Eternity and Dictators: Discussing Protests in Belarus with Prof. Timothy Snyder
Eastern Europe is full of instructive examples of how democracy should not be taken for granted. There is always a benevolent autocrat who claims to know better, a president who wants to stay for just one more term, oligarchs with their hand politics. Sometimes people push back against it hard enough to make a difference. Ukraine is a great example of this: it had two revolutions against the corrupt government in 2005 and 2013. There is also Russia and its Bolotnaya Square protests in 2011, and, more recently - the 2020 protest movement in Belarus which has reinvigorated its democratic opposition to the country's dictator Aliaksandar Lukashenka. Despite this democratic show of force, overcoming autocrats is more difficult than embracing them. Putin isn't going anywhere, neither are the Ukrainian oligarchs, and Belarus' Lukahsenka has been in power since 1994 – the longest-ruling autocrat in the post-Soviet space. Why is it so difficult to get back on the democratic track for these countries? To discuss the post-Soviet struggle for democracy, I sat down with Dr. Timothy Snyder, a renowned Yale professor who specializes in the history of Eastern European Authoritarianism. In his studies, Dr. Snyder came up with the concept of politics of eternity - a societal worldview where future holds no significant developments but is rather a cycle of repetition of whatever has or is happening. Things happen regardless of what we do, and so individuals lose all agency and the sense of responsibility for the future. What replaces it is tribalism, eternal victimhood and constant imaginary threat we are mobilized to fight. In my conversation with Professor Snyder, this concept turned out to be a great tool in explaining the challenges for democracy in Belarus and Russia, why we should pay attention to it, and what can be done to help it flourish.
