The Origins of Political Order — Francis Fukuyama on Political Evolution

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The Origins of Political Order — Francis Fukuyama on Political Evolution

Origins of order

It is a fallacy to assume that nations can simply export their institutions to another without regard to culture and context. This is in part why the interventions of the United States in the Middle East, for example, have been fraught with troubles and failures. The administration wrongly assumed that Iraq would swiftly restore itself once Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship ended; and underestimated the bonds, fear, and religious edicts that motivated his followers beyond rational calculation. Similarly, looking east, from the times of the Persians and Mongols, to the Brits, Russians, and Americans, many empires have, at some point or another, tried to invade or conquer Afghanistan to limited success.

State building and political development is rarely expedient or straightforward. As the political scientist Francis Fukuyama explains in his book, The Origins of Political Order, if we are to get anywhere on this front, we must first understand the manner in which centralized states, the rule of law, and political accountability emerge and decay. What we often see, however, as Fukuyama writes, is that “the actual historical roots of different institutions often seem to be the products of a long concatenation of historical accidents.” How then might political development transition from despotic rule to something fairer and accountable?

Predatory states

It can be difficult to imagine today, for instance, that the early states of many advanced democracies in the West were once similarly predatory in nature. Many political scientists, Fukuyama notes, have likened these early states to organized criminal syndicate groups that consisted of political elites who excelled at monopolizing power and extracting resources from the peasantry. (Some of you may even feel that little has changed since then.) And while public accountability, Fukuyama notes, might arise via education, as with the princes of early Chinese states who studied Confucianism to cultivate their sense of responsibility; or procedurally via mechanisms like elections that allow voters to oust the politically incompetent; the trouble often lies in creating strong practices, norms, and rules that apply not only to the populace but to the ruling class as well. This is the same challenge that plagues many developing nations to this day. 

Norm-following conformists

Today, modern states rely on concepts like republicanism, the constitution, and legal statutes to uphold an authority that is superior to any one lawmaker or president. They are shared systems that people jointly recognise as legitimate. Religious institutions, likewise, have played a similar function in previous times. And while they have been responsible in part for many conflicts, they have also helped many strangers and disparate communities to cooperate beyond their immediate kinship. While this is perhaps best illustrated by the role of monotheistic religions like Christianity and Islam, many early empires, from the Mayans to the Romans, found ways to incorporate the divine and supernatural into their order. As Fukuyama writes, “religious ideas were critical to early state formation, since they could effectively legitimate the transition to hierarchy and loss of freedom” that statehood entails. 

Indeed, this ability to build, alter, and conform to transcendental rules and norms has helped us to achieve some semblance of political order. And it is an ability that appears to be a uniquely human thing. To our knowledge, no other animal, plant, or insect will make appeals to gods or paragons in their self-organization. And yet this capacity of ours is not a wholly rational social contract either. Our culture and politics is often driven by envy, greed, pride, and other human emotions. We feel embarrassment or shame, for instance, when we fail to live up to some ideal or expectation that we deem socially important. “The fact that we become attached to certain rules… greatly enhances the stability of social life”, Fukuyama observes.

Leviathans at war

Looking elsewhere, the emergence of the leviathan state also owes a great deal to the agricultural revolution. As Jared Diamond and others have discussed, food production led to larger, denser populaces, which led to further agricultural intensification. This feedback loop in turn placed new pressures on societal formation and organization. Food surpluses began to feed new specialists like kings, bureaucrats, priests, soldiers, artisans, merchants and scribes. But in regions where domesticates were absent or productive lands scarce, as with early aboriginal Australia, politically complex agrarian states did not arise.

Another driver of political development, however, at least for China and Europe, was the chronic threat of violence—a sad feature of life that we have not yet learned to extinguish. State formation during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, for example, Fukuyama notes, led to the development of standing armies, tax-collecting bureaucracies, and large public works like canals and irrigation systems.

Similarly, European politicking from the sixteenth century and onward centered heavily on their ability to finance their war machines. A small sample of this zoo of prolonged conflicts include the Dutch Revolt, the Thirty Years War, the Seven Years War and the Napoleonic Wars. The Habsburg Empire, for one, dedicated around ninety-eight percent of its budget to wars with Turkey and the Protestant powers in the seventeenth century. But it was the empires that learned to organize their economy and military more efficiently that had the better standing chances.

