Does the West Need Autocrats to Fight Putin?

VIENNA – In their scramble to counter Russian President Vladimir Putin’s murderous revanchism, Western leaders seem increasingly open to striking Faustian bargains with other authoritarian regimes. Hence, on March 16, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson traveled to Saudi Arabia to meet with its de facto ruler, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman – making him one of the few Western leaders to do so since the gruesome killing of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in 2018.

With its focus on finding alternatives to Russian oil, Johnson’s trip resembled an earlier one by the US National Security Council’s top Latin America official, Juan Gonzalez, who visited Venezuela to hold talks with Nicolás Maduro’s regime. The United States has also given its blessing to Turkey, a NATO member with a dismal democratic record, as that country mediates talks between Ukraine and Russia.

Most startling of all has been the willingness of the European Union and NATO to grant an outsize role to Poland’s illiberal government. Poland’s de facto leader, Law and Justice (PiS) party leader Jarosław Kaczyński, recently captured global headlines as part of a delegation of government leaders from Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovenia to war-torn Kyiv, where his “courageous gesture” was praised by the Western press.

Yet to see Kaczyński speaking on behalf of Western democracy is surreal. This is a man whose entire political life since 1989 has contested the European democratic order. Over the last seven years, his regime has transformed Poland from one of Central and Eastern Europe’s democratic frontrunners into one of the world’s most rapidly “autocratizing” countries.

The West’s new reliance on Poland is eerily reminiscent of its reliance on Turkey during the 2015 refugee crisis. Like Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who agreed to prevent Syrian refugees from traveling to Europe in exchange for €6 billion ($6.6 billion) in financial assistance, Kaczyński has become the West’s latest autocrat fixer. The underlying cause is the same: the irreconcilable contradiction between the West’s principled rhetoric and what it is willing to do.

In 2015, Europeans’ patience for receiving asylum seekers was wearing thin, yet the plain language of the 1951 Refugee Convention compelled them to take in any person facing “serious threats to their life or freedom.” The deal with Turkey appeared to resolve the conundrum. Instead of openly flouting the Convention, Europeans would let Turkey do the dirty work of keeping refugees where they were.

A similar “extraordinary rendition” of moral commitments is now taking place in Poland. Unwavering in its support of Ukraine’s territorial integrity, the West sees Russia’s attack as a threat to the entire European order but is unwilling to put boots on the ground to defend it.

Because Hungary, another quasi-authoritarian NATO member state, has refused to allow its territory to be used to transport military aid to Ukraine, a narrow stretch of the Polish border is the only viable route. In providing this service, Poland faces a substantial risk, as Russia has designated military supply convoys as legitimate targets. And, like Turkey in 2016, Poland is expected to shelter a large proportion of the millions of Ukrainian refugees fleeing the war.

The West needs favors from Poland, and rapprochement is the down payment. As US Vice President Kamala Harris quipped to Kaczyński’s puppet president, Andrzej Duda: “A friend in need is a friend indeed.” Georgette Mosbacher, Trump’s former ambassador to Poland, went further, arguing that “Poland deserves an apology” from the EU and the US for their past criticisms of the country’s democratic backsliding. There is talk of Poland receiving EU funds that were rightly frozen because of its flagrant rule-of-law violations. These presumably would be made available in exchange for some cosmetic changes in Polish law.

Far from making Poland’s government any more committed to European values, these measures will embolden and empower it (not least by providing fresh funds with which PiS can buy electoral support). It is worth recalling that just a few months after striking his deal with the EU, Erdoğan went on to purge Turkey’s judiciary, civil service, media, and universities following the failed coup in July 2016. The EU largely stood by while some 40,000 people were imprisoned.

A similar dynamic is already visible in Poland. On March 10, the Polish Constitutional Tribunal, a sham institution packed with Kaczyński loyalists, declared key provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights unconstitutional. Poland thus has become the only European country – other than Russia – to repudiate the continent’s 1950 landmark human rights treaty. The government’s likely next move will be to call an early election to cement its hold on power until 2026.

Ordinary Poles, Turks, and Venezuelans won’t be the only ones paying the price for the West’s decision to include unsavory authoritarians in its coalition of the willing. Faustian bargains tend to have unintended consequences, and autocrats are unreliable fixers. While Kaczyński and his entourage were en route to Ukraine, EU representatives in Brussels reportedly fumed that the visit risked being “the spark for World War 3.” These fears were not alleviated by Kaczyński’s subsequent remarks about putting NATO troops on the ground in Ukraine.

There is no need for Western politicians to ingratiate themselves with autocrats to achieve unity in the face of a crisis. Given that support for Ukraine within Poland was already widespread and organic, Kaczyński would never dare to block EU or NATO assistance. Any additional praise or largesse sent his way amounts to an unearned political windfall.

Moreover, there are almost always other options. In 2016, prominent figures like George Soros offered serious proposals for creating a sustainable EU refugee system – one that would have alleviated the need to strike a deal with Erdoğan. Likewise, Europeans do not need to accept the inevitability of a protracted war in Ukraine. Instead, Europe and the US could make every effort to support Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s government in its repeated attempts to find a negotiated solution with Putin.

If we must make moral compromises with bad actors, we should focus on negotiations that could resolve the crisis, rather than on side deals that will only create problems in the future.

Maciej Kisilowski is Associate Professor of Law and Public Management at Central European University.

Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2022.
www.project-syndicate.org