Political Order and Political Decay (37 page)

FIGURE 12.
Per Capita Incomes, Industrialized Countries vs. Nonindustrialized

SOURCE
: Gregory Clark,
A Farewell to Alms

What, then, accounts for the difference in institutions in different parts of the world, and why did the West have a large initial advantage? If institutions are so critical to wealth and growth, why doesn't everyone simply adopt the best ones and get on with it?

THE SPIRIT OF THE LAWS

Charles Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu (1689–1755) is perhaps best known for his arguments in favor of separated powers as a check on tyranny and his observations concerning the softening effects of commerce on morals and politics. Montesquieu was in some sense the first modern comparative political scientist. His observations on politics are drawn not just from the experience of different European countries including England and his native France, but also from non-Western societies such as China and Turkey. Books XIV–XIX of his great work
The Spirit of the Laws
contain an extensive discussion of the impact of climate and geography on political institutions.

There are several avenues by which Montesquieu sees geography having an effect on the nature of institutions. The first is through the way it shapes what later would come to be called national character. Climate had a direct effect on personality, as he argues in Book XIV:

Put a man into a close, warm place, and … he will feel a great faintness. If under this circumstance you propose a bold enterprise to him, I believe you will find him very little disposed towards it; his present weakness will throw him into despondency; he will be afraid of everything, being in a state of total incapacity. The inhabitants of warm countries are, like old men, timorous … the people in cold countries are, like young men, brave. Northern people, transported to southern regions, did not perform such exploits as their countrymen, who, fighting in their own climate, possessed their full vigor and courage.

Montesquieu goes on to note that “in cold countries they have very little sensibility for pleasure; in temperate countries, they have more; in warm countries, their sensibility is exquisite.” He makes an observation many people today would likely affirm: “I have been at the opera in England and in Italy, where I have seen the same pieces and the same performers; and yet the same music produces such different effects on the two nations: one is so cold and phlegmatic, and the other so lively and enraptured, that it seems almost inconceivable.”

The second mechanism through which geography influences institutions is its effects on power. In Book XV, he discusses the institution of slavery. He notes Aristotle's theory of natural slavery but doubts that natural slaves exist; he also rejects the view that African slavery is based on some inherent biological inferiority of blacks. Slavery, he argues, is the product of human convention and coercion. But who coerces whom into slavery is very much the product not of biology but of physical geography. In Book XVII, Montesquieu comes to the following conclusion, which deserves to be quoted at length:

In Asia they have always had great empires; in Europe these could never subsist. Asia has larger plains; it is cut out into much more extensive divisions by mountains and seas; and as it lies more to the south, its springs are more easily dried up; the mountains are less covered with snow; and the rivers being not so large form more contracted barriers.

Power in Asia ought, then, to be always despotic; for if their slavery was not severe they would make a division inconsistent with the nature of the country.

In Europe the natural division forms many nations of a moderate extent, in which the ruling by laws is not incompatible with the maintenance of the state: on the contrary, it is so favorable to it, that without this the state would fall into decay, and become a prey to its neighbors.

It is this which has formed a genius for liberty that renders every part extremely difficult to be subdued and subjected to a foreign power, otherwise than by laws and the advantage of commerce.

On the contrary, there reigns in Asia a servile spirit, which they have never been able to shake off, and it is impossible to find in all the histories of that country a single passage which discovers a freedom of spirit; we shall never see anything there but by the excess of slavery.

Other political theorists, from Aristotle to Rousseau, have argued that climate and geography had an effect in shaping the nature of political institutions. By the second half of the twentieth century, however, when the European colonial empires were being disbanded and countries of the developing world were emerging as independent states, this line of reasoning began to fall out of favor. This was particularly true of arguments having to do with the effects of climate on national character and consequently development. Many of Montesquieu's views on the differences between courageous inhabitants of northern climates and pleasure-seeking but indolent southerners were dismissed as crude stereotyping or racist prejudice. These and related arguments about the cultural determinants of development were attacked for “blaming the victim.”

The idea that there were intrinsic differences between Europeans and southern people of color had been biologized during the late nineteenth century when the great colonial empires were being carved out of Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Europeans justified their conquests of much of the rest of the world on the basis of a social Darwinist doctrine regarding their own inherent racial superiority. The peoples being colonized were regarded as unfit for democracy or self-rule because they were lower down on an evolutionary scale and would require centuries of tutelage before they were ready to operate modern institutions on their own. The Nazis with their doctrine of Aryan racial superiority produced the most extreme and grotesque variant of this theme, which Germany used to justify conquest of Poland, Russia, and other neighbors. There was an understandable reaction against this type of biological determinism in the period after World War II, and the rise of a countervailing belief in the inherent equality of both individuals and of human societies.
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Montesquieu never attributed differences in behavior between North and South to human biology. Rather, he seemed to believe that human beings around the world were fundamentally similar to one another. What differed were conditions of climate and geography that, operating on the biology of otherwise indistinguishable individuals, produced systematic differences in political behavior. Slavery for him was not natural and needed to be explained in terms of the ability of certain societies to better organize themselves for war and conquest. The political freedom that Northern Europeans enjoyed was not the product of any inherent natural or even cultural characteristic. They were as likely as anyone else to want to conquer one another and indeed were rather good at it. European freedom was for Montesquieu instead the result of the fact that physical geography kept European states divided into a relatively balanced number of competing polities, none of which was able to conquer all the others. The great Asiatic empires of China, Persia, and Turkey, by contrast, were facilitated by the flatness and extent of open terrain on which they operated, which made the military centralization of power much easier to achieve.