Weak absolutism

The French and Spanish monarchies of the period, for instance, can be characterized as weak or partial absolutist states. In France, the ruling classes, from the traditional aristocracy to the urban bourgeoisie, as Fukuyama explains, agglutinated into a wide rent-seeking coalition. They exempted themselves from taxes and left the growing bills and burdens of war to the peasantry. Elsewhere in England, government accountability and rule of law was fermenting. The Glorious Revolution, in particular, led to the removal of James II, the limiting of royal powers, and greater protections for English denizens. The middle class was afforded with increasingly fairer representation, property rights, and taxation.

So when England warred with France during the Nine Years War (1689—1697) and the War of the Spanish Succession (1702—1713), English taxpayers supported the burdens of battle. France, by contrast, had to extract taxes from their peasantry by force, and soon found itself unable to compete financially with England. And this was despite having a population that was nearly four times as large. France went bankrupt in 1715. Over time, “the states in both [Spain and France] lost legitimacy because of the corrupt way they were put together”, Fukuyama writes. But while “the old French patrimonial system died in the revolution… the old regime in Spain… was exported to Latin America, which has had to live with its legacy ever since.”

The balance of power

The English experience was indeed a precursor to the modern liberal democracies that arose in Great Britain, the United States, and elsewhere. Hidden inside all this, however, is a delicate balancing of power. After all, a strong state is necessary to enact and enforce laws, channel resources towards public works, and mobilize armies and navies for defense. But a strong society is equally necessary to ensure that the state remains accountable to the public’s interest.

As Fukuyama notes, the eighteenth century English state, for instance, “did not degenerate into rapacious oligarchy… [because] the English Parliament included representatives of all the country’s propertied classes, from the great nobles down to yeoman farmers.” Their society developed “legitimate property rights”, a “uniform system of justice”, “a tradition [for] grassroots political participation”, and “a multiplicity of courts.” Where “state building concentrates political power… [the] rule of law limits it.” And it is this balance between state and society that makes it work.

Vestiges of history

Of course, the political order of states and chiefdoms do not simply replace that which came before it. Their “institutions [are] merely layered on top”, writes Fukuyama. The political scientist points, for instance, to the caste system of India, which continues to play a strong role in Indian society and politics. And while the emergence of orderly states is not deterministic in any sense, they are influenced by the lines of history.

The strong absolutism that arose in Russia, likewise, can be traced back in part to the thirteenth century when Batu Khan and around two-hundred thousand Mongols invaded Kievan Rus. As Fukuyama explains, the Mongol occupation was devastating not only in its predatoriness, but that it disconnected Russia from the Byzantine Empire, eroded their legal traditions, and forestalled their political development for more than two centuries. Brutal force and repression, likewise, remained a tool of the Tsardom that emerged from the Mongol yoke. Remnants of this experience are felt to this very day.

Delicate and inertial

I should emphasize again the word delicate in the origins of political order. Because even if a balance of power is achieved, it is almost always under threat and tension. Political decay, Fukuyama reminds, is often associated with patrimonialization, where kin groups or inner circles try to hijack their institutions for personal gain. He notes, for instance, that the “bureaucratic system set up during the former Han Dynasty was gradually eroded by aristocratic families who sought to secure privileged places for themselves and their lineages.”

Something similar occurred as well during the Roman Nerva-Antonine dynasty when the stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius abandoned meritocratic appointments for hereditary rule by choosing his incompetent and cruel son Commodus for successorship. Today, we observe similar acts in modern states through the repudiation of election results, the subversion of democratic norms, the capturing of the courts and free press, and the rise of powerful lobby groups that seek only to feed their self-interest. 

Moreover, our institutions are also inertial and sticky in the sense they are difficult to change once in place. Humans, after all, are habit-seeking, norm-following creatures. We imbue our ways of life with intrinsic value. And so the leviathan state is sometimes slow to adapt to changing internal and external environments.

