Political Order and Political Decay (34 page)

Second, there is no guarantee that a member of the middle class will support an anticlientelistic reform coalition. Even within the United States, not all of the new social actors produced by industrialization signed up with the Progressive movement. As we saw, the railroads figured out how to make use of the existing patronage system to their own benefit; in many cases it was rather the customers of the railroads—the merchants, shippers, and farmers—who led the charge against what they perceived as a cozy relationship between the railroads and politicians. There was in a sense a race between the newly organizing middle-class interests opposed to patronage and the existing urban machines to sign up new social groups like recent immigrants.

In Greece and Southern Italy, the race to recruit the middle classes to a reform coalition was lost almost before it began. In Italy, there was a strong reformist middle class in the North that could have led a coalition to try to change the nature of politics in the South. But these groups found the job far too ambitious, given the weakness of the existing state; it was easier to guarantee peace and stability by making use of local elites and their chains of clients. In both places, the least clientelistic groups were those on the extreme left, the Greek and Italian Communists. But both parties had an agenda of overturning the democratic political system as a whole and were therefore strongly opposed by external powers including Britain and the United States. (In Italy, the Communists succeeded in coming to power locally in Turin and Bologna, and were generally credited with running relatively clean and effective municipal governments.) While the Progressives in the United States tended to be on the left as well, they had a strong stake in preserving the existing American system and therefore had a much better chance of taking power at a national level.

Third, there may be cultural factors that explain the difference in outcomes between Germany, Britain, and America on the one hand and Greece and Italy on the other. Self-interest explains only part of the reason that different social groups push for change, and it does not capture the high degree of moralism that often accompanies such movements. In each of these countries, individual leaders of reform movements were motivated by personal religiosity. They included the Great Elector and Frederick William I of Prussia, whose Calvinism induced them to import coreligionists from abroad and gave them a disciplinary vision of an austere and moral society led by an upright state. Calvinism also infused the Dutch state, which had accumulated extraordinary wealth and power in the seventeenth century after winning its independence from Catholic Spain.
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From well before the English Civil War, Puritanism was an important driver of reform in England, and it continued to shape the behavior of the new middle classes in the nineteenth century. This was true as well of the upper-crust Progressive Era reformers in late-nineteenth-century America, who did not think merely that political bosses and patronage politics got in the way of making money. They were morally outraged that public offices were being perverted for private ends. While Americans may distrust state authority, they also believe that their democratic government is deeply legitimate, and that manipulation of the democratic process by monied interests and corrupt politicians is a strike against the democratic principle itself. Individual leaders like Gifford Pinchot were driven by a kind of Protestant religiosity that has largely disappeared from contemporary American public life.

Putting loyalty to the state ahead of loyalty to family, region, or tribe requires a broad radius of trust and social capital. Britain and the United States are traditionally societies with good endowments of both, at least in comparison to Greece and southern Italy. It is impossible to create social movements if people cannot be motivated to join civil society organizations, and they will not be inspired unless there is some ideal of civic responsibility to a larger community present among their fellow citizens.

The sources of social capital in Britain and the United States were varied. One had to do with the sectarian form of Protestantism, noted above, that took root in both countries and encouraged the grassroots organization of religious life that did not depend on centralized, hierarchical institutions. But the second source had to do with strong national identity organized around institutions—in Britain's case, the Common Law, Parliament, and the monarchy, and in America's, a similar Common Law tradition and the democratic institutions emanating from the Constitution. By the nineteenth century, government in both countries came to be seen as a legitimate expression of national sovereignty and an object of considerable loyalty.

Greeks and Italians always had a more troubled sense of national identity. Greek society was very homogeneous on ethnic, cultural, and religious levels, but the Greek state was frequently seen as a tool of foreign powers and therefore illegitimate. Loyalty was therefore limited to a narrow circle of trust around the immediate family; the state was an object of suspicion. Italy, particularly in the South, had also been the playground of various foreigners who set Italians against one another. The unified country that emerged after 1861 yoked together regions of very different cultures and levels of development, and never generated the kind of centralized political power that could assimilate the South to the North. To this day, regional loyalties often trump national identity, as the very existence of the Northern League suggests. There have been heroic individuals inspired by a strong sense of civic duty, like Alberto dalla Chiesa and Giovanni Falcone. There is also the residue of a strong civic republican tradition in the cities of the North. But especially in the South, the lack of legitimate state institutions narrowed the radius of trust to friends and family, a tendency that then became institutionalized through organizations like the Mafia.

REPATRIMONIALIZATION

Before Americans, Britons, or Germans get too self-satisfied about their own political systems, however, it is important to note that the problem of patrimonialism is never finally solved in any political system. I argued in Volume 1 of this book that reliance on friends and family is a default mode of human sociability and will always return in different forms in the absence of powerful incentives to behave otherwise. The modern, impersonal state forces us to act in ways that are deeply in conflict with our own natures and is therefore constantly at risk of erosion and backsliding. Elites in any society will seek to use their superior access to the political system to further entrench themselves, their families, and their friends unless explicitly prevented from doing so by other organized forces in the political system. This is no less true in a developed liberal democracy than in other political orders, and one can make the argument that the process of repatrimonialization continues into the present.

