Americans Take Government For Granted

Posted by Amar C. Bakshi
August 19th, 201104:57 PM ET
Courtesy Of "CNN News"

Francis Fukuyama is a political scientist at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. He wrote the seminal essay The End of History and the Last Man and most recently published The Origins of Political Order.

Amar C. Bakshi: The Origins of Political Order is a magisterial book. What’s the main takeaway for Americans?

Francis Fukuyama: We who live in developed modern countries take government for granted. In fact, we as Americans, given our anti-statist political culture, think that the problem is always too much government.

We don’t appreciate the importance of having a functioning government and how difficult it was historically to create a society in which government existed.

By government I mean specifically three things: One is the state itself - that is to say an organization that can enforce laws throughout the land. The second component is rule of law that restricts that ability and makes sure that the state exercises its authority only according to mutually agreed upon rules. And the third is accountability, which we understand today as democracy - that the government ought to respond to the will of the people.

It’s a miracle that in the modern world you can have these very powerful states that have nuclear weapons and can launch wars and put people in jail and yet they’re constrained by these other institutions to act only in certain legitimate channels.

To get to that point is something that the vast majority of developing nations have not succeeded in doing.

Look at Mexico. Today, it is in many ways a successful country economically but they cannot enforce the law against drug cartels in modern cities like Monterrey.

So how do you get to that point?

That’s really the point of the book. The book actually begins with human beings’ primate ancestors. I think that really a lot of what we are as political creatures is actually determined by our biology. So that is really the foundation of any understanding of how we progress through tribal societies and that’s where the first states came from.

I was particularly interested not to make this a classic rise-of-the-West story because in my view the first world civilization that created a modern state – not a state, but a modern state – was actually China. It did this in the third century BC, 1800 years before it appeared in Europe. I think that’s also important in understanding present day China,India and so forth.

From your sweeping examination of state formation, do you draw lessons applicable to the current situation in Mexico? If you were to advise the President of Mexico, what would you say?

One of the things your realize when you look at these historical examples is the tragedy of human history. A lot of times you only create modern institutions under very dire incentives. One of the biggest is war.

The original Chinese state was created during a 500-year period of constant war between smaller Chinese entities that finally unified into a single Chinese Empire. But even in the history of the U.S., if you look at the growth of the centralized government in Washington, DC, it probably had less than 50,000 inhabitants before the Civil War. After the Civil war it had a couple hundred-thousand.
The two world wars in the 20th Century were important in developing a competent centralized state in the U.S.

So I’m not sure this leads to advice, because you do not want to tell a leader in a developing country that has got a weak state, “Well, just fight it out for the next 500 years like the Europeans and the Chinese….”

In the present day, money, resources and people move across international boundaries much more readily. So societies do have the prior experience of other people to look at.

When the Japanese modernized in the late nineteenth century, they actually first tried to copy the English and then the German constitutions and that was a key part of their own strategy for developing. I think that that ability to look at other models to try and pick and choose carefully those that fit your circumstances is about the best you can do.

What do you make of the European Union?

In my view, Europe is a very noble experiment but it has certain key design flaws. The one that has become evident with Greece and the other so-called PIGS –Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain– is that there was no mechanism for disciplining countries that got into the European Union.

There are plenty of criteria for how you get in, but if you get in and then you backslide - or if you get in as Greece did under false pretenses and basically lied about your national statistics - there is nothing that the rest of the EU could do other than bail you out once you got into trouble as all these other countries have now done.

I think the truth about political communities is that there has to be a strong sense of social solidarity underlying that political unit. That’s why nation states are patriotic and nationalistic and it makes people all pull on the same side.

Europe just does not have that emotional content. So when a German sees a Greek who is evading taxes, his or her first reaction is not “These are fellow Europeans and we’re all part of the same family and we’ve got to help them.” Their first reaction is “These shiftless Greeks aren’t enough like the Germans and why should we pay our valuable tax money to help them?”

That’s really the fundamental issue going on and that’s the reason why the Europeans keep delaying any kind of decisive action on their currency.