And it remains to be seen too if Xi under whom China's foreign policy has certainly become more and more aggressive can keep his country out of a disastrous war with Taiwan which would almost surely see China lose access to the Western financial system and Western technology on which it has long relied. Singapore and China though are only two of many examples where autocracies are on the ropes rather than in the clear. Certainly Russia is an obvious example Belarus is an obvious example but the gradual global phase out of oil will eventually put economic pressure on the Gulf States. They will have to figure out how to provide their people with the high quality of life to wish they'd become accustomed without oil revenue. Climate change will similarly wreak havoc on countries like Vietnam prompting mass waves of immigration that threaten to undermine even the most consolidated of autocracies. The list goes on. And of course, whereas democracies are willing to embrace the chaos chaos that drives innovations like the internet and paints paintings like Pollux these chaos drives us forward. Autocracies snuff out that same chaos in the name of order stifling progress in its infancy. Democracies might have their problems but autocracies do too and they don't have the solutions. We do. Sometimes in that this kind of shaky era we're living through this optimism all feels a little bit difficult to believe. My book then is really about showing why democracy remains a superior system in spite of Singapore or the UAE's clean streets and rapidly accumulated wealth. It's a book about beating back the autocratic challenge by getting our own houses in order by outperforming autocracies to serve as an example for the rest of the world because democracies can defeat dictators only with good governance at home only when people the world over think of the United States, Europe, Japan and other democracies as examples as exemplary leaders that hold the path to the good life can democracy triumph around the world? Trying to sell Singapore or Vietnam and democracy using idealistic rhetoric in the wake of January 6th or the UK's three prime ministers in three months is doomed to fail. Why would stable regimes in Singapore or Hanoi want that? I think beating the drum for liberal values and economics abroad while these same principles appear to struggle at home will do us no good. What we need instead is a much more clear headed approach to the future. We must commit not only to our values but also to our practices and we must not buy into utopianism into undue confidence in democracies inevitable success and the self assurance that reason will save us. Democracy is not our problem that faith in its automatic functioning is. There is no one size fits all fixed to democratic distress but it's my most sincere hope that this book is at least a place to start. I hope that it prompts governments and companies to invest in the institutions and communities vital to democracy to invest in us so that we the people powering the democracies of the world can believe in democracy enough to lay claim to the future on its behalf. This might seem like a tall task but democracies are resilient. We're tough, we bounce back and I know we have it in us to deliver the better future people everywhere deserve. I'll leave it there and with that I'm really looking forward to answering questions. Thanks.