It is not often that a 600-page work of political science ends with a cliffhanger.

But the first

volume of Francis Fukuyamas epic two-part account of what makes political societies work,
published three years ago, left the big question unanswered. That book took the story of political
order from prehistoric times to the dawn of modern democracy in the aftermath of the French
Revolution. Fukuyama is still best known as the man who announced in 1989 that the birth of
liberal democracy represented the end of history: there were simply no better ideas available. But
here he hinted that liberal democracies were not immune to the pattern of stagnation and decay
that afflicted all other political societies. They too might need to be replaced by something better.
So which was it: are our current political arrangements part of the solution, or part of the
problem?

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Political Order and Political Decay is his answer. He squares the circle by insisting that
democratic institutions are only ever one component of political stability. In the wrong
circumstances they can be a destabilising force as well. His core argument is that three building
blocks are required for a well-ordered society: you need a strong state, the rule of law and
democratic accountability. And you need them all together. The arrival of democracy at the end
of the 18th century opened up that possibility but by no means guaranteed it. The mere fact of
modernity does not solve anything in the domain of politics (which is why Fukuyama is
disdainful of the easy mantra that failing states just need to modernise).
The explosive growth in industrial capacity and wealth that the world has experienced in the past
200 years has vastly expanded the range of political possibilities available, for better and for
worse (just look at the terrifying gap between the worlds best functioning societies such as
Denmark and the worst such as the Democratic Republic of Congo). There are now multiple
different ways state capacity, legal systems and forms of government can interact with each
other, and in an age of globalisation multiple different ways states can interact with each other as
well. Modernity has speeded up the process of political development and it has complicated it. It
has just not made it any easier.
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What matters most of all is getting the sequence right. Democracy doesnt come first. A strong
state does. States that democratise before they acquire the capacity to rule effectively will
invariably fail. This is what has gone wrong in many parts of Africa. Democracy has exacerbated
existing failings rather than correcting for them because it eats away at the capacity of
government to exert its authority, by subjecting it to too many conflicting demands. By contrast,

in east Asia in places such as Japan and South Korea a tradition of strong central government
preceded democracy, which meant the state could survive the empowerment of the people.
This is an explanation of how we have got to where we are but it is not a recipe for making the
world a better place. Telling people who want democracy to hold off in order to strengthen their
state wont wash, because having to live under a strong state in the absence of democracy is
often a miserable experience: thats why the Arab spring erupted in the first place. It is the basic
tension in Fukuyamas oeuvre: if we live in an age where democracy is the best idea but discover
that democracy will only work if we defer it, then politics is going to be a horribly messy
business.
A widespread attempt to achieve leaner and more efficient government has only succeeded in
bloating it and making it more bureaucratically oppressive
The other problem is that getting the right sequence often takes a shock to the system. War
remains the great engine of political development because it can empower the state, so making it
fit for democracy once the fighting is over. This is what happened in the aftermath of the first and
second world wars. Peace comes at a price, however. Fukuyama argues that Latin American
politics is often so dysfunctional because that continent has been spared the worst of global
conflict. Fewer wars meant weaker states and weaker states means political instability. It doesnt
follow that violence always helps, though the wrong kind of violence can be even worse than
no violence at all. Colonial rule in Africa was bloody but it was also destabilising because the
imperial powers used violence as a substitute for building local administrative capacity. That
pattern has repeated itself today in Afghanistan and Iraq. Peace is dangerous and war is hell.
There are few consolations in this story.
...
Fukuyamas analysis provides a neat checklist for assessing the political health of the worlds
rising powers. India, for instance, thanks to its colonial history, has the rule of law (albeit
bureaucratic and inefficient) and democratic accountability (albeit chaotic and cumbersome) but
the authority of its central state is relatively weak (something Narendra Modi is trying to
change). Two out of three isnt bad, but its far from being a done deal. China, by contrast, thanks
to its own history as an imperial power, has a strong central state (dating back thousands of
years) but relatively weak legal and democratic accountability. Its score is more like one and a
half out of three, though it has the advantage that the sequence is the right way round were it to
choose to democratise. Fukuyama doesnt say if it will or it wont the present signs are not
encouraging but the possibility remains open.
The really interesting case study, however, is the US. Americas success over the past 200 years
bucks the trend of Fukuyamas story because the sequence was wrong: the country was a
democracy long before it had a central state with any real authority. It took a civil war to change
that, plus decades of hard-fought reform. Among the heroes of Fukuyamas book are the late19th and early-20th-century American progressives who dragged the US into the modern age by
giving it a workable bureaucracy, tax system and federal infrastructure. On this account, Teddy
Roosevelt is as much the father of his nation as Washington or Lincoln.

