Political Order and Political Decay (8 page)

Silicon Valley thinks that it invented “disruptive innovation,” but in fact the rate of social change across Europe and America was if anything higher at the time that Marx wrote than it is in the early twenty-first century.

Social mobilization creates political change by creating new groups that demand participation in the political system. Throughout industrializing Europe and America in the late nineteenth century, workers began to join together in trade unions and pushed for higher wages, as well as better and safer working conditions. They agitated for the right to speak out publicly, to organize, and to vote. Workers also began to support new political parties, which in turn started to win elections under banners like the British Labour Party and the German Social Democratic Party. In places without elections, such as Russia, they began joining underground Communist parties.

Spreading communications and transportation technologies fostered another important change that occurred in this period: the appearance of an early form of globalization that allowed ideas to spread across political boundaries in ways they had not done previously. The development of political institutions before 1800 took place largely within the context of single societies, even though some of those societies were rather large. For example, the Chinese introduction of merit-based bureaucracy in the third century
B.C.
had virtually no impact on the contemporaneous Greek and Roman worlds. While early Arab state builders could look to neighboring Persian or Byzantine models, they did not seek to emulate the feudal institutions of contemporary Europe, much less those of the Indians or Chinese.

The beginnings of a world system were laid first by the Mongols, who carried both trade and diseases all the way from China to Europe and the Middle East, and then by the Arabs who extended their networks from Europe to Southeast Asia. It was subsequently the Europeans who opened up trade with both the Americas and South and East Asia. For those who think that globalization is a unique feature of the early twenty-first-century world, consider the following passage from
The Communist Manifesto
: “The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe … The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world-market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country … All old-established national industries have been destroyed … by industries that no longer work up indigenous raw material, but raw material drawn from the remotest zones; industries whose products are consumed, not only at home, but in every quarter of the globe.”

What was true of commodities was also true of ideas concerning political and economic institutions: if something seemed to work in one part of the world, it was rapidly copied in another. For example, Adam Smith's ideas about the power of markets circulated widely throughout Europe and traveled all the way to Latin America where Spanish Bourbon reformers relaxed earlier mercantilist restrictions on trade. At the other end of the ideological spectrum, Marxism was from the start a self-consciously cosmopolitan ideology that was adopted by non-European revolutionaries from China to Vietnam to Cuba.

The conditions in which political development occurred after 1800 were very different from those that prevailed in the preceding periods covered in the first volume of this book. Continuous economic growth was rapidly driving new forms of social mobilization, creating new actors who then demanded participation in the political system. At the same time, ideas could spread from one society to another at the speed of the printing press or, later, the telegraph, telephone, radio, and eventually, the Internet. Political order under these conditions became highly problematic, as institutions developed to manage agrarian societies now presided over industrialized ones. The linkages between technological and economic change and political institutions continue into the present, with social media fostering new forms of mobilization in the Arab world, China, and beyond.

ALL GOOD THINGS DON'T ALWAYS GO TOGETHER

Britain was the first country to industrialize, and for many social theorists from Karl Marx on it became the paradigm for modernization as such. In Britain a causal path led from economic growth to social mobilization to changes in values to demands for political participation and, ultimately, to liberal democracy. European social theory crossed the Atlantic in the early twentieth century and became entrenched in the American academy under the rubric of modernization theory. The latter argued, in effect, that all good things ultimately go together. Modernization was a single, interconnected phenomenon in which change occurred simultaneously in all six of the boxes in Figure 1.
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Everyone, in other words, would get to Denmark in short order. Modernization theory appeared at the historical moment that Europe's colonies were receiving their independence, and the expectation was that they would replicate the European development sequence.

Samuel Huntington's 1968 book
Political Order in Changing Societies
threw a dash of cold water on this theory. Huntington sharply contested the view that all good things necessarily go together. He argued that economic development bred social mobilization, and when the rate of social mobilization exceeded the capacity of existing institutions to accommodate new demands for participation, political order broke down. Huntington pointed to the “gap” that emerged between the expectations of newly mobilized populations and their government's ability or willingness to accommodate their participation in politics. He argued that both poor traditional societies and fully modernized societies were stable; instability was characteristic of modernizing societies in which the different components of modernization failed to advance in a coordinated fashion.
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In the forty-plus years since Huntington wrote his book, there has been a tremendous amount of research into conflict and violence in developing countries by scholars including James Fearon, David Laitin, and Paul Collier.
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In light of this recent work, Huntington's theory would have to be revised in many ways. He was right that instability reflected a lack of institutions. This is true almost by definition, since institutions are rules that organize behavior. But the instability and violence he observed in the 1950s and '60s was not necessarily the result of modernization upsetting otherwise stable traditional societies. His view that such societies were stable is misleading: most developing countries had been parts of colonial empires before the period in which he wrote, where authority was imposed externally. We have little reliable data, quantitative or otherwise, on general levels of conflict in, say, sub-Saharan Africa before the colonialists' arrival. Many of the new countries in the developing world that emerged in this period, like Nigeria and the Belgian Congo/Zaire, had never existed as independent polities previously and therefore had no traditional institutions to speak of at a national level. It is therefore not surprising that they fell into conflict shortly after independence. Countries with weak or nonexistent institutions would have been unstable whether they modernized or not.

