Political Order and Political Decay (32 page)

2. Moving or eliminating populations to create more homogeneous political units. During the Balkan wars following the breakup of the former Yugoslavia, this is what came to be known as “ethnic cleansing.” Ethnic cleansing was in a sense the natural concomitant to the shift in legitimating principle from dynastic rule to national solidarity.
     The great agrarian polyglot empires were compatible with both impersonal administration and rule of law. Indeed, they depended on such universalistic institutions in order to function, since they thrived on the interactions of ethnically and linguistically diverse people. At the height of the Roman Empire in the second century
A.D.
, travelers moving from Britain to North Africa, Syria, or Asia Minor could expect to find similar administrative structures, laws, and roads. Fin de siècle Vienna was one of the most liberal and cosmopolitan cities in the world, reflecting the diversity of the empire of which it was the capital.
     When multiethnic empires broke apart into states organized on a nationalist principle, various minority populations were left stranded in them. They could have been accommodated had the new national states adopted a liberal rule of law, but the power of ethnonationalist self-assertion guaranteed that this seldom happened. The result was huge movements of populations as various minority groups were forced out of the new would-be nation-states or traded for minorities in neighboring countries. Thus the mixed Greek and Turkish populations in Asia Minor and the eastern Aegean who had lived side by side since the time of the Byzantine Empire sorted themselves out during the Greek-Turkish War of 1919–1922. World War II was triggered, in some sense, by stranded populations such as the Sudeten Germans in Czechoslovakia and the Baltic Germans in Poland. The end of the war in 1945 saw massive transfers of populations (as well as substantial redrawing of borders) among Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, and other countries. Ethnic cleansing in the Balkans was thus not an invention of the post–cold war period. As some observers pointed out at the time, the stability of modern Western Europe was built on ethnic cleansings that had taken place in earlier historical periods, which modern Europeans had conveniently forgotten.

3. Cultural assimilation. Subordinate populations can adopt the language and customs of the dominant group, or in some cases intermarry to the point of eventually disappearing as a distinct minority. Assimilation can happen voluntarily, as minorities decide that it is in their self-interest to conform to the dominant culture. The reduction in the number of regional languages in France and the adoption of Parisian French as a national standard is an example. Similarly, most immigrant groups arriving in the United States learned English and took on American customs because that was a route to upward social mobility.
     Perhaps one of the greatest assimilation stories is China. Remarkably for so large a country, ethnic Han Chinese today constitute over 90 percent of the population. China was not always so homogeneous; its current ethnic makeup is the result of more than two millennia of relentless assimilation. The seat of ethnic Han civilization lay in the northerly Yellow River valley four millennia ago. The first Han state was established by the conquests of the state of Qin (in what is now north-central China) in the third century
B.C.
This state then expanded to the southeast, southwest, west, and northeast over the centuries. In doing so, the Han people ran into ethnically diverse indigenous populations, particularly among the Turkic-Mongolian nomads to the north and west. This original cultural diversity is preserved in the different forms of spoken Chinese that exist today. But the literary language was unified from the time of the original Qin Dynasty and served as the basis of a common elite culture for the entire empire. China was heavily influenced by non-Han ethnicities, but almost all of the foreign populations ultimately adopted Chinese cultural norms and intermarried so extensively with Han Chinese that those remaining in China were no longer distinguishable as ethnic minorities. The major exceptions are the Muslim Uighurs in the western province of Xinjiang, the Mongols in Inner Mongolia, and the Tibetans. Assimilation continues relentlessly as a matter of government policy, with the settling of ethnic Han Chinese in each of these areas.
     We should not underestimate the degree of power and often coercion that is required to bring about cultural assimilation. Choice of a national language is a political act on the part of those who speak it. Few minorities voluntarily give up their mother tongues, particularly if they themselves are concentrated in a particular region where they have lived for generations. The primary instrument of cultural assimilation is the public education system and secondarily the choice of language in public administration. Control over the school system is thus a hugely contested issue and the central objective of would-be nation builders.

4. Adjusting posited national identities to fit political realities. All nation-building projects eventually run into practical obstacles to achieving correspondence between idea and reality, and it is often the idea that gives way first in the face of simple power politics. The identity question cannot be separated from the territorial question. Ideas can be adjusted in a variety of ways: territorial claims can be scaled back, identity can be shifted from ethnicity or religion to ideology or a more flexible concept of shared culture, or entirely new concepts of identity can be introduced to supersede existent ones. Changing the definition of national identity to fit reality is the least coercive and most promising path to national unity.

HISTORICAL AMNESIA

Identity-building projects are extremely contentious because the world never consisted of compact, homogeneous “nations” ready to be turned into political units. As a result of conquest, migration, and trade, all societies were and still are complex mixtures of tribes, ethnicities, classes, religions, and regional identities. Any idea of a nation inevitably implies the conversion or exclusion of individuals deemed to be outside its boundaries, and if they don't want to do this peacefully, they have to be coerced. This coercion can be accomplished from the top down by states, but it can also take the form of communal violence, as one community kills or drives off its neighbors. The twenty-five or so nations that made up Europe at the middle of the twentieth century were the survivors of the five hundred or more political units that had existed there at the end of the Middle Ages.

In all of the cases discussed up to now—Germany, Greece, Italy, Britain, and the United States—contemporary outcomes, including high levels of economic development and liberal democracy, were dependent on earlier histories of violence and coercion. I have already touched on this with regard to Germany and Greece, both of which had large diaspora populations interspersed with other ethnicities to their east. The formation of the contemporary German and Greek states began with an act of violence—Bismarck's wars against Denmark, Austria, and France on the one hand, and the Greek revolution against the Ottomans on the other. That violence continued over the next century as populations were physically moved and borders continually redrawn.

