Political Order and Political Decay (54 page)

I suggested earlier that successful democracies have benefited from historical nation-building projects that were achieved by violent and nondemocratic means. What was true for Europe is also the case in developing countries like Indonesia and Tanzania. Both are reasonably successful democracies today: Indonesia in 2013 received an overall freedom rating of 2.5 from Freedom House (on a scale that goes from 1, the best, to 7, the worst), and Tanzania's was 3.0. Yet both countries were far more authoritarian in the periods in which their national identities were being built. Conversely, it is hard to see how either Nigeria or Kenya could embark on a nation-building project today, given their existing divisions and constraints on national power. No one would have the authority to write a national narrative or declare a new national language. Sequencing and history therefore matter with regard to common identity, as they did to the creation of a modern state.

When we turn to the countries of East Asia, we find a very different situation with regard to national identity and state traditions. China, Japan, and Korea, at least, are among the most ethnically homogeneous societies in the world and have long had strong national identities based on shared language and culture. Things were not always like this—Chinese civilization expanded over the centuries out of the Yellow River valley with conquests to the south, southeast, and west; it assimilated countless nonethnic Han populations and was itself colonized by a variety of Turkic barbarians from the north and northwest. China, as chronicled in Volume 1, invented not just one of the first states, but the first modern state, which was built around a common literary corpus of classical writings that served as the basis for the education of generations of bureaucrats. National identity and state building were connected from the start in Chinese history. The same was true of the other societies on China's borders touched by Confucian culture—Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. All of this happened well before any of them had significant contact with European colonialism or Western ideas. This fact has had a very powerful impact on contemporary development outcomes: unlike Nigeria or Indonesia, none of these Asian countries had to undertake a nation-building project in parallel with its efforts to create a modern state in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Like their European contemporaries, those nations had already been formed.

 

23

THE STRONG ASIAN STATE

How China, Japan, and other East Asian societies could presuppose strong, modern states before their contact with the West, and how East Asia's problem is not state weakness but the inability to constrain the state; how Japan introduced law under foreign pressure and how bureaucratic autonomy got completely out of control

East Asia is the only part of the non-Western world that boasts of industrialized, high-income societies that are also liberal democracies—Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. It is also home to China, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, and other fast-developing countries that lack democratic political institutions but nonetheless have very effective states. East Asia stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from sub-Saharan Africa with its weak states and poor economic performance.

There is a huge literature on the “East Asian miracle” and why countries there have grown so rapidly. Interpretations of growth there are polarized between those who see the region's success resting on its market-friendly policies and others who stress the importance of industrial policy and other forms of state intervention to promote economic growth. There are also cultural theories that attribute the region's success to the Asian values of thrift and a work ethic. Since a great deal of variation exists across the region, one can make a plausible case for either a market-oriented or a state-driven interpretation of the sources of growth: Hong Kong has always been more open and less statist than mainland China and South Korea, but all three have grown rapidly. Regardless of the degree of government intervention, the fast-growing economies of East Asia share a common feature: they all possess competent, high-capacity states.
1

A capable state is particularly important for activist governments pursuing industrial policy, essentially trying to “pick winners” in the economy and promote them through subsidized credits, special licensing arrangements, or infrastructural support. Contrary to free-market fundamentalists who say that industrial policy never works, it has proved highly successful in certain places.
2
But the conditions for success are very specific. Any effort to override the price signals given by the market can be dangerous if politicians get their hands on the process: investment decisions will be made on political rather than economic grounds. The history of developing countries in Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East is littered with cases of industrial policy gone bad and collapsing in a flurry of corruption and rent seeking, like the Argentine effort to create a domestic car industry noted in chapter 18. For government intervention to work, the state must have what Peter Evans labels “embedded autonomy”: bureaucracies have to respond to social needs, but also must be free of pressures to satisfy rent-seeking political constituencies, allowing them to promote longer-term goals that serve a broad public interest. This kind of policy worked in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China but failed elsewhere. The difference in outcomes lies in the quality of government.
3

Where does this strong Asian state come from? While Singapore and Malaysia were colonial creations, China, Japan, and Korea all had strong traditions of state- and nationhood centuries prior to significant contact with the West. These traditional states were severely disrupted in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by confrontation with Western colonial powers, and state institutions needed to be dramatically restructured and reformed. But governments did not have to be built from scratch as in many parts of Africa. Moreover, China, Japan, and Korea already had strong national identities and shared cultures; indeed, they constituted some of the most ethnically homogeneous societies in the world. These long state traditions and national identities were the basis of the region's remarkable success in economic development.

Much of East Asia therefore resembled Europe insofar as it could take a strong state for granted as industrialization began. However, the region's path of political development took quite a different course from that of Europe. Europe established legal institutions in the late Middle Ages, prior to the burst of state building that occurred from the late sixteenth through the eighteenth century. This meant that modern European states always had more limited powers than their counterparts in East Asia, despite the absolutist pretensions of European monarchs. Having been limited by law, state power in Europe was further constrained by the rise of new social actors such as the middle classes and industrial working class, who organized themselves into political parties and demanded rights against the state. Law and accountability worked hand in hand to restrict the power of the state. Law established the rights of feudal estates like the English Parliament to require the king to seek its permission for new taxes. Originally established on a narrow oligarchic basis, parliaments could become the vehicles for the assertion of power by rising new social forces that organized political parties and sought broadened representation.

