06/08/2019 The end of harmony - Francis Fukuyama

Francis Fukuyama

The end of harmony

How the bene ts of political order are slowly eroding

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Print edition | Books and arts

Sep 27th 2014

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalisation of Democracy. By Francis
Fukuyama. Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 658 pages; $35. Pro le Books; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

A BASIC rule of intellectual life is that celebrity destroys quality: the more famous an author becomes the more likely he is
to produce hot air. Superstar academics abandon libraries for the lecture circuit. Brand-name journalists get their

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06/08/2019 The end of harmony - Francis Fukuyama

information from dinners with the great and the good rather than hard digging. Too many speeches must be given and backs
slapped to leave time for serious thought.

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Francis Fukuyama is a glorious exception to this rule. Mr Fukuyama earned global applause with the publication of “The End
of History and the Last Man” in 1992. He won more plaudits in the early 2000s with his broadsides against the
neoconservative movement that had nurtured him. But rather than milking his fame he has devoted the past decade to
producing a monumental study of the history of what he calls “political order”. In its rst volume, “The Origins of Political
Order”, he took the story from prehuman times to the late 18th century. This second and last volume brings the story up to
date. The two books rest on an astonishing body of learning.

This burst of intellectual energy was inspired by the half-failure of the liberal revolution that Mr Fukuyama once celebrated.
“The End of History” proposed that markets and democracy were part-and-parcel of a single triumphant formula. But the
past two decades have produced a more depressing picture. China has adopted a mixture of state capitalism and
authoritarianism. Democratisation has failed in Russia and a host of Middle Eastern countries. Mr Fukuyama suggests that a
major reason why history has proved to be more complicated than he imagined lies in the quality of political institutions.
Neither democracy nor markets can ourish properly in the absence of a competent state. But such a state can produce
many of the virtues of modernity without the bene ts of either democracy or free markets.

State-building is di cult. Mr Fukuyama argues that Europe and America have long led the world in doing the hard lifting.
They inherited strong medieval legal codes. They introduced merit-based civil services in the 19th century. For the most part
they introduced mass franchises after creating e cient state machines. The man who once talked about “the end of history”
now talks about “getting to Denmark”.

Mr Fukuyama contrasts the accomplishment of Denmark et al in creating successful states with two types of failure. The
rst is a failure of institutions to keep up with social change, as in much of Latin America. After a spate of reforms in the
1980s Brazil’s government is a hotch-potch of rst-rate departments and patronage dumps. The second is wholesale
institutional failure. The failure of the Arab spring was essentially a failure of governmental capacity. In Egypt the Muslim
Brotherhood failed to understand the di erence between winning an election and winning total power, so the country’s
middle class reluctantly re-embraced authoritarianism.

Yet this is not a simple story of the West versus the rest, or the developed world versus the underdeveloped world. Mr
Fukuyama notes that southern Europe lags a long way behind northern
Subscribe now Europe: Greece and Italy continue to distribute jobs
on the basis of patronage. But he is at his most interesting on East Asia. China produced a highly competent state, sta ed by
rst-rate civil servants chosen by written examinations and
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Economist via print, the a airs of a vast empire. Mr Fukuyama
argues that what we are seeing in China now is the revival ofand
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ourtradition
apps. after a century-long collapse: the Chinese
Communist Party is reaching back into history to prove that you can create a competent state without the bene t of the
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The book is sometimes frustrating. Mr Fukuyama frequently overloads the reader with his learning, and the rst two parts of
this book, on the state and foreign institutions, are too lengthy and the second two parts, on democracy and political decay,
too short. But two things more than make up for Mr Fukuyama’s occasional failures.

The rst is the quality of his intellect. He litters the book with insights that make you stop and think. The United States
preserved the main features of Henry VIII’s England long after England had abandoned them, he says, including an
emphasis on the authority of the common law, a tradition of local self-rule, sovereignty split among several bodies and the
use of popular militias. Africa’s botched state-building can partly be explained by the fact that it is the most lightly
populated continent in the world: it was only in 1975 that its population density reached the level that Europe enjoyed in
1500.

The second is his despair about the current state of American politics. Mr Fukuyama argues that the political institutions
that allowed the United States to become a successful modern democracy are beginning to decay. The division of powers has
always created a potential for gridlock. But two big changes have turned potential into reality: political parties are polarised
along ideological lines and powerful interest groups exercise a veto over policies they dislike. America has degenerated into
a “vetocracy”. It is almost incapable of addressing many of its serious problems, from illegal immigration to stagnating
living standards; it may even be degenerating into what Mr Fukuyama calls a “neopatrimonial” society in which dynasties
control blocks of votes and political insiders trade power for favours.

Mr Fukuyama’s central message in this long book is as depressing as the central message in “The End of History” was
inspiring. Slowly at rst but then with gathering momentum political decay can take away the great advantages that political
order has delivered: a stable, prosperous and harmonious society.

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Sep 27th 2014

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