The study of authoritarian diffusion and cooperation: comparative lessons on interests versus ideology, nowadays and in history

This article outlines and discusses the central comparative findings on the role of interest versus ideology in the study of authoritarian diffusion and cooperation. It highlights the primacy of pragmatic interests in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, a finding that holds in diverse cases in Eastern Central Europe, the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa. Of particular importance here are negative findings that reflect the absence of ideological appeal. At the same time, the primacy of interest-based accounts needs to be qualified, both today (Bolivarianism in Latin America) and especially considering a longer historical perspective. As the experiences of fascism and communism suggest, there used to be autocracies with missionary ideologies that inspired emulation in a wide range of countries. Against this background, the article advocates a “moving back” to history to better account for the context-bound nature of authoritarian diffusion and cooperation. It also calls for a “moving down” the ladder of abstraction to study the more concrete mechanisms in which authoritarian diffusion and cooperation unfold.