Political Order and Political Decay (86 page)

In those parts of the world that were not extensively settled by Europeans, the nature of preexisting institutions was critical in shaping the kinds of political order that eventually emerged. Sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia in this respect stand at opposite ends of the spectrum. Much of the former region did not possess strong state-level institutions at the time of colonization, and the state-level societies that did exist were not highly developed in terms of either state scope or strength. Diseases and lack of attractive economic opportunities prevented Europeans from settling Africa in large numbers (with the exception of South Africa), and the colonial powers consequently did not find it worth their while to invest heavily in re-creating their own institutions there. The short period of European colonialism in Africa thus succeeded in undermining the region's traditional institutions while failing to implant more modern ones in their place.

By contrast, China, Japan, and Korea had traditions of stateness that were in some cases longer and deeper than those of the Europeans themselves. This allowed them to be much more successful in resisting conquest and colonization in the first place. Attempts to settle or annex their territories in the nineteenth century were all defeated or reversed, up to the reversion of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. While traditional East Asian regimes all collapsed after confronting the West, they were eventually able to rebuild strong new state institutions based on a mixing of indigenous political traditions with modern practices. The states that emerged were greatly influenced by Western ideas: China is ruled by a regime that claims to be based on Marxism-Leninism, and Japan and South Korea have Western-style liberal democracies. East Asian borrowings from Western practice are substantial: for all of China's trumpeting of its own governance model, its legal system and microlevel institutions are all heavily shaped by Western and international practices. But the major states of East Asia were constructed around bureaucratic cores that owe more to their own historical experience than to anything imported from the West.

VIOLENCE AND POLITICAL DEVELOPMENT

One of the tragic aspects of the human situation is that violence has been integral to the process of political development in a host of ways, particularly with respect to the creation of modern states. Human beings compete to cooperate, and cooperate to compete; cooperation and competition are not alternatives but two sides of the same coin. And competition frequently takes a violent form.

We do not, unfortunately, have historical records of the early transitions from band to tribe, or from tribe to pristine state, and can only speculate about the factors motivating them. The shift to larger-scale societies depended, of course, on technological changes and the economic surpluses they permitted, and were facilitated by the physical environment. But economic incentives by themselves do not seem to have been sufficient to bring these transitions about. Just as peasants today in developing countries frequently refuse to adopt productivity-enhancing technologies, so too these early societies were often subject to institutional rigidities in production methods and social organization that blocked change.

The archaeological record suggests instead that the dynamic force that induced the major transitions from band to tribe to state to modern state was military competition. It was only the threat of violence that created strong demand for new forms of political organization to ensure the community's physical survival. The Tilly hypothesis that “the state made war and war made the state” was meant to apply to state formation in early modern Europe. But military competition drove the formation of modern states in ancient China as well. When historical records begin to appear in ancient China's Zhou Dynasty, violence figures front and center as the source of state building and state modernization. As we saw, military competition was critical in compelling France, Prussia, and Japan to build modern bureaucracies under absolutist conditions. The military fiascoes of the Crimean War played a role in motivating passage of the Northcote-Trevelyan reform in Britain; many of the major expansions of the state in the United States were made for reasons of national security during the two world wars, the cold war, and the so-called war on terrorism. Conversely, it was the infrequency of interstate war in Latin America that explains in part the relative weakness of states there.

The role of violence in producing political order may seem contradictory, since political order exists in the first place to overcome the problem of violence. But no political orders have ever permanently eliminated violence; they simply pushed the organization of violence to higher levels. In the contemporary world, state power can provide basic peace and security for individuals in societies that encompass more than a billion people. But those states are still capable of organizing highly destructive violence between themselves, and they are never fully capable of maintaining domestic order.

External competition is not the only way that violence or the threat of violence has driven political institution building. Violence has frequently been necessary to overcome institutional rigidity and political decay. Decay occurs when incumbent political actors entrench themselves within a political system and block possibilities for institutional change. Oftentimes these actors are so powerful that they can be eliminated only through violent means. This was true of the venal officeholders of the ancien régime in France, who as a class had to be physically dispossessed during the revolution. Other powerful agrarian oligarchies—the Prussian Junkers and the landowning classes in Russia and China—lost their holdings only as a result of war and revolution. The landowning classes in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan were forced to divest their holdings against the backdrop of American military power. At other times, it was nonelites who were the obstacles to modernizing change. Barrington Moore noted that the commercialization of agriculture in England under the parliamentary enclosure movement, necessary to create a modern capitalist land tenure system, required a slow-motion revolution under which peasants were forcibly driven off the lands their families had inhabited for generations.

A final respect in which violence or the threat of violence is important to political development is in the formation of national identities, which are an often critical adjunct to successful state building and political order more generally. The idea that territorial boundaries should correspond to cultural units required the redrawing of borders or the physical removal of populations, neither of which could be accomplished without substantial violence. Even where national identity was deliberately designed to be inclusive and nonethnic, as in Tanzania and Indonesia, lingua francas and coherent stories of nationhood had to be imposed through authoritarian political methods. In Europe, nations that became successful liberal democracies in the second half of the twentieth century were all the products of violent nation building in the preceding centuries.