ENTER THE ECONOMISTS

In recent years there has been a revival of arguments that climate and geography are the chief determinants of both modern institutions and economic growth.
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Perhaps not surprisingly, this case has been made chiefly by economists, for whom materialistic explanations of behavior are second nature. Jeffrey Sachs, for example, points out that there is a strong correlation between contemporary levels of development and geography: industrialized countries are largely located in temperate zones, while the bulk of poor countries are in the tropics. Geography, according to him, operates in two important ways to facilitate or impede economic growth. First, access to waterways and other means of transport is critical in allowing a country to benefit from commerce, just as Adam Smith noted it had been in the early development of trade and commerce in Europe. Landlocked countries in the interior of Africa and Central Asia face huge disadvantages in exporting products compared to those with harbors or navigable rivers. Second, people in the tropics are subject to a much wider variety of diseases than those in temperate climates. Sachs estimated that the incidence of intensive malaria alone shaves 1.3 percentage points off of the potential per capita growth rates of countries in the tropics.
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Sachs's argument reproduces, in a sense, the first of Montesquieu's causal channels in a more modern form: hot southern climates directly affect economic performance not by making people lazy and pleasure loving but by debilitating them with chronic diseases that hinder their ability to work and flourish.

Jared Diamond's metahistorical work
Guns, Germs, and Steel
similarly points to material obstacles to development that were primarily the products of geography and climate. Europe's ability to dominate other parts of the world has to do with a number of geographical factors like the east-west lines of communication that link the Eurasian continent compared to the north-south axes of South America across different climatic zones that pose big obstacles to movement. This allowed appropriate technologies to diffuse laterally across similar climatic zones, while differences in climate prevented similar diffusion in the western hemisphere. Europeans furthermore succeeded in cultivating wheat and rye, which became major cash crops, and domesticated the horse, which was critical to mobility. Greater mobility in turn facilitated the development of immunities to a variety of diseases by creating greater genetic diversity through the intermarriage of peoples. The relative homogeneity of genotypes in the New World, by contrast, left populations there particularly vulnerable to diseases introduced from outside. All of these factors came together to explain, according to Diamond, the almost effortless conquests of the Spanish in the New World.
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Neither Sachs nor Diamond pays much attention to the question of institutions in their initial accounts of development outcomes. By contrast, the economic historian Douglass North attributes Latin America's poor performance relative to North America to institutional differences regarding property rights and rule of law, which in turn was a function of the identity of the colonizer. It was England that seeded North America and gave it the institutions of Common Law and parliamentary government, while South America was colonized by a mercantilist and absolutist Spain or Portugal.
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The economic historians Stanley Engerman and Kenneth Sokoloff argue in a similar vein that institutions were critical, but that they were themselves the product of the geographical and climatic conditions that the colonizers found in the New World. They note the persistence of hierarchical, authoritarian governments in Latin America, coupled with exploitative economic institutions, and contrast that with the democratic governments and open markets of North America. Engerman and Sokoloff trace these institutional differences not to the identity of the colonizer but to what economists call factor endowments, that is, the types of crops and minerals that can be grown or extracted based on the climate and geography of different parts of the Americas. They point out that at the time of the American Revolution, Cuba and Barbados were wealthy colonies due to the relative efficiency of large-scale plantation agriculture employing slaves. Barbados was no less a British colony than Massachusetts or New York and yet saw the emergence of a highly exploitative society involving the rule of a small planter elite over a large slave population.

Similarly, the Spanish colonies of New Spain (Mexico) and Peru were built around the extraction of gold and silver. These colonies did not have to import slaves from Africa but could make extensive use of the large indigenous populations as a source of involuntary labor. The concentration of economic power in mining spilled over into land ownership and led to the growth of large estates that persisted over the next several centuries, in sharp contrast to the family farming that was more characteristic of North America. Engerman and Sokoloff trace the origin of different political institutions—authoritarian and oligarchic on the one hand, and democratic and egalitarian on the other—to these original conditions of climate and geography.
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These institutions persisted over time even when the conditions that gave rise to them changed. The elites empowered by these institutions used their political clout to preserve their initial advantage. Thus the Creole elites in Latin America were able in later years to block immigration into their societies, so as to prevent competition in labor markets. They also restricted the franchise much later into the nineteenth century than did the United States. As a result, Latin America remains overall the most unequal region of the world, despite the fact that its political institutions are today largely democratic.