In this episode of Talking About the Future, I talk with Seva Gunitsky about how the proliferation of personalist regimes makes the international system less stable and less predictable. Seva Gunitsky is an associate professor of political science and the George Ignatieff Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto. He also writes a must-read Substack newsletter on international politics called Hegemon. You can listen to our full conversation using the audio player above or on most podcast platforms. Excerpts from our conversation, edited for clarity, are below. If you enjoy our conversation, please share it widely.
Seva, you recently co-authored an essay in Foreign Affairs that points out something striking. The world’s most powerful countries—China, Russia, and the US—all now have personalist leaders. Thirty years ago, none of these countries had governments that revolved around the personality of one man the way they do now. Could you start by telling us what personalism is?
SG: I think the simplest way to put it is, we normally think of regimes as based around institutions, and personalism is what happens when a regime stops being based around institutions and starts being based around a single person, around one guy’s head—and it is a guy. So it’s not just that it’s an autocracy. There are lots of autocratic systems that have some kind of collective decision making, some sort of deliberation or internal checks of some kind. You think about the USSR under Brezhnev, right? Obviously, a sclerotic autocracy, but there was some genuine collective decision making. And, after Mao died, China actually designed its system to prevent one-man rule. So we had informal term limits and all of that stuff. A personalist leader is different because in that system the leader hollows out all institutions around him—the party, the military, even the bureaucracy—and basically replaces them with a small inner circle. All the people in it are selected for loyalty and not competence. Policy stops flowing through any kind of deliberative process, the experts are pushed out, and policy is made through the leader’s private fixations or personal grievances. These become the state’s foreign policy. So what we argue in that Foreign Affairs piece that you mentioned with Semuhi [Sinanoglu] is that for the first time since really the 1930s some of the most powerful countries in the world are governed in this way at the same time. And that’s an obvious problem. The historical parallels should be worrying....
If we’re talking about [the 1930s], Hitler was personalist leader, Stalin was personalist leader. Are we also coding FDR as a personalist leader?
SG: Yeah, this is a great question because this came up in the 1930s and in the 1940s, that FDR was essentially emulating some of the features of those leaders, like Stalin and Hitler. This was a major critique of FDR from the right who accused him of basically becoming a dictator. And you could see him abolishing term limits—or at least ignoring term limits—things like that. That’s a feature of personalism. In that case personalism was a response to a crisis. Often under conditions of crisis institutions become—they’re unable to deal with the crisis and they default to a single person, a strongman who can make choices. There’s almost a default that we like to run to in a crisis. So those tendencies can appear anywhere. As you point out, it happened with FDR, and I think it’s happening now under Trump, who’s still facing legal constraints, but he’s done all those things, sidelining career officials, building a sycophantic court essentially. So those personalist tendencies can reappear even under democratic conditions....
What’s a world like in which you have impulsive leaders who are relatively unconstrained? What happens to international institutions, for example? Can you make durable agreements in this world?
SG: A lot of things become more difficult. International institutions become essentially bodies through which these leaders exercise their influence. They become sort of these almost quasi-private actors for exerting influence. And then alliances become alliances of convenience. There are no durable institutional frameworks. Trump doesn’t care about NATO. He’s not interested in any of that. It’s more about the one-on-one, personal relationships. Institutions and bureaucracies, that’s all boring and inefficient. In the personalist world, you want to conclude alliances and treaties one-on-one. Now this is also totally unstable because there’s no institutional framework underpinning it. You think back to Kim Jong Un and Trump, right? They have this big meeting, one on one, Trump declares it a stunning success, and then the cameras turn off, and North Korea goes right back to building and testing nukes. Nothing gets accomplished. So in the personalist world you might have these attempts, summits or one-on-one meetings, but it’s hard for them to get any institutional traction going for all these reasons. Also it’s hard to build a foreign policy based on the whims of a single person, in whose ear several people are whispering their own agendas. It’s hard to build a cohesive national interest, let alone a cohesive national foreign policy on that kind of groundwork. That’s not a pretty world. It’s unstable. It’s prone to miscalculation, prone to error, prone to escalation because you have all these sycophants whispering in the leader’s ears. I’m starting to think for the first time that we will see nuclear weapons being used in some way during our lifetimes. Hopefully not, but, the possibility for me has increased over the past five years, partly as a result of the invasion [of Ukraine] that has given so much incentive to countries to develop their nuclear programs....
You made a connection between far-right personalist rule and gender politics. What do you think the connection between anti-feminist grievance and right-wing populism is?
SG: I want to be careful because I don’t want to equate far-right politics with the incel young men movement. I think far-right politics are much more complex than that, and they include many more demographics than that. So I don’t want to say the two are identical. But I think there is sort of this weird similarity where the strongman—which is what we’ve been talking about—we’ve talked about the institutional side of the strongman. But the man part we’ve kind of ignored. The politics of masculine identity is often embedded with these strongman politics. This idea that something has been taken from you—that’s the personalist populist message—and I can restore it back to you, right? That’s Trump’s message. That’s certainly Putin’s message. When we look at the leaders of these—I don’t know if you can call them “leaders” of these incel movements, people like Andrew Tate and others—that’s exactly the same sort of emotional framework that they’re offering. Something has been stolen from you by these outside forces—sometimes they’re shared culprits, you know, the globalists or whoever—and I can return it to you. I think right-wing populism in part relies on this idea of this masculinized foreign policy, for example, this idea that hawks are strong, and doves are weak. So masculinity is kind of the vehicle for a lot of these far-right resentments—again, not to equate the far-right with masculine resentments. I think that’s not going away because it’s a response to—now, this may be controversial—it’s a response to the feminization of modern society. What I see as the rise of women to equal status in political and economic life, which inevitably entails partial feminization of social structures, You can’t have patriarchal social structures anymore. Now, to me, this is a good thing. This is what makes modern life tolerable in many ways, that women can participate in these societies. But to people who are used to these hierarchies, this is a big problem, and it’s a political problem for them. And those grievances are not going anywhere because female equality is not going anywhere. So I think the incel and the strongman are in some ways maybe not just allies of convenience but two manifestations of the same grievance expressed in slightly different ways....
Thanks for listening to Talking About the Future. The classic political science book Seva Gunitsky recommends in this episode is Kenneth Waltz’ Theory of International Politics. Related episodes include “Lucan Way on Authoritarianism in the US” and “Balkan Devlen on NATO and European Security.” If you enjoyed this post I’d be grateful if you shared it with others or liked it by clicking the heart button below.
