Global
Warning
Francis
Fukuyama’s ‘Political Order and Political Decay’
By
SHERI BERMAN
The
New York Times Book Reviews, September 11, 2014
Political Order and Political Decay: From
the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy
By
Francis Fukuyama
Illustrated.
658 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $35.
In
1989, Francis Fukuyama published an essay in The National Interest entitled
“The End of History?” that thrust him into the center of public debate.
Although often misunderstood and maligned, its central argument was
straightforward and sensible: With the collapse of Communism, liberal democracy
stood alone as the only form of government compatible with socio-economic
modernity. Over the years since, Fukuyama has continued to argue the case, and
has now summed up his efforts with a two-volume magnum opus that chronicles
global political development from prehistory to the present. A quarter-century
on, he remains convinced that no other political system is viable in the long
run, but concludes his survey with a sobering twist: Liberal democracy’s future
is cloudy, but that is because of its own internal problems, not competition
from any external opponent.
Fukuyama
began the first volume, “The Origins of Political Order,” which appeared in
2011, by stating that the challenge for contemporary developing countries was
how to “get to Denmark” — that is, how to build prosperous, well-governed,
liberal democracies. This, in turn, required understanding what “Denmark” —
liberal democracy — actually involved. Drawing on the insights of his mentor
Samuel Huntington, Fukuyama argued that political order was all about
institutions, and that liberal democracy in particular rested on a delicate
balance of three distinct features — political accountability; a strong,
effective state; and the rule of law. Accountability required mechanisms for
making leaders responsive to their publics, which meant regular free and fair
multiparty elections. But elections alone were not enough: A true liberal
democracy needed to have its institutions of accountability supplemented by a
central government that could get things done and by rules and regulations that
applied equally to everyone.
Fukuyama
showed how throughout human history these three factors had often emerged
independently or in various combinations. China, for example, developed a state
long before any existed in Europe, yet did not acquire either the rule of law
or political accountability. India and much of the Muslim world, by contrast,
developed something like the rule of law early on, but not strong states (or,
in much of the Muslim world, political accountability). It was only in parts of
Europe in the late 18th century, Fukuyama noted, that all three aspects started
to come together simultaneously.
“Political
Order and Political Decay” picks up the story at this point, taking the reader
on a whirlwind tour of modern development from the French Revolution to the
present. Fukuyama is nothing if not ambitious. He wants to do more than just
describe what liberal democracy is; he wants to discover how and why it
develops (or does not). So in this volume, as in the previous one, he covers a
vast amount of ground, summarizing an extraordinary amount of research and
putting forward a welter of arguments on an astonishing range of topics.
Inevitably, some of these arguments are more convincing than others. And few
hard generalizations or magic formulas emerge, since Fukuyama is too
knowledgeable to force history into a Procrustean bed.
Thus
he suggests that military competition can push states to modernize, citing
ancient China and, more recently, Japan and Prussia. But he also notes many
cases where military competition had no positive effect on state building
(19th-century Latin America) and many where it had a negative effect (Papua New
Guinea, as well as other parts of Melanesia). And he suggests that the
sequencing of political development is important, arguing that “those countries
in which democracy preceded modern state building have had much greater
problems achieving high-quality governance than those that inherited modern
states from absolutist times.” But the cases he gives as examples do not
necessarily fit the argument well (since Prussia’s state eventually had trouble
deferring to civilian authorities and the early weakness of the Italian state
was probably caused more by a lack of democracy than a surfeit of it). In
addition, he surely understands that authoritarianism is even more likely to
generate state weakness than democracy since without free media, an active
civil society and regular elections, authoritarianism has more opportunities to
make use of corruption, clientelism and predation than democracies do.
Perhaps
Fukuyama’s most interesting section is his discussion of the United States,
which is used to illustrate the interaction of democracy and state building. Up
through the 19th century, he notes, the United States had a weak, corrupt and
patrimonial state. From the end of the 19th to the middle of the 20th century,
however, the American state was transformed into a strong and effective
independent actor, first by the Progressives and then by the New Deal. This
change was driven by “a social revolution brought about by industrialization,
which mobilized a host of new political actors with no interest in the old
clientelist system.” The American example shows that democracies can indeed
build strong states, but that doing so, Fukuyama argues, requires a lot of
effort over a long time by powerful players not tied to the older order.
Yet
if the United States illustrates how democratic states can develop, it also
illustrates how they can decline. Drawing on Huntington again, Fukuyama reminds
us that “all political systems — past and present — are liable to decay,” as
older institutional structures fail to evolve to meet the needs of a changing
world. “The fact that a system once was a successful and stable liberal
democracy does not mean that it will remain so in perpetuity,” and he warns
that even the United States has no permanent immunity from institutional
decline.
Over
the past few decades, American political development has gone into reverse,
Fukuyama says, as its state has become weaker, less efficient and more corrupt.
One cause is growing economic inequality and concentration of wealth, which has
allowed elites to purchase immense political power and manipulate the system to
further their own interests. Another cause is the permeability of American
political institutions to interest groups, allowing an array of factions that
“are collectively unrepresentative of the public as a whole” to exercise
disproportionate influence on government. The result is a vicious cycle in
which the American state deals poorly with major challenges, which reinforces
the public’s distrust of the state, which leads to the state’s being starved of
resources and authority, which leads to even poorer performance.
Where
this cycle leads even the vastly knowledgeable Fukuyama can’t predict, but
suffice to say it is nowhere good. And he fears that America’s problems may
increasingly come to characterize other liberal democracies as well, including
those of Europe, where “the growth of the European Union and the shift of
policy making away from national capitals to Brussels” has made “the European
system as a whole . . . resemble that of the United States to an increasing
degree.”
Fukuyama’s
readers are thus left with a depressing paradox. Liberal democracy remains the
best system for dealing with the challenges of modernity, and there is little
reason to believe that Chinese, Russian or Islamist alternatives can provide
the diverse range of economic, social and political goods that all humans
crave. But unless liberal democracies can somehow manage to reform themselves
and combat institutional decay, history will end not with a bang but with a
resounding whimper.
Sheri
Berman teaches political science at Barnard College, Columbia University.
A
version of this review appears in print on September 14, 2014, on page BR1 of
the Sunday Book Review with the headline: ‘Political Order and Political
Decay’. Order
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