More recent analyses of the causes of conflict contradict Huntington's assertion that instability afflicted primarily modernizing countries somewhere in the middle between poverty and development. In fact, they show that conflict correlates very heavily with poverty, and that it is often both a cause and a result of poverty.
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Almost all the authors systematically studying the phenomenon of conflict point to weak governments and poor institutions as a fundamental cause of both conflict and poverty. Many failing or fragile states are thus caught in a low-level trap whereby poor institutions fail to control violence, which produces poverty, which further weakens the ability of the government to govern. While many people believe that ethnicity is a cause of conflict when observing the Balkans, South Asia, Africa, and other places in the aftermath of the cold war, William Easterly shows that when one controls for the strength of institutions, any link between ethnic diversity and conflict disappears. James Fearon and David Laitin similarly show that higher levels of ethnic or religious diversity were not more likely to cause conflict when controlling for level of per capita income. Switzerland, after all, is divided among three linguistic groups and yet has been stable since the middle of the nineteenth century because of its strong institutions.
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Modernization and economic growth did not necessarily lead to escalating levels of instability and violence; certain societies were in fact able to accommodate demands for greater participation by developing their political institutions. This is what happened in South Korea and Taiwan in the period after World War II. Rapid modernization in both cases was overseen by repressive authoritarian governments. But these governments were able to satisfy popular expectations for jobs and economic growth, and eventually accommodated demands for greater democracy. Like South Korea and Taiwan in an earlier phase, the People's Republic of China has been able to maintain a high level of overall political stability without opening up its system to formal political participation, largely through its ability to supply stability, growth, and jobs to its citizens.

The years since the publication of
Political Order in Changing Societies
saw both dramatic economic development and the emergence of what Huntington himself labeled the “Third Wave” of democratic transitions. Global economic output roughly quadrupled between 1970 and 2008, increasing from $16 to $61 trillion,
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and at the same time the number of electoral democracies around the world increased from about 40 to nearly 120.
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While some of these transitions, including those in Portugal, Romania, the Balkans, and Indonesia, involved violence, this huge transformation of global politics occurred on the whole remarkably peacefully.

There are areas of the world, however, where Huntington's gap between increasing social mobilization and institutional development has in fact been a major driver of instability. While the Middle East experienced a large number of coups, revolutions, and civil conflicts in the 1950s, '60s, and early '70s, the subsequent decades saw the emergence of highly stable authoritarian regimes throughout the Arab world. Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, and Libya were ruled by dictators who did not permit opposition political parties to operate and who tightly controlled civil society. The Arab Middle East was in fact the one part of the world that did not participate in the Third Wave of democratic transitions.
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This all changed dramatically in early 2011 with the collapse of the Ben Ali regime in Tunisia, the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, a civil war in Libya and the death of Muammar Qaddafi, as well as serious political instability in Bahrain, Yemen, and Syria. The so-called Arab Spring was driven by a number of factors, among them the emergence of larger middle classes in Egypt and Tunisia. The Human Development Indices compiled by the United Nations, which are composite measures of health, education, and income, show an increase of 28 percent in Egypt and 30 percent in Tunisia for the period between 1990 and 2010.
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There was also a substantial increase in the numbers of college graduates, especially in Tunisia.
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The new middle classes, mobilized by new technologies such as satellite TV stations (Al Jazeera) and social media (Facebook and Twitter), led the uprisings against the Ben Ali and Mubarak dictatorships, even if these social groups could not retain control over subsequent developments.
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What the Arab world experienced, in other words, was a Huntingtonian event: under the surface of seemingly impregnable authoritarian governments, social change was occurring, and newly mobilized actors vented their frustrations at regimes that made no provision for incorporating them through new institutions. The future stability of that region will depend entirely on whether political institutions emerge to channel participation in peaceful directions. This means the growth of political parties, the opening up of media to permit broad discussion of political topics, and the acceptance of constitutional rules for regulating political conflict.

Huntington's basic insight, that modernization is not a seamless and inevitable process, was nonetheless correct. The economic, social, and political dimensions of development proceed on different tracks and schedules, and there is no reason to think that they will necessarily work in tandem. Political development, in particular, follows its own logic independent of economic growth. Successful modernization depends, then, on the parallel development of political institutions alongside economic growth, social change, and ideas; it is not something that can be taken for granted as an inevitable concomitant of the other dimensions of development. Indeