AN OFT-REPEATED IDIOM about the “rising” Asian giants, China and India, is that the Chinese tend to grow because of their government, whereas the Indians grow despite theirs. Observers of China are taken aback by how swiftly 1.3 million people can be relocated to make way for the biggest dam in the world, or the speed with which the world’s largest bullet train network was built. Moreover, despite its lack of democratic accountability the Chinese government has managed to eradicate malnutrition, achieve universal literacy, and drastically improve urban infrastructure.
India, in comparison, stands out for its government’s incompetence, whether in the construction of rail tracks and flyovers, or in running schools and hospitals. Any monumental infrastructure project is likely to be stalled or delayed because of an onslaught of litigation—the very tool to make the government more accountable—from the stakeholders involved. Bureaucratic corruption and ineptitude ensures that money meant for food and fuel subsidies often does not reach its intended recipients. In stark contrast to China, the Indian government’s failure to readily deliver on basic promises of healthcare, nutrition and education is reflected in the country’s social indices. Malnutrition afflicts half of India’s children, and it remains the only BRIC nation to not have achieved near-universal literacy.
In his two voluminous dissections of the origins and trajectory of political order—The Origins of Political Order, published in 2011, and Political Order and Political Decay, published in 2014—the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama addresses such conundrums of governance and development. Why is it that the Chinese government, despite the absence of democratic institutions, is able to deliver better public services to its people than the Indian one? Why is Indian politics often an expression of the power and dominance of a particular community rather than a civic-minded pursuit of the good for all citizens? What would it take to have professional and efficient public services here?
Fukuyama came into the international spotlight with his “End of History” thesis—first presented in an article in the right-of-centre American journal National Interest in 1989, and eventually expanded into a book. Leftist critics of Western foreign policy have tended to label (and thus misunderstand) the thesis as a quick ticket to liberal imperialism; however, Fukuyama merely posited that modernisation should ideally result in some variant of free markets, individual freedom and electoral democracy. Once the Berlin Wall fell, and the Communist Bloc was proven to have become hollow, the article managed to almost perfectly capture the zeitgeist.
For much of the post-Cold War era, Fukuyama was attached to the cabal of rising neoconservatives in the American establishment. He was a board member of the National Interest, an institution that housed such leading votaries of this clique as Irving Kristol and Charles Krauthammer. He signed the infamous letter addressed to the then US president George W Bush calling for the removal of “Saddam from power” in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. But as the clamour for war grew and the date for the invasion of Iraq approached, Fukuyama began to have serious doubts about the United States’ ability to implant democracy. He went on to very publicly break away from both the National Interest journal and his fellow neoconservatives, and renounced his support for the Iraq War.
Like his political views, Fukuyama’s scholarly work has hardly been static. After an early, Hegelian insistence on seeing progress throughout history, Fukuyama has gone on to steadfastly avoid grand gestures, instead turning to old-school social scientific study. In a book called Trust, from 1995, he explored why certain countries—such as Germany and Japan—exhibit great social cohesion while others—such as Italy, Greece and India—are more socially fragmented, and the implications of these conditions for economic development.
The sudden chaos caused by US-led invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan helped Fukuyama to understand the crucial role of public administration in holding a country together, and to overcome his conservative distaste for strong states. The result was an elegantly argued discourse on public administration, State Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century, released in 2004. This was a deep meditation on the institutional requirements for effective state-building; Fukuyama directly questioned the international community’s emphasis on democracy over the brick and mortar of public administration in Iraq and Afghanistan.
His two volumes on political order ought to be seen in the light of his obsession with the particular issues of governance and civil society that has characterised his work for most of the past two decades, as opposed to the general pronouncements on the philosophy of history that still characterise his public profile.
LATE-NINETEENTH-CENTURY and early-twentieth-century Europe and North America witnessed a wave of scholars and writers coming to terms with the rapid political and socio-economic changes taking place around them, processes retrospectively described as “modernisation.” This modernisation entailed the growth of centralised states, the rise of industrial capitalism and the bourgeoisie, an increased intensity of nationalist fervour and, perhaps most importantly, the atomisation of society—from clans and communities to individuals and classes.
Europe’s slow evolution from a land of petty feudal kings to an abode of absolute monarchs, and finally to a continent of parliaments, factories and political parties, convinced many of these writers that all aspects of modernisation inevitably go together. For the liberals, political centralisation and the growth of bourgeois industrialism would lead to democracy. On the left, the propensity of capitalism to contain the “seeds of its own destruction,” in Karl Marx’s famous words, was assumed to eventually lead to socialism. Common amongst these writers was the belief that the process of modernisation was, as Fukuyama himself notes, a “single package,” and that its constituents—political, social and economic modernisation—would drive one another.
This linear understanding of modernisation and its progress, however, did not explain the immense political instability in the Third World following decolonisation. Latin America, Africa and certain parts of Asia were rife with unstable democracies, self-appointed “presidents for life” and military coups. It was Samuel Huntington, an extremely influential political scientist at Harvard, who in his classic 1968 treatise Political Order in Changing Societies provided a composite theory to frame all this. His central thesis was that the instability in many modernising societies was the result of the inability of their political institutions to “assimilate” rising social forces set loose by industrialisation and access to new ideas.
Therefore, the United States and the Soviet Union had more in common with each other than with democracies or communist societies from the Third World. For Huntington, the exercise of political authority was institutionalised in both the superpowers, and neither faced any real crisis of legitimacy (as was apparent when Huntington wrote the book). In contrast, many Third World nations repeatedly underwent coups and counter-coups.
Much has happened in the forty-five years since Huntington wrote Political Order. The Communist bloc collapsed under the kind of crisis of legitimacy that Huntington assumed would not occur in it; East Asia has successfully modernised; liberal interventionism is rife in parts of West and Central Asia; and plenty of African and Asian states continue to be marked by instability and economic backwardness.
Fukuyama, in his two recent books, sees himself as “updating” Huntington’s magnum opus. His task is two-fold. First, like Samuel Huntington, he attempts to outline a broad framework for understanding and comparing different political orders and institutions. Second, he conducts a broad-brush comparison of political orders throughout history in order to arrive at fruitful generalisations. The Origins of Political Order deals with the history of political order till the advent of the French Revolution; Political Order and Political Decay traces the development of political order into the contemporary period. Given the gargantuan breadth of the material covered, the reader—depending on his or her specialisation—will inevitably find certain unanswered questions and inaccurate assumptions about specific regions. But by and large Fukuyama manages to pull his project off—well enough for many of his conclusions to be agreeable.
Political order, for Fukuyama, comprises three core elements—the state, the rule of law, and democratic accountability. The “state” here refers to a public administration, rather than the more common understanding of the term as standing for a structure of democracy, elections and political parties. Fukuyama highlights the distinction drawn by the sociologist Max Weber between a patrimonial administration and a modern, impersonal, bureaucratic state. The rule of law constitutes “abstract rules of justice that bind a community together” and supersede the sovereign—much like a constitution in a modern republic. Lastly, accountability refers to mechanisms—like elections or representative government—through which the sovereign could be held accountable to a certain section of society.
Using these three simple but profound concepts, Fukuyama, in most of the first volume, criss-crosses disparate regions and cultures to understand the growth of each aspect of political order. Thus, China was the first region to develop a modern Weberian bureaucracy by recruiting administrators on the basis of their knowledge of Confucian texts. The incessant warfare of the Warring States period, approximately from 450 BC to 200 BC, demanded extracting taxes and maintaining standing armies, and to do both rulers needed capable people staffing their administrations.
But Chinese political culture never yielded a set of abstract norms, in the form of religious or moral maxims, which could supersede the sovereign. These were to take root in Indo-European people. Europe, West Asia and India all developed corpuses of such norms, whether under the umbrella of Christianity, Islam or Brahmanism. The sovereign in these polities could never claim absolute power—as was possible to a large extent in China. Promises to faithfully carry out the will of god or uphold the casteorder justified the sovereign’s existence.
Thus, in comparison to China, India, writes Fukuyama, took a “detour” by developing the jati and Brahmanical systems, which resulted in not warriors but “elites holding ritual power” at the top of the hierarchy. Like Sunil Khilnani in The Idea of India, a seminal work on modern Indian politics, Fukuyama argues that the rigidity of the jati order ensured a stability that largely insulated Indian society from politics. This meant that it could never be remoulded by political power in the way Chinese society has been.
Clearly, the legacy of these histories is evident today. The Cultural Revolution in China saw Mao upturn the establishment and send scores of urban professionals and party cadres to work in the countryside. Such forced mobilisation by the state is unthinkable in India.
It was Europe, and more specifically early modern England, that first saw the three essentials of political order—centralised state, rule of law and democratic accountability—converge to some degree. Constant warfare on the continent ensured the growth of the power of the state, while Christianity superseded the sovereign, thus limiting tyranny. The extreme plurality of medieval European society laid the foundations for the first representative institutions—the “parlements” of the nobility. Subsequent industrialisation would further the tradition of representation, through the mobilisation of new social groups such as the bourgeoisie and labourers.