Ernest Renan, one of the first writers to describe the phenomenon of modern nationalism, speaks of a historical amnesia that accompanied the process of nation building. According to him, “Forgetting, I would even say historical error, is essential to the creation of a nation, which is why the advance of historical study often poses a threat to nationality. Historical inquiry, in effect, brings to light the violent events that are at the source of all political formations, even those whose consequences have been beneficial.” He argues that this amnesia extended all the way back to the barbarian conquests of Europe, in which wifeless warriors, having subdued the decadent remnants of the Roman Empire, married the local women and adopted their customs. Historical amnesia continued through the centuries, as we have forgotten once proud and independent entities like Burgundy, the Grand Duchy of Parma, or Schleswig, all of which now exist only as regions subordinate to larger territorial states.
11

Britain and the United States are sometimes seen as exemplars of peaceful political development, which managed to avoid the violent upheavals of other societies in establishing their national identities through a process of gradual, piecemeal reform. But this is true only to a certain extent; Renan's historical amnesia applies in both cases. Britain's original Celtic Gaelic-speaking inhabitants were repeatedly invaded from across the channel, first by the Romans, then by succeeding waves of Angles, Saxons, and Danes, and finally a French-speaking Norman dynasty. The transformation of England into Britain involved the often violent efforts to incorporate Wales, Scotland, and Ireland, the limits of which were reached during Ireland's Easter Rebellion in 1916 and the formation of an independent Irish Republic. Needless to say, Northern Ireland has not been an entirely happy member of the British family since then, and at this writing Scotland has scheduled a referendum on independence.

Renan's observation about historical amnesia echoes a similar thought of Niccolò Machiavelli. Writing about the beginnings of Rome in
Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy
, Machiavelli noted that the great city's founding was based on a fratricide, the killing of Remus by Romulus. He makes a broader observation that all just enterprises originate in a crime.
12
So too with the founding of democracy in the United States. North America was not a land of “new settlement” as is sometimes asserted. It was a territory thinly occupied by indigenous tribal groups who had to be exterminated, moved, or driven off their lands into reservations to make way for the democratic institutions of the settlers. American national identity is based on principles of equality, individual rights, and democracy, but that identity could not take hold except at the expense of the country's indigenous inhabitants. This didn't make the outcome less democratic or just, but it also does not mean that the original crime was not a crime. Moreover, the question of whether America's identity should give priority to political union based on the assertion of equality in the Declaration of Independence, or to the Constitution's protection of the rights of states, could not be peacefully resolved through democratic processes. So while Germans and Greeks may have more vivid memories of the violence in their recent histories, Britons and Americans should not forget that their contemporary national identities are also the beneficiaries of bloody struggles in the distant past.

 

13

GOOD GOVERNMENT, BAD GOVERNMENT

Why some developed-country governments are more effective than others; how political reform happens; why modernization is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for reform, yet helps; the role of outsiders in promoting reform

It is time to draw some general conclusions about the process of state building and modernization of the public sector. The purpose of this part of the book has been to explain why some developed countries managed to enter the twenty-first century with reasonably effective and uncorrupt governments, while others continue to be plagued by clientelism, corruption, poor performance, and low levels of trust both in government and in society more broadly. Providing an explanation may give us some insight regarding strategies that contemporary developing countries might use to deal with problems of corruption and patronage today.

All modern societies began with what Weber called patrimonial states, governments that were staffed with the friends and family of the ruler, or those of the elites who dominated the society. These states limited access to both political power and economic opportunity to individuals favored by the ruler; there was little effort to treat citizens impersonally, on the basis of universally applied rules.
1
Modern government—that is, a state bureaucracy that is impersonal and universal—develops only over time, and in many cases fails to develop at all.

I've selected cases that vary in terms of the success or failure of this modernization process. Germany developed the core of a modern state by the early decades of the nineteenth century. Japan, as we will see in chapter 23, created a modern bureaucracy almost from scratch shortly after the country was opened up during the Meiji Restoration. Italy and Greece, by contrast, never developed strong modern states and continue clientelist practices today. Britain and the United States are intermediate cases: both had patronage-ridden bureaucracies in the first half of the nineteenth century, or in the case of the United States, full-blown clientelism. Britain reformed its system fairly decisively following the Northcote-Trevelyan Report in the 1850s, while the United States reformed its public sector incrementally from the early 1880s through the 1930s.

Patrimonial states can be highly stable. They are constructed using the basic building blocks of human sociability, that is, the biological inclination of people to favor family and friends with whom they have exchanged reciprocal favors. Elites build power through the management of patronage chains by which clients follow patrons in pursuit of individual rewards. All of this is reinforced by ritual, religion, and ideas legitimating a particular form of elite rule. These elite groups are much better organized than others in the society—particularly dispersed and poverty-stricken peasants in agrarian societies—and have better access to weapons and training in the use of violence. As the scale of the society increases, informal patronage networks are converted into more formally organized clientelistic hierarchies. But the basic organizing principle of politics—reciprocal altruism—remains the same. Once they achieve political power, the elites running this type of system can be displaced by other, better-organized elite groups but seldom by the nonelites below them. These types of premodern states have succeeded in enduring for centuries and continue to exist around the world at the present moment.