The Progressive Era reforms in the United States eliminated one particular form of clientelism, the ability of the political parties to secure support through the distribution of jobs in the bureaucracy at federal, state, and local levels. It did not, however, end the practice of distributing other kinds of favors, such as subsidies, tax breaks, and other benefits, to political supporters. One of the big issues afflicting American politics in recent years has been the impact of interest groups that are able to effectively buy politicians with campaign contributions and lobbying. Most of this activity is perfectly legal, so in a sense the United States has created a new form of clientelism, only practiced at a much larger scale and with huge sums of money at stake. This is an issue to which I will return in the last part of this volume.

This is not only an American problem. Japan, as noted, has a tradition of strong, autonomous bureaucracy, and jobs in the bureaucracy were never the currency of corruption there. On the other hand, budgetary perks have for many decades been the currency of so-called money politics in Japan, with the Liberal Democratic Party maintaining its hegemony over several decades by skillfully handing out political pork. The ability of Japanese interest groups like the electric power industry to capture regulators was evident in the crisis that enveloped the country in 2011 after the Tohoku earthquake and the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

GIVE WAR A CHANCE?

Military competition was an important driver of state modernization in the cases selected here, but it is in itself neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition to achieve this end. Our sample was deliberately biased toward successful cases, but a number of observers have pointed out that prolonged military competition in other parts of the world has not produced modern states. This is true among the tribes of Papua New Guinea and other parts of Melanesia, which have been fighting one another for some forty thousand years now and were nonetheless unable to achieve even state-level forms of organization prior to the arrival of European colonizers. This has also been largely true in Latin America, whose wars have ended with patrimonial elites still in power (see chapter 17 below). There are clearly other conditions, such as physical geography, class structure of societies, and ideology, that combined with war to produce modern states in Asia and Europe but not elsewhere.

Conversely, other countries have created modern, nonclientelistic governments without military competition. While Sweden and Denmark fought large numbers of wars in the early modern period, their neighbors Norway, Finland, and Iceland did not, and yet all have very similar clean governments today. Korea was the victim of outside aggression, occupation, and violence beginning in the late nineteenth century up through the end of the Korean War, and yet it has a bureaucratic system equal in quality to that of Japan, as does the former British colony of Singapore. Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have modern, nonclientelistic states and yet were never militaristic.

In many of these cases, high-quality government was the result of a direct colonial inheritance (Norway became independent of Denmark in 1813, Iceland in 1874, and Canada separated from Britain in 1867). In others, it was due to a deliberate copying of other models. Singapore and Malaysia created effective modern governments virtually from scratch out of materials that seemed initially very unpromising, in response to perceived challenges from leftist forces that were mobilizing across Southeast Asia.
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These observations have important implications for the present. In a half-serious vein, the military analyst Edward Luttwak once suggested that the international community needed to “give war a chance” in weak-state zones like sub-Saharan Africa.
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Modern states, he argued, had been forged over the centuries in Europe through relentless military struggle; Africa, with its irrational colonial era state boundaries, had not been allowed to sort itself out in a similar manner. The states there created neither strong bureaucracies nor overarching national identities.

Apart from the fact that no one should wish Europe's violent experience on anyone else, it is not clear that even a couple of centuries of conflict would actually produce strong states in other parts of the world. Why this is so, and what alternative approaches might be taken to state building in Africa, will be addressed in the following part of this book on legacies of colonialism. On the other hand, the fact that other states achieved modern governments without war suggests that developing states today might choose similar peaceful paths.

The fact that the early introduction of democracy encouraged clientelism, and that today's strong states were often forged prior to the onset of democracy, might further suggest that contemporary developing countries should try to follow the same sequence. This was in fact a conclusion drawn by Samuel Huntington in
Political Order in Changing Societies
—that societies needed order before they needed democracy, and that they were better off making an authoritarian transition to a fully modernized political and economic system rather than trying to jump directly to democracy. His book praised not just existing Communist regimes for their ability to expand political participation and force the pace of economic growth; he also wrote approvingly of systems like the one created by Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI), which ruled the country from the 1940s up until 2000, and returned to power in 2013. The PRI created a tremendously stable political order that replaced the coups, military caudillos, and violent social conflicts that characterized Mexico's first century of national existence, but at the expense of democracy and economic vitality.
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Huntington's student Fareed Zakaria has made a similar argument about the importance of sequencing, emphasizing less political order in itself than a liberal rule of law as a necessary first step prior to the onset of democracy.
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While this type of argument would seem to flow logically from the cases presented here, it is not in fact such a good guide to policy in the present.
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It is fine to say that societies should create a strong, autonomous Weberian bureaucracy first, or else put into place a liberal rule of law with its independent courts and well-trained judges. The problem is that, as a matter of institutional construction, it is not very easy to do either. Institutions were often predetermined by historical legacies, or shaped by external powers. Many poor societies in the developing world have been able to create authoritarian states that stay in power through some combination of repression and co-optation. But for the reasons that we saw, hardly any has been able to create a Chinese mandarinate or Rechtsstaat, in which authoritarian power is embodied in a highly institutionalized bureaucracy and operates through clearly articulated rules. Many contemporary authoritarian states are riddled with patronage and high levels of corruption. The only countries in the contemporary world that come close are some Persian Gulf monarchies, as well as Singapore, whose peculiar circumstances make them difficult models for anyone to emulate. Under these circumstances, what is the point of putting off democratization, in favor of a ruthless and/or corrupt and incompetent dictatorship?