Political order does not get better than in Denmark
Once upon a time, we lived in a state of nature, each of us a law unto ourselves. As Thomas Hobbes saw it, individuals were certainly free, but their violent nature and desire for power, made life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” In contrast to Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau saw the state of nature through rose-colored glasses; it was in the state of nature that innate human goodness was most clearly manifested. He saw the entrance into society as perverting. Collective interests, for example, constantly threatened to warp the endeavor to ensure the common good that should guide the sovereign.
Francis Fukuyama, political scientist and political philosopher at Stanford University, puts paid, once and for all, to the notion of the isolated state of nature, regardless of whether it should be understood metaphorically to legitimize a social order in which individuals willingly don the collective straitjacket or as an attempt to describe an actual historical development. The default social state of man is and will remain the band, as shown by biological, archeological, historical, and anthropological research. And “the band,” great or small, needs an organization, an “order,” to survive and prosper over time. Human history is therefore indivisible from the history of how such political orders have emerged in more primitive and, with time, increasingly sophisticated forms until they began to coalesce into centralized states starting in 13th century Europe. State-building is, however, only one of many solutions to organizing the band.
Francis Fukuyama is awarded the 2015 Johan Skytte Prize in Political Science for having “with breathtaking erudition, acuity, and boldness shed new light on the emergence of the modern political order.”
Awarded by the Skytte Foundation, the Johan Skytte Prize has since its inception in 1995 become established as one of the most prestigious prizes in political science.
In a tour de force unparalleled in modern times, Fukuyama limns the history of political order and political decay in two cohesive volumes: The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (2011) and Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy (2014). The latter volume was reviewed in Svenska Dagbladet 12 November 2014.
Beginning thousands of years in the past, Fukuyama analyzes the various forms and expressions of the exercise of power over the collective in the great civilizations: China, India, the Middle East, the Muslim world, and Western civilizations in Europe and the United States.
Fukuyama argues that political order revolves around three institutions that must be differentiated both analytically and empirically: the state, the rule of law, and accountable government. This makes it possible to observe how one can exist without the other and how both the rule of law and accountability can assume forms other than those they do in modern constitutional democracies.
While China has had a strong government for millennia, much longer than Europe, it was usually based on neither the rule of law or accountability towards the governed. In India, where the central government has been weak, both the rule of law and accountability have instead been present in various forms. The centralized state came on the scene relatively late in the Western world. When it took root, however, it was connected with a historically conditioned rule of law and demands for accountability from the governed that have today given us stable democratic states.
Fukuyama borrows the metaphor of “Getting to Denmark” to describe the modern Utopia in the political sense, which may have seemed particularly apt to him after his time as a visiting professor at Århus University, where he observed at close range Denmark’s strong state balanced by an equally strong society, effective rule of law, and consolidated democracy that guarantees accountable government. The Scandinavian states, along with the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Germany are among the most effective political orders currently in existence.
But how do you “get to Denmark”? Fukuyama is deeply skeptical of ideas on any sort of quick fix and is as far from being an institutionalist as one can be; the journey instead follows a historical, cultural, and social map. Simply plopping Danish institutions down in Afghanistan, Liberia, or Kirgizstan does not work. The political order – like the economic order that Fukuyama writes about, equally profoundly and open-mindedly in
Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1996) – is embedded in but not determined by the specific culture shaped through the centuries, or even millennia.
Francis Fukuyama worked for many years at the Rand Corporation, an American policy think tank, where he directed Eastern European research and closely monitored events in the Soviet Union as the empire collapsed and 15 states rose from the ashes. As an acknowledged expert and someone deeply engaged in the evolution of American domestic and foreign policy, Fukuyama also revisits in this work the major economic and policy problems in the United States in recent decades as he understands them. He decries the polarization between Republicans and Democrats that has partially paralyzed the Congress, and goes so far as to call the United States a country in political decay.
This is not to say that Fukuyama’s scholarship is limited by the borders of the United States. He has an ability, matched by few others, to combine geographic breadth and profound scholarship with a keen eye for theoretical essentials and the big questions. He sees that which escapes others. How he identifies blood ties and kin selection as the key building blocks in the social order is one of the more important examples. The significance of kinship is, however, not the result of rational choice, but of biology. The human animal takes care of its own first. Consequently, the greatest challenge to building a state based on the rule of law and meritocracy is to suppress the entirely natural impetus towards nepotism.
Many rulers have understood this throughout history and attempts at resolution have been myriad. One of the most long-lived was practiced by the Turkish-dominated Ottoman Empire, which took boys from the Balkan provinces to Istanbul, where they were prepared to hold the highest positions. Suspended in a bubble and lacking family ties, these elite slaves were forced to serve the Ottoman state. Their privileges were not, however, private property and could not be passed down to their children; indeed, many were forced to remain celibate their whole lives. A state in decline is also recognized by how kinship (once again) begins to invade structures that should, to ensure the proper functioning of the political order, be based on merit and competence.
In economic contexts as well, the disciplining of a primordial urge towards kinship organization is also central to shaping an effective and sustainable economic order. It was understood early on in family-oriented Japan that the family’s influence must be balanced in business and companies through a leader (banto) who was not part of the family, but was instead independent and given far-reaching authority. The Japanese economy is thus based on a different kind of loyalty than kinship, but is still what Fukuyama calls a “moral” order. Cooperation is expected among companies in the same large networks (keiretsu).
Likewise, there are moral expectations between companies and employees in that employment, at least in the past, was for life (nenko). The company commits to ensuring the employee’s further training and transfer if the economy changes, while the employee in turn agrees not to seek his fortune elsewhere. That these obligations are met without being written down is, according to Fukuyama, an indicator of the high social trust that characterizes Japanese society (which is reminiscent of Germany but differs from both the United States and the United Kingdom).
Fukuyama is a scholar who allows empirical evidence to challenge and to complicate. When he shows how different market economies work in countries like Japan, the United States, Germany, and Italy – wherein the outcome of the Japanese “moral” economy is that behavior is structured by loyalty, rather than price mechanisms or supply and demand for labor – he also demonstrates that the neoclassical economy is not generally valid but is primarily applied in the United States. The simplification that rationalist theory in particular is guilty of, in terms of understanding both economics and policy, is often misleading.
For example, the American economist and political scientist Mancur Olson’s famous theory on how the state may be regarded as a stationary bandit, in contrast to the roving bandits that threaten the individual in the state of nature, is according to Fukuyama “a pleasingly cynical concept of the way that government works.” But, he writes, “The only problem with Olson’s theory is that it isn’t correct.” History shows us that many rulers made no attempt to extract unreasonable taxes from their subjects, even when this was in fact possible.
Fukuyama’s depiction of how political systems have coalesced historically and in our day also makes it clear that an oft-repeated claim – that the centralized state is a Western phenomenon – is patently false. China had such a government power long before the Common Era. Nor is accountability, or democracy if you will, something “typically Western,” as often claimed by postcolonialists and postmodernists, but rather an issue that all great civilizations have grappled with periodically throughout history and have attempted to bring about, but in different ways.
On behalf of the Prize Committee,
Li Bennich-Björkman, Johan Skytte Professor in Eloquence and Political Science.