By contrast, East Asian political development began not with rule of law but with the state. Because of its lack of a transcendental religion, China never developed a body of law that stood outside the positive enactments of the emperor and had no legal hierarchy independent of executive power. The emperor ruled by law, using law as an instrument of bureaucratic governance. Chinese rulers had at their disposal a precociously modern state that could prevent the subsequent emergence of social actors that might want to oppose their purposes, like religious organizations, an entrenched blood nobility living (as they did in Europe) in impregnable castles, or a commercial bourgeoisie ruling themselves in free cities. As a result, traditional Asian governments could be far more absolutist than those in Europe.

East Asia's political challenge then was very different from that of much of the rest of the colonial world. State authority could be taken for granted. The problem was rather the opposite: how to limit the power of the state through law and representative government. The state-society balance, skewed heavily in favor of society in other parts of the world, strongly favored the state in East Asia. Social organizations that could serve as a counterbalance to state power existed, but they were tightly controlled and seldom allowed to flourish on their own. This pattern continues up to the present day.

JAPANESE BUREAUCRACY

Japan, the first non-Western country to modernize and join the developed world, is in some sense paradigmatic of this larger pattern. Its inherited traditions of stateness were strong enough that it succeeded in resisting colonization altogether, even as its traditional institutions were restructured through borrowings from imported European models. Key to this process was the creation of a centralized national bureaucracy, which from the late nineteenth century on was the primary source of government authority. This eventually resulted in an out-of-control military so autonomous that it was able to drag the entire country into a disastrous war. Law and democratic accountability were put in place in the end not through popular mobilization of democratic forces but through outside intervention by the United States and other foreign powers.

During the Tokugawa Shogunate (1608–1868), the shogun, while nominally a vassal of the emperor, in fact exercised real authority in the latter's name. The country was not ruled as a centralized bureaucratic state; authority rather was split between the
bakufu
—the shogun's administration in the capital of Edo (Tokyo)—and a few hundred domains (
han
) ruled over by a daimyo or military lord. The resulting “bakuhan” system has often been characterized as being similar to European feudalism, since power was decentralized at the domain level. Each daimyo had his own castle and following of samurai warriors.

Calling this system feudal, however, masks considerable uniformity in administration and the extraordinary ability of the premodern Japanese state to penetrate society. In its premodern period, Japan inherited a tradition of bureaucratic government that was heavily shaped by Chinese norms and practices. In the words of Peter Duus, “Despite its outwardly feudal structure Japan was in many respects a model bureaucratic state … Government offices were stacked high with records and documents of every conceivable kind, from land surveys to population registers, which recorded the existence of most of the population in some way or another. (In the domain of Nambu, a horse breeding area, even the pregnancies and deaths of horses were recorded.)”
4
As in the case of China, Japanese government was modern in many ways, well before it began its post-1868 economic modernization.

The latter began after the arrival of U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry's “black ships” in 1853 and presents a paradigmatic case of what Samuel Huntington labeled “defensive modernization.” Demands by Perry and other Western powers to open Japan to outsiders led to the concession of various unequal treaties granting foreigners market access. This capitulation delegitimized the Tokugawa government and sparked an armed rebellion, which set in motion the restoration of a centralized state in 1868 in the name of the Emperor Meiji. The urgency of the restoration was animated by the desire to avoid the fate of China, which had lost pieces of coastal territory to foreign powers. Abrogation of the unequal treaties, and the colonial powers' recognition of Japan as an equal, remained central to Japan's drive to modernize through the first decades of the twentieth century. As in Prussia, perception of military threat drove state building.
5

Japan's political development occurred with astonishing rapidity during the decade of the 1870s. All of the domains were abolished in a single stroke in 1871 and ordered to incorporate their military forces into a national army. The samurai elite, who under the Tokugawa system were the only individuals permitted to bear arms, were stripped of their stipends by 1876 and forbidden to wear their two symbolic katana, or swords. A new conscript army was set up on modern organizational principles, and its ranks were filled with formerly despised peasants. These changes led to a samurai revolt known as the Satsuma Rebellion in 1877, which was militarily suppressed in short order by the new conscript army.
6

We tend to accept these historical facts as the natural consequence of Japan's decision to modernize. But compared to other parts of the world, these developments are extraordinary. In Europe, the abolition of feudal privileges and the creation of a modern, centralized state was a process that extended, depending on the country, from the late sixteenth to the late nineteenth century and involved enormous levels of often violent social conflict. In the contemporary developing world, such consolidation has not yet occurred despite years of effort. Pakistan, for example, continues to be dominated by an entrenched quasi-feudal landed elite that has no intention of giving up its privileges. Somalia and Libya have been unable to force their militias into a new national army. In Japan, by contrast, consolidation of a modern state was accomplished in just over a decade.

Of the various reasons that have been given for this difference, one that stands out is Tokugawa Japan's extraordinarily strong sense of national identity. As an island nation ruled from the start by a single, unbroken dynasty, Japan enjoyed an unusually high degree of ethnic and cultural uniformity. The Meiji oligarchs were careful to cultivate this identity through such policies as the elevation of Shinto and emperor-worship as a state religion. Shinto had direct political implications, providing a source of legitimacy for the new emperor-centered state.
7
These traditions had existed for centuries but were simply given greater emphasis after 1868. In contrast to most developing country elites, the leaders of the Meiji Restoration only had to build a state, and not a nation.