Such a broad comparative analysis of histories can help us draw useful generalisations, but, as mentioned above, most region-specific experts will easily be able to punch holes through many of Fukuyama’s assumptions. For instance, the belief in Brahmanical authority over kshatriyas and rulers in the Indian subcontinent has been brushed aside as an inaccurate Orientalist verdict by anthropologists and historians such as Nicholas Dirks and Susan Bayly, who have shown that the crown was not as hollow as is commonly presumed. In many cases, particularly in southern India, kings undisputedly held great power over the priests.
Political Order and Political Decay—more precise perhaps because it is closer to us in time—adds to his original three-part framework the factors of economic growth (caused by rapid industrialisation), social mobilisation, and the development of modern ideas such as liberalism, fascism, communism and republicanism.
The illustration of the progress of political orders in this second volume has, largely, two underlying themes—the necessity (and alarming absence) of the Weberian, impersonal state in contemporary times, and the general importance of the bourgeoisie in democratisation.
After carefully establishing how the rise of centralised modern states in Western Europe was the key to furthering industrialisation and improving governance, Fukuyama underscores the great dichotomy in the developing world—between Africa, Latin America and those parts of Asia with weak or non-existent states, and East Asian nations with historically effective states. The former have often descended into civil wars, coups and other forms of political instability, while the latter have retained viable administrations and managed to industrialise through highly effective industrial policies.
One conclusion from this is that the elements of political order ought to occur in the right sequence. Putting democracy before the creation of an effective state will probably lead to either clientelism or total collapse, depending on the relative strength of the state administration. The latter result defines many African and Central Asian states, which often exercise little control over vast tracts of their territory. In Afghanistan, for instance, the government has ceded control of major areas of the country to tribal entities including the Taliban. Those Asian or Latin American countries that do have rudimentary state structures tend to be victims of clientelism and patronage politics.
Such verdicts may seem harsh given the importance the prevailing intellectual discourse attaches to restricting the power of the state. But it becomes tough to disagree with them once Fukuyama begins to discuss the political trajectory of today’s only superpower—the United States.
Unlike Europe, but very much like independent India, the United States had democracy long before it had a rationalised state or a sizeable bourgeoisie. The roots of this lay in the fact that the country’s founding fathers “brought with them many of the political practices of … late medieval England,” which entailed the division of powers and functions between the monarchy and the parliament—similar to the dichotomy between the presidency and the Congress in the United States today—and not of the modernising and centralising nineteenth-century European states. This ensured extensive political decentralisation, powerful courts, and (for the time) a “premature” extension of suffrage.
Soon, political entrepreneurs such as Andrew Jackson began promising people government jobs and cash in return for votes. Between the 1830s and the dawn of the twentieth century, voter turnout hinged on the fulfilment of such promises by party machineries. Even the Steven Spielberg film Lincoln notes how ready Abraham Lincoln was to trade jobs for legislative votes.
Many in India may find this familiar. Most chief ministers, for instance, ensure that favoured bureaucrats get choice posts, that preferred businessmen win public tenders, and that party members and voters get jobs or cash. From the Philippines to Kenya, clientelism is perhaps the story of every poor democracy.
Thus, democracy-building and state-building in the short run “exist in a great deal of tension with one another.” Instituting democracy prior to effective state building or industrialisation, as in the nineteenth-century United States and scores of developing nations today, leads to patronage politics, since voters care more about immediate give-aways than ideology or systemic changes in policies. This calls into question, very directly, the West’s emphasis on democracy in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which have no viable administration, no cohesive sense of nationhood and no real economic modernity.
IT HAS BEEN TWENTY-FIVE YEARS since Fukuyama’s article on the “End of History” appeared in the National Interest. These years have seen the United States and its allied nations and institutions, flushed with victory in the battle of ideas following the collapse of the Soviet Union, unsparingly promote democracy, “liberal interventions” and neoliberal economics across the world.
But “history” has not culminated at the point Fukuyama’s theory meant it to. The ruthless implementation of neoliberal “shock therapy” in Russia—through sudden privatisation, deregulation and liberalisation—has allowed a few government insiders to form a new oligarchy. Across the world, loosely regulated money has fed bubble after bubble, leading to an unprecedented number of financial crises. These crises built up to the Great Recession of 2008, whose effects have emasculated most Western economies. The West, convinced of its ability to impose democracy anywhere, launched the disastrous and illegal invasion of Iraq, which generated anarchic conditions amongst its sectarian groups. And finally, China, the only major nation to have successfully modernised over the past twenty years, has done so on the back of authoritarian politics and state-controlled capitalism.