But even this story doesnt have a happy ending. Just as it can take a major shock to achieve
political order, so in the absence of shocks a well-ordered political society can get stuck. That is
what has happened to the US. In the long peace since the end of the second world war (and the
shorter but deeper peace since the end of the cold war), American society has drifted back
towards a condition of relative ungovernability. Its historic faults have come back to haunt it.
American politics is what Fukuyama calls a system of courts and parties: legal and democratic
redress are valued more than administrative competence. Without some external trigger to
reinvigorate state power (war with China?), partisanship and legalistic wrangling will continue to
corrode it. Meanwhile, the US is also suffering the curse of all stable societies: capture by elites.
Fukuyamas ugly word for this is repatrimonialisation. It means that small groups and
networks families, corporations, select universities use their inside knowledge of how power
works to work it to their own advantage. It might sound like social science jargon, but its all too
real: if the next presidential election is Clinton v Bush again well see it happening right before
our eyes.
True political stability comes when the positive and negative sides of democracy cohere: when
people who control the power of their governments also come to value them
Fukuyama is keen to emphasise that a strong state doesnt have to mean a large one: he tries not
to take sides in the argument between the proponents of big and small government. Stable
societies can operate with a lean welfare system (Singapore) as well as a far more extensive one
(the Netherlands). But his argument does have one counterintuitive insight that is deeply
pertinent to our present democratic discontents. If strong central authority is needed to make
politics work, then even people who want to shrink the state need to be careful they dont shrink
its capacity to govern at the same time. This is the paradox of mature political development: if
you want a less controlling state you need strong state control to achieve it. Otherwise you get
what has been happening in the US (and to a lesser extent in Britain) over the past generation: a
widespread attempt to achieve leaner and more efficient government has only succeeded in
bloating it and making it more bureaucratically oppressive. The only thing that can rein in the
state is a more powerful state. The politics of austerity is a very precarious balancing act.
So what happened to the end of history? At the heart of this book is a tension that Fukuyama
never quite resolves between democracy as a positive value and democracy as a negative one.
The positive value is dignity: people who rule themselves have a greater sense of self-worth. The
negative value is constraint: people who rule themselves have far greater opportunities to
complain about governments they dont like. True political stability comes when the positive and
negative sides of democracy cohere: when people who control the power of their governments
also come to value them. That is not true at present. Where democracy has come to mean dignity
in Egypt, for example constraint is chaotic and counter-productive. Where constraint is fully
functional as in the US dignity is in short supply. In its place is a politics of resentment and
complaint, manifested as deep-seated partisan intolerance. Fukuyama points out the irony that
the US institutions that currently poll best with the American people the armed forces, Nasa
are the ones that experience the least democratic oversight. The institutions Americans really
hate such as Congress are the ones they control themselves.

This book offers the best account I have read of how we reached this point. Its slightly flat
academic style hides a wealth of insights worthy of the greatest writers about democracy. It is not
all doom and gloom. Fukuyama retains faith in the capacity of smart leaders to find a path out of
the cave. He insists that geography is not destiny and history is not fate. Countries continue to do
well or badly according to the political choices they make. Costa Rica is a relative success story
because during the 20th century its politicians got the big decisions right. Argentina has
squandered many of its advantages because its politicians got them wrong. All this takes time to
play out, however. Even the US needed the best part of a century to get its house in order. And
time may no longer be on anyones side.
The pace of technological change along with rising ecological risks means that the shocks will
keep coming, though its far from clear that states will acquire the capacity to deal with them.
Twenty-first-century wars such as the one against Isis that is just getting going are
increasingly bitty and piecemeal, fought at one remove by drones and proxy armies. They are as
likely to erode government authority as to enhance it. The politics of complaint is on the rise
almost everywhere. In a coda to the 1989 essay that made him an intellectual superstar,
Fukuyama wrote that the end of history will be a very sad time. He was more right than he
knew.