Nick Fraser 

Political Order and Political Decay review – volume two of Francis Fukuyama’s magisterial political history

The author of The End of History challenges the west’s obsession with liberal democracy, writes Nick Fraser
  
  

An 1894 map of Denmark and, in yellow, Sweden. The Schleswig-Holstein area, which Denmark had recently lost, is in the green of Prussia.
An 1894 map of Denmark and, in yellow, Sweden. The Schleswig-Holstein area, which Denmark had recently lost, is in the green of Prussia. Photograph: Alamy

Just after the end of the cold war, a young American-Japanese political scientist published an arresting essay entitled The End of History?, followed in 1992 by a book, The End of History and the Last Man. Many chose to interpret Fukuyama’s dense, aphorism-studded argument as an arrogant, misguided spelling out of the triumph of liberal capitalism. But Fukuyama had something subtler to say. He wanted us to think of what we should do with ourselves now democracy was installed globally. Would we be happy as humans – or would we not enter some zone of deep, anti-climactic dissatisfaction? And would liberal democracy be superseded?

Fukuyama mistakenly endorsed the neocon imperial project. Later, after the Iraq invasion, he wrote an admirable short book trashing his ex-associates. He supported Obama, and wrote eloquently of the failures in Congress organised by the latter’s enemies in the name of democracy. Now he has finally and triumphantly completed what must be his life’s work, telling the story of the evolution of the world’s political institutions in two fat volumes loaded up with wisdom and stuffed with facts.

Volume two skids through the 19th century to the present, but to appreciate the astounding ambition of Fukuyama’s project one must reach back to volume one, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (2011). We begin somewhere remote with primates and family hunter-gatherer groups. Then we visit scattered tribes. Something like an ordered state comes earliest in China. Now we rush through Athens and Rome. Authentic states with functioning bureaucracies come into existence. The Catholic church proves unexpectedly to be an innovator with respect to law. Life becomes less brutish and short in places such as Denmark, England, and, later, the United States, Japan, Germany. There are wars, famines, breakdowns, but some sort of amelioration of the human condition can be seen to occur.

Fukuyama has a gift for catchy, repeatable phrases, and he refers to democratic development as “Getting to Denmark” – a 17th-century pre-Borgen vision of property laws, parliaments governed by a live-and-let-live pluralistic ethos. In Fukuyama’s view “Denmark” is a metaphor of moderate tempers, a good legal system, credible parliamentary democracy, a dose of healthful end-of-history tedium. Denmark, defined both as a real place or a metaphor, is the closest we can get to collective perfection.

Political Order and Political Decay is somewhat less of a good read than the first volume. This is a consequence of the material, which is more complicated and less susceptible to being rendered as a narrative. As Tocqueville did in the 19th century, Fukuyama examines the real prospects for democracy. He wants us to ask ourselves not just whether the world we have can be improved, but whether it can survive at all.

The nearer we get to the present, however, the less this simple narrative appears sustainable. Instead of ascending in orderly fashion, humans begin to behave like demented and exhausted marathon runners. They go in different directions, following often contradictory signs – labelled Democracy, Law, Social Mobilisation – stumbling and falling. There is no finishing line.

There are omissions (modern India is one, and the passages about the Middle East are perfunctory) but the ground covered is astonishing. There are brilliant passages about modernity in Argentina and Japan. A chapter comparing the civil service in Britain, France and Germany left me wondering how such potentially dull subjects can be made so interesting.

Most Americans pay deference to the notion of American exceptionalism, but not Fukuyama. Anyone who thinks that Americans could do without the federal government, or should be happy with the way it is run, should be forced to read the 50-odd subtly argued pages about American railroads and forests. The “vetocracy” (another good Fukuyama word) of US democracy is a fact of contemporary life.

What he calls “repatrimonialisation” is the lock applied to democratic institutions by the wealthy and powerful in the pursuit of their exclusive interests – and dominance by wealthy individuals and corporations is more pervasive than at almost any time in American history. Without political change, it is clear that America faces decay. But Fukuyama is honest enough to say that he cannot see how that change will take place.

You cannot have democracy without a functioning legal system. Just as important, it would seem, is the creation of a state to which citizens can at least feel some minimal attachment – and that, too, takes time, and isn’t easy to bring off. If you choose one aspect of modernity, such as efficiency, you may rule out another. It proved easy to turn the modern bureaucratic states of Japan and Germany into tyrannies; no civil society existed capable of mobilising opposition. Fukuyama does acknowledge this, yet he forces us to see, too, how liberty has been oversold in recent decades.

Should we believe in the cause of liberal democracy – or is it time to shed what many, after so many botched efforts, see as the last, doomed western obsession with remaking the world in its distorting image? Fukuyama makes us see that such things as good government and laws that protect the weak are more or less universally desired – impulses towards them are to be found wherever political activity exists, and they are surprisingly durable.

Whether humankind can get to Denmark, alas, is less certain. We can all try, but there is no guarantee of success. Decay, meanwhile, is pervasive, easily attained and terrible. Read these wonderful books so that you can never again say that we haven’t been warned. And read them, too, for the way they make uncertainty seem not just tolerable but the only sane way to look at the world.

Nick Fraser is the commissioning editor of Storyville, the BBC’s documentary strand. Political Order and Political Decay is published by Profile (£25). Click here to buy it for £18.99 with free UK p&p

 

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