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Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy , Francis Fukuyama (New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux , 2014), 658 pp., $35 cloth.
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During the globalization euphoria of the 1990s some pundits were writing that the individual state was too small to solve social and economic problems. Now the tone has changed. Even those who aspire to a transnational religious caliphate are branding their political objective as establishing an effective "Islamic State." Francis Fukuyama, following in the footsteps of his renowned teacher Samuel Huntington, affirms that successful state-building remains the sine qua non of political order. He worries, though, that too many contemporary states are not living up to Huntington's criteria for a strong state: "complex, adaptable, autonomous, coherent."
Fukuyama notes the wide variation in the strength of contemporary states. African failed states host terrorists, corruption, and disease. Brittle Middle Eastern states are the object of movements to strengthen, reorganize, or sweep them away. States in East Asia are generally doing well, whether democratic or not. Among the older established states, some, including the United States, are at risk of institutional decay.
Extending to the present day his 2011 study The Origins of Political Order, which ends at the French Revolution, Political Order and Political Decay asks why some polities have been able to create states based on consensual rules of behavior that bind even the most powerful elements of society, reconciling administrative and judicial autonomy with social accountability, whereas others have not. The earlier volume showed that historically, states developed out of patronage networks of descent lineages or clients, which evolved with varying thoroughness into an impersonal, rule-following administrative apparatus. This volume shows how the state's clientelistic birth defects create an endemic risk of state capture by kin and cronies, descent into corrupt ineffectiveness, and outraged populist reaction.
In Fukuyama's wide-ranging historical account, states encounter three pitfalls. First, many in the tropics never got off the ground, since geography and disease conspired against the transplanting of European settlers and their efficient institutions, while unhelpful economic endowments and imposed colonial structures often stymied indigenous institutional development. A second pitfall occurs when technical administrative rationalization proceeds without procedural accountability to the...