Fukuyama is aware of the profound discrepancies between the world view he espoused a quarter of a century ago and world history since. His two latest books, therefore, need to be seen as an attempt to roll up his sleeves, hit the history books and break apart the black boxes of concepts such as democracy, government, the state and the rule of law. Even beyond these volumes, this approach has characterised all his recent work. His conclusion is not some grand statement about where humanity ought to head; it is a series of theories and conjectures—most immensely accurate—that he thinks could benefit those building or repairing political orders.
Is Fukuyama right? Despite the flawed assumptions noted earlier, Fukuyama’s assessment of India as a strong society and a weak state largely sticks. Thus, one of his key conclusions—about democracy being in implicit conflict with state-building—is certainly accurate in India’s case.
India continues to be a largely rural nation, where caste and other primordial identities remain key mobilisers of votes. The state maintains its power by being virulently sectarian too. Every power change in Uttar Pradesh, for instance, ushers in a massive shuffling of bureaucrats. Akhilesh Yadav, the state’s current chief minister, transferred over a thousand of them when he came to power in 2012 because he suspected them of being loyal to his main rival, Mayawati. Thus, the administration is politicised rather than impersonal, and party loyalty counts for more than competence.
Fukuyama’s prescription for India would clearly be to reform and strengthen state institutions and the bureaucracy, by promoting their autonomy and a meritocratic culture within them. The state ought to be better insulated from the rough and tumble of politics, and specialist agencies—the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India, for instance—need to be staffed with relevant experts, not generalists. A profound example of reform would be to curb a minister’s power to arbitrarily transfer bureaucrats, allowing administrators to improve capacity by spending significant time in the same department. This would also vanquish political loyalty as a factor in appointments. As Chalmers Johnson notes in his MITI and the Japanese Miracle, the key to the competence of the Japanese bureaucracy and its success in guiding industrial development lay in the fact that it had considerable autonomy, was insulated from politics, and recruited staff based on merit.
But how do we achieve such reforms? As Fukuyama has shown, constant warfare was the chief driver behind the creation of capable public administrations in both East Asia and Western Europe. Most of the world, including India, simply cannot be expected to follow a similar trajectory. For poor democracies, the answer lies in building broad social coalitions with a stake in ending patronage politics—namely, in growing the middle classes. While describing the United States’ journey from a patronage-infested polity to a modern state, Fukuyama discusses how Theodore Roosevelt knit up a “progressive coalition” composed of activist middle classes, and so replaced the “spoils” system that had plagued American bureaucracies with a system of merit-based promotion. For Fukuyama, the American experience is “singularly important” because most developing countries—like India and the Philippines—need to “build strong states in the context of a democratic political system.”
The second achievement of Fukuyama’s recent work is to bring the framework of modernisation back to the centre of the discourse on development. For too long, intellectuals and policymakers across the world have opted for what are essentially one-size-fits-all measures meant to promote some combination of capitalism and democracy.
Thus, there are economists such as Dambisa Moyo—a noted Zambian banker turned development pundit—arguing for free trade and capitalism in African nations that have little or no state capacity to even create the markets necessary for these systems to flourish. Even the hopes of the Ivy League-educated Indian commentariat that Modi will bring about a Thatcherite revolution seems misplaced. Modi is no Margaret Thatcher, presiding over an industrial society with hefty unions. Rather, India has yet to undergo a thorough process of industrialisation of the kind that Britain experienced in late nineteenth century, and other nations saw thereafter.
By drawing up the “six dimensions of development,” including political, social and economic factors; by stringently emphasising the importance of their sequencing; and by using European and North American experiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to draw conjectures about developing nations today, Fukuyama has revived—after the fashion of Karl Marx, Max Weber, Karl Polanyi and Samuel Huntington—an analytical approach that considers modernity the result not of particular economic and political policies, but of historical processes fed by a complex mix of social, economic and political developments.
Fukuyama’s audacity in engaging with disparate regions of the world is admirable, and his conclusions—especially those pertaining to the crucial need for enhancing the state apparatus in countries such as India—are utterly believable. In India, the onus for carrying a rural population of 800 million people into modernity is squarely on the state. Only the state can provide training and education, organise large-scale industrial and infrastructural investments, and manage the sort of intricate industrial policies that led to the industrialisation of East Asian economies. And to do all this, the state needs to have the capacity of any successful agency or corporation. Fukuyama’s lessons, therefore, must not go unheeded.