Francis Fukuyama: 'A lot of democracies haven't been able to govern effectively.'Larry Downing / Reuters
In 1989, as communism was collapsing in Eastern Europe, foreign-policy oracle Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed that we were witnessing the end of history because, in the modern world, liberal democratic capitalism would have no rivals as a legitimate form of government.
His daring manifesto was widely derided as fanciful by critics, many of whom accused him of ignoring the fact that liberal democracy was hardly taking off in the Islamic world. More than two decades later, however, his ideas about the universal appeal of liberal democratic ideals look surprisingly robust in the wake of widespread popular revolts in the Middle East and North Africa, as well as persistent democratic tremors in China.
At 58, he is also back in the news with a hefty tome, The Origins of Political Order, an ambitious global survey that traces the birth and slow emergence of democracy, and is to appear in Canada on April 30.
In a phone interview from his office in Stanford University, where he is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, Prof. Fukuyama provided a typically sweeping tour d'horizon of the world scene, offering surprising and thoughtful insights on recent events in the Middle East and Asia.
With characteristic aplomb, he argues that thinkers on the left and right have been purblind in ignoring the importance of a strong state, and that the Communist Party of China has inherited both the strengths and weaknesses of Asia's tradition of enlightened despotism.
What's the basic message of your book?
If you didn't have order and a central government that can provide things, then all of the other good things like democracy and economic growth wouldn't happen. I am basically happy and optimistic that finally the Arab world is overcoming its passivity and they've gotten rid of [some] dictators. But you need institutions. You're not going to get to a successful democratic Middle East unless you have political parties, unless you have governments that can govern, unless you have free media - things that support good government. One of the big weaknesses is that a lot of democracies haven't been able to govern effectively.
What do you think are the prospects for the rule of law in the Islamic world?
What I argue in my book is that the rule of law originally really came out of religion. The rule of law is a set of rules of justice that is not dependent on the current ruler or government saying, "That's what I want." People sometimes say church and state were fused in the Islamic world, but I think it was a much more complicated situation than that.
In fact, Islamic rulers historically had to respect the sharia [law] and the ulama [legal scholars]and the religious authorities. One of the great tragedies of modernization in the Middle East is that the confrontation with the West completely undermined the legitimacy of these traditional forms of law.
Your account is interesting because currently sharia is a scare word in political discourse in the West.
The problem is that, in Islam, religion has gotten hijacked by these radicals out of Saudi Arabia and other places like that - who are genuine theocrats.
Isn't part of the attraction of sharia in parts of Africa that it brings law to places where there is no law? In places where the state is weak, sharia law allows people to have a set of rules.
At least the religious law puts certain limits. I was watching one of these videos on one of the opposition Libyan websites early on in the conflict, and they showed this one video of a black African militia man who was working for [Moammar]Gadhafi who had been killed.
They dragged his body into the middle of the street, and they were about stomp on it. And then one of them said, "Hey, wait. That's a soul. This person has a soul."
All of a sudden, they left the body alone; they began to treat it more respectfully. There are lots of cultures in which religion plays that moderating role on human passions
For political change to be effective, don't you need some semblance of civil society?
I think civil society is extremely important. The problem was really one of balance.
If you think what's important about Egypt: They've got a strong state that's in the hands of the military right now, but what you need are all the balancing institutions that can put some limits on the state. You certainly don't want a situation where you go to the other extreme where the state has lost all its credibility and authority.
You write about how on both the right and the left there has been an unwillingness to acknowledge the importance of the state. Why is that?
Everybody on the right and the left has been imagining you can somehow do without the IRS [Internal Revenue Service]and the ATF [Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives] Marx talked about the withering away of the state. These Internet entrepreneurs think you can have a stateless world in which you just have companies and network people on the Internet.
But unfortunately we human beings can't really organize ourselves for many purposes without a state. So we tend to take states for granted and forget that, without them, you're not going to have basic order, security, property rights, economic growth or many of the good things we associate with modern life without this hierarchical politics.
In your book, China is presented as a great pioneer of state formation. Where do you think China stands now?
China's great historical achievement was the invention of high-quality centralized, authoritarian government. If they are lucky when they get a good emperor, they do really well - which I think is their situation now.
But there is nothing to guarantee them that they will always have a good emperor. When they get a bad one, it's a total disaster. I think anyone that lived through the Cultural Revolution would say that Mao was the last really bad emperor they had, and they all suffered as a result.
I think that's the long-term lesson - that effective authoritarian government, like the one the Chinese have developed over the millennia, can be quite good and very efficient in the short run. But its average performance is likely to be worse, because there is really no check against this kind of tyrannical state power.
Will we see the emergence of the rule of law and accountability in China?
I think the Chinese are going to work their own way toward that. I just don't think they can keep this kind of centralized authoritarian system going forever.
What is the social basis of the Communist Party? Is it just a gang that rules the country, or do they have some sort of responsiveness toward the population?
They are definitely responsive. That's what makes them different as an authoritarian country. For example, inequality has grown immensely in China in the last 30 years, but the Communist Party is aware of that. They are aware that there are poor interior provinces and they are doing a lot to shift investment resources to try and equalize that.
I think that's the legacy of Confucianism: that rulers don't just rule in their own self-interest; they rule in a sense for the greater good.
Jeet Heer is is a writer who divides his time between Regina and Toronto.
This interview has been edited and condensed.