Fortunately, military struggle is not the only route to a modern state. Although Britain and the United States constructed state bureaucracies in response to national security imperatives, they both undertook reforms of their state administrations in peacetime through the building of reform coalitions. These coalitions consisted chiefly, though not exclusively, of new social groups that did not have a stake in the old systems of political patronage. In Britain it was middle classes wanting to break into the circle of privilege held by the old aristocracy. Once the country's relatively small elite decided that the old system was not efficient and was failing to meet the needs of empire, it shifted course relatively rapidly. The country's Westminster system concentrated power in such a way that the reform could be put in place in less than two decades. In the United States, the reform coalition was more complex. The new middle and professional classes were themselves divided on the issue of patronage, with some business interests having found a way to work within the old system. Conversely, some of the older agrarian interests being left behind by industrialization also joined the reform coalition out of hostility to those same interests. Culture played an important but hard to quantify role as well. The moralism of a Protestant elite resentful of the corruption being fostered by urban party machines with their immigrant clients joined in mobilizing support for reform.

These cases suggest that economic development in itself can be the starting point for the shift from a patrimonial or clientelistic state to a modern one. But growth alone provides no guarantee that modern states will emerge. The cases of Greece and Italy show how clientelism can survive into the present, despite high levels of per capita wealth. Newly mobilized social groups like middle-class professionals may or may not support reform of the state; they could just as easily get sucked into the web of clientelistic politics. This is particularly true when economic growth is not based on market-centered entrepreneurship, and when an unreformed state takes the lead in promoting economic development.

There are thus a number of ways of getting to a modern state. Violence was important in incentivizing political innovation as a historical matter, but it does not remain a necessary condition for reform in cases that come later. Those societies have the option of learning from earlier experiences and adapting other models to their own societies.

POLITICAL UNIVERSALS

In the course of the two volumes of this book, I have emphasized general over specific evolution in political development. That is, societies have diverged in their forms of political organization as they adapted to the specific environmental niches they occupied. But they have also, as noted, generated remarkably similar solutions to problems of organization across different environments.

I have argued that a well-functioning political order must consist of the three sets of political institutions—state, law, and accountability—in some kind of balance. Implicit in this argument is a normative preference. In my view, liberal democracies that combine effective and powerful states with institutions of constraint based on law and democratic accountability are more just and serve their citizens better than ones in which the state is dominant. This is because the kind of political agency implied by democratic politics serves an important end of human life in its own right, independently of the quality of government that such a system produces. I agree with Aristotle's assertion in the
Politics
that human beings are political by nature and can achieve their highest level of flourishing only to the extent that they participate in a shared life. There is a similar argument to be made for the intrinsic value of market-based economic systems. Amartya Sen notes that the latter are not simply more efficient; even if a planned economy grew at an equal rate, a citizen “may still have very good reason to prefer the scenario of free choice over that of submission to order.”
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The exercise of political and economic agency is an important end of human life itself, apart from the effects of that exercise.

The rule of law that grants rights to citizens also has an intrinsic value independent of whether those rights are useful in promoting economic growth. Individual rights—to speak freely, to assemble, to criticize, and to participate in politics—constitute recognition by the state of the dignity of its citizens. An authoritarian state at best treats its citizens as if they were ignorant or immature children who need adult supervision for their own good; at worst it treats them as resources to be exploited or trash to be disposed of. A rule of law that protects individual rights in effect recognizes that citizens are adults who are capable of independent moral choice. This is why so many tyrants, from Qin Shi Huangdi, the unifier of ancient China, to Mubarak and Qaddafi during the Arab Spring, have ultimately faced revolts of outraged dignity on the part of their own citizens.
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A broader question raised by this study is whether a regime that is balanced among state, law, and accountability—that is, liberal democracy—itself constitutes some kind of political universal, or whether it simply reflects the cultural preferences of people who live in Western liberal democracies.

This kind of regime clearly does not represent a human universal, since it came into being only a few centuries ago, a mere speck of time in the history of human political order. To the extent that liberal democracy does constitute a more generally applicable form of government, we would have to argue that it does so as a matter of general political evolution, much as band-, tribe-, and state-level institutions came to be dominant forms of political organization across different cultures and regions at different historical moments. That is, this kind of regime becomes necessary in conjunction with the other dimensions of development—economic growth, social mobilization, and changes in ideas. Band- and tribal-level societies had no state or law enforced by third parties, though they arguably had a strong form of accountability. State-level societies presiding over agrarian economies could persist for centuries, sometimes with law but never with democratic accountability. The functional need for a balanced regime incorporating all three components becomes necessary only as high levels of economic growth kick in and countries modernize along their economic and social dimensions.

It is very difficult to run large-scale societies with highly mobilized populations in the absence of legal rules and formal mechanisms of accountability. The large markets that underpin economic growth and efficiency require consistent, predictable, and well-enforced rules. Highly mobilized and ever-changing populations make constant demands of rulers; free press and elections can be seen as crucial information channels by which governments can keep abreast of this kaleidoscopic process. Moreover, as Tocqueville observed, the idea of human equality has been growing inexorably over the past several centuries, even if it is not respected by many regimes in practice. People believe they have rights and will take whatever opportunities exist to assert them. Under these conditions, the need to balance state power with rule of law and democratic accountability becomes not just a normative preference but the necessary condition for the stable organization of politics if a society hopes to be modern in other respects. Huntington believed authoritarian parties could satisfy popular demands for participation, but we see in retrospect that this was not true.