Democracy

Destination Denmark

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy
By Francis Fukuyama (Profile Books 658pp £25)

'A liberal democracy,' according to Francis Fukuyama, 'cannot be said to be humanly universal, since such regimes have existed for only the last two centuries in the history of a species that goes back tens of thousands of years. But development is a coherent process that produces general as well as specific evolution - that is, the convergence of institutions across culturally disparate societies over time.' Fukuyama intends this declaration as a statement of the idea that underlies this book - the bulky second instalment of what his publisher describes as 'the most important work of political thought in at least a generation'.

Fukuyama achieved fame at the end of the Cold War for announcing 'the end of history' (an idea he claims has been widely misunderstood) and celebrating the worldwide reach of Western power and values. Today, possibly somewhat chastened by events, he is no longer writing in such triumphalist terms. He recognises that democracy is showing signs of decay, such as gridlock in Washington and the rise of extremist parties in Europe. Yet the prophet of the end of history has hardly changed his tune: though the tone is different, the message is essentially the same. A quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Fukuyama is as convinced as he was then that democracy is the only system of government that has a future. The West may not be as powerful as he once thought, but Western-style democracy remains the end point of modern development.

In his two-volume blockbuster Fukuyama is looking for an overall pattern in history that, while leaving room for human choice, normally eventuates in democratic government. In The Origins of Political Order (2011), a 600-page door-stopper, he pursued his quest from pre-human primate hierarchies up to the French Revolution. Now we have another 600-page opus, which takes the story up to the present time. There are no surprises in this concluding volume: while it may now be in some difficulties and its ultimate triumph is not predetermined, liberal democracy continues to be the universal destination of humankind. 'The study of "development",' he writes, is 'not just an endless catalog of personalities, events, conflicts, and policies. It necessarily centers around the process by which political institutions emerge, evolve, and eventually decay.'

The telltale word here, and throughout the two volumes, is 'evolve'. For Fukuyama, as for many other modern thinkers, today and in the past, political development is an evolutionary process. What drives this process is never specified; if there is a social equivalent of the natural selection of genetic mutations, we learn no more about its workings from Fukuyama than we did from Karl Marx or Herbert Spencer, who produced similar speculations in the 19th century. It is never explained why political evolution should have any particular end state, nor why the process should involve the convergence of institutions. As it operates among species, evolution shows no such tendency. Drift and diversity, punctuated by extinction, are the normal state of affairs. Why should evolution in society - if there is such a thing - be any different?

The answer, of course, is that Fukuyama takes for granted that the end point of political development is the system of government he prefers. As he puts it here and in the previous volume, the problem that most of the world faces is 'getting to Denmark' - where 'Denmark' means not the actual country but 'an imagined society that is prosperous, democratic, secure, and well governed, and experiences low levels of corruption'. He sees many of the humanitarian and military interventions of Western governments as bungling attempts to promote this imaginary society: 'The international community would like to turn Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya, and Haiti into idealized places like "Denmark," but it doesn't have the slightest idea of how to bring this about.' Oddly, Fukuyama omits Iraq from his list of Western failures. The reason for all of these fiascos, however, is clear: 'We don't understand how Denmark itself came to be Denmark and therefore don't comprehend the complexity and difficulty of political development.'

One of the merits of this ambitious and wide-ranging book is that it recognises the daunting difficulties of creating an effective state - democracy's most essential precondition. 'Before a state can be constrained by either law or democracy', Fukuyama writes, 'it needs to exist. This means, in the first instance, the establishment of a centralized executive and a bureaucracy.' Much of the book is a catalogue of the vicissitudes of state-building, and Fukuyama recounts in impressive detail the disparate results in countries such as Prussia, Italy and the United States. Part of the book is given over to examining semi-failed states, with an instructive chapter devoted to Nigeria. Here Fukuyama's analysis is incisive: 'Lack of democracy is not the core of the country's problems.' What Nigeria lacks is 'a strong, modern, and capable state ... The Nigerian state is weak not only in technical capacity and its ability to enforce laws impersonally and transparently. It is also weak in a moral sense: it has a deficit of legitimacy.'

In some ways Political Order and Political Decay may be Fukuyama's most impressive work to date. The upshot of his argument is that functioning democracy is impossible wherever an effective modern state is lacking. Since fractured and failed states are embedded in many parts of the world, the unavoidable implication is that hundreds of millions or billions of people will live without democracy for the foreseeable future. It's a conclusion that anyone who thinks realistically is bound to accept. It's also a view that runs counter to nearly all currents of prevailing opinion. Perhaps it's not surprising that Fukuyama - who is not known for challenging ruling orthodoxies - makes little of this aspect of his analysis. At the same time, it is a conclusion that is hard to square with his continuing talk of 'the globalization of democracy'.

If the reader searches this massive tome for some reason why, despite all the difficulties to which he refers, Fukuyama believes democracy is the only system of government with a long-term future, a familiar idea emerges: as societies become more prosperous, the growing global middle class will demand more political freedom and governmental accountability. Effectively a restatement of Marx's account of the historical role of the bourgeoisie, it is an idea we have all heard many, many times before. In fact the political record of the middle classes is decidedly mixed. In Europe, throughout much of the 20th century, many middle-class people reacted to economic and political crisis by embracing the enemies of liberal democracy - fascism, communism and ethnic nationalism. Rightly, Fukuyama expresses some concern about the impact on the quality of political life of a middle class that is shrinking rapidly under the effects of globalisation and technological change. But even when the middle class was stronger than it is today, it has rarely acted as deus ex machina for democracy.

While the book contains some useful insights, at the most fundamental levelPolitical Order and Political Decay remains a morass of intellectual confusion and category mistakes. Slipping insensibly from arguments about the ethical standards by which governments are to be judged to speculative claims about the moving forces of modern history, Fukuyama blurs facts, values and theories into a dense neo-Hegelian fog. Liberal democracy may be in some sense universally desirable, as he maintains. That does not mean it will always be popular, still less that it is the normal destination of modern development.

When challenged as to his pronouncement that history has ended, Fukuyama tends to protest that he never suggested that large-scale conflict had ceased: what he meant was that henceforth only one system of government would be accepted as legitimate. But political legitimacy is a slippery business; people want many things apart from prosperity, accountability and low levels of corruption. They also demand expression of their national myths, identities and enmities - and quite often attach more importance to this aspect of government than they do to democracy. Somewhere above the fog that surrounds Francis Fukuyama's convoluted treatise hangs a clear and simple question: what if large sections of humanity don't much care about getting to Denmark?