Political Order and Political Decay: from the industrial revolution to the globalisation of democracy

Francis Fukuyama will doubtless be remembered by posterity as the author of The End of History and the Last Man, which, shortly after the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, proposed that the world had achieved a final Hegelian synthesis in the form of free markets and liberal democracy. However, his two most recent volumes, which examine what he calls “political order” from our primate ancestors to the twenty-first century, have better claim to be his magnum opus. The first, published in 2011, ends in the late eighteenth century. The second, reviewed here, covers the industrial revolution and the spread of democracy across the globe.

The End of History came to an optimistic conclusion. As its title suggests, Political Order and Political Decay has a more sober message. The right balance between the state, the rule of law and accountability, which Fukuyama believes is “a practical and moral necessity for all societies”, is a difficult goal and, if achieved, is vulnerable to decay. The rise of political Islam, reassertion of autocratic rule in Russia, China’s clinging to the primacy of the Communist Party in the face of profound social change, the collapse of the Arab Spring into civil war in Syria and Libya and the return of military rule in Egypt: all challenge the assumption that history is moving in the right direction.

At the beginning of the book, Fukuyama reminds us that natural human sociability expresses itself in altruism towards family (genetic relatives) and friends (individuals with whom we have exchanged favours). That is the default mode to which we revert if more impartial institutions break down. Alarmingly, he sees ample evidence of this in the United States, where the state has become a “bloated and inefficient monstrosity” corrupted by lobby groups. To this process, whereby private interest takes precedence over public good, he gives the ugly term “repatrimonialization”. In The End of History the goal of a balanced society appeared to have been reached. Twenty or so years later, the author writes of “getting to Denmark”, less the actual country than “an imagined [my italics] society that is prosperous, democratic, secure, and well governed, and experiences low levels of corruption”.

Prussia provides an interesting example of political development in the 200 or so years Fukuyama covers. It created an efficient bureaucracy before it industrialised and long before it became democratically accountable. War was an important spur to modernisation. The autonomy of the civil service and the military contributed to a united Germany’s disastrous experiences in the first half of the twentieth century. But it did bequeath to the Federal Republic a bureaucratic tradition, now controlled by democratically elected parties, which prevented political patronage in the form of wholesale distribution of government jobs to party workers.

Greece introduced universal male suffrage in 1864, before a modern state had been created. The result has been clientelism, or the exchange of goods and services for political support, and a state unable to collect taxes.

Clientelism was also prevalent in the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as a means by which parties sought votes. Today, Fukuyama argues, Americans rely on the courts, and political parties which have become hostage to interest groups, at the expense of state administration. Conflicting forces within a system famous for its checks and balances have created what he calls a “vetocracy”.

Post-independence Africa, damaged by “colonialism on the cheap” which left little in the way of modern political institutions, has suffered from weak state institutions, clientelism and ethnic division, Nigeria, its most populous country, being a classic case in point. 
 
A comparison between Costa Rica and Argentina provides a good example of the importance of individual choice in determining a country’s future. After a civil war in 1948, how did the former escape the revolutionary violence which subsequently afflicted its northern neighbours, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Guatemala? Fukuyama points to moderation between the opposing forces, the extension of the vote to women and the abolition of the standing army. With a geography similar to that of North America, and expectations of political development to match, Argentina, by contrast, has suffered military coups, the rampant clientelism of Juan and Evita Perón and, more recently, the left-wing populism of Néstor and Cristina Kirchner.

On the future of China, a country which created a powerful state more than 2000 years ago but has yet to become democratic, Fukuyama, disappointingly but perhaps wisely, hedges his bets. However, he rightly recognises that social mobilisation through economic growth is occurring at an unprecedented pace in Chinese history and that the rise of a middle class may force the Communist Party to limit its powers.

Political Order and Political Decay and its earlier companion are a formidable piece of historical analysis which throws light on the problems we face today. The optimistic tone of The End of History may have been tempered, but Fukuyama concludes that there is “a clear directionality to the process of political development, and that accountable governments recognizing the equal dignity of their citizens have a universal appeal”.