Cognitive dissonance in particular, Fukuyama notes, is a recurring pattern in political and social history. He describes, for instance, how the declining protostates in Ancient Rome and early China would blame their failures on religious observances rather than organizational weaknesses. In response, they dedicated even more resources to their rituals than to practical means, adding further to their troubles. In most cases, “political decay [continues] until the existing actors come up with a new set of rules and institutions to restore order.”

Political evolution

In a sense, political evolution is Darwinian-like. It is a process of variation and selection. It is in this ceaseless struggle for power and recognition, both internally between different groups or social classes, and externally between different states or empires, that competitive stresses work to reform or malform the organization. And it is the political systems and structures that are most environmentally fit and fortunate that persist, expand, and replicate over time.

Do not, however, misconstrue fitness for virtue or righteousness. Many extractive states, like the Mongol Empire or North Korean Regime, can persist for generations or centuries. Even the Old Regime of France, as an “early prototype” of rent-seeking societies, lumbered on for nearly two hundred years, Fukuyama writes. Selection pressures operate on many socio-political levels and dimensions.

What’s more, as with biological evolution and technological progress, there are plenty of accidents and surprises in the history of political development. Many ideas that people introduce for one political purpose may be unexpectedly exapted for another down the track. Fukuyama points, for instance, to the “idea of the corporation…, [which] arose initially as a religious organization and not for commercial purposes.”

Similarly, “the Catholic church upheld the right [for] women to inherit property not because it wanted female empowerment—something quite anachronistic in the seventh century—but because it had its eye on valuable real estate held by powerful clans and saw this as a way of getting it away from them.” In this way, our institutions and political orders are forever repurposing themselves for various means and ends.

Questions of the future

We are then left to wonder about the orderliness of political order. What can we say, for instance, about the future of democracy? Right now, the signs are not positive. The number of liberal democracies have since receded from 41 to 32 over the last ten years. Gridlock, indecision, polarization and bouts of corruption are characteristic of this global democratic recession. 

Yet the outlook for China is also unclear. Fukuyama wonders whether such a large authoritarian state can continue to maintain its economic growth and political stability without accountability or rule of law. Will future societal movements and uprisings be quashed by the state, or will it be a growing force for change? 

We have to remember as well, however, that tyranny comes in many forms. It is not necessarily a product of a singular, powerful body. Local oligarchies, hereditary classes, and related models of organization can be equally debilitating. And all of this is most insidious when, as John Kenneth Galbraith reasons in The Anatomy of Power, the populace is conditioned to believe and accept that the result is a natural course of things.

Peaceful paths

With that said, Fukuyama expects accountable and representative governments to fare better than absolutist regimes over the very long run for one crucial reason. If nothing else, “political accountability provides a peaceful path toward institutional adaptation.” True, accountability and the rule of law often mires the state in needless bureaucracy. A benevolent, competent dictator, on the other hand, would certainly have an easier time in uplifting his or her people. But there is no guarantee that his or her successor, and the successor’s successor, and so on, will be just as competent or well meaning.

Indeed, “the one problem that the Chinese political system was never able to solve in dynastic times was that of the bad emperor”, Fukuyama writes. By contrast, “the checks on state authority provided by rule of law and accountability serve to reduce the variance… [They] constrain the best governments, but they also prevent bad ones from spiraling out of control.” The peaceful transition of power requires a reliable mechanism to remove the idiots and despots that find their way into power. If left with no other means, revolts and uprisings become all the more likely.

Pens and swords

In the end, “there should be no general presumption that political order, once it emerges, will be self-sustaining,” Fukuyama writes. The conditions that give rise to order and disorder are forever in flux. Old actors and old ideas make way for the new—sometimes for the benefit of all, often for the benefit of the few.

This is also in part why institutions are not something for us to simply manufacture and export like widgets from a factory. As we’ve said, the political order that emerges is more than a rational social contract. In many ways, the result is unique to itself—deeply intertwined with its people, its history, and the vagaries of happenstance. 

We can take some solace perhaps in knowing that history has been a long, haphazard but upward march in representation of different groups of people. But it took us the better part of several millennia to give equal rights, privileges, and dignity to women and minorities. In fact, many of us are still fighting for such recognition to this very day. Is the pen then mightier than the sword? History suggests to me at least that the mightiness of one is weak without the other.

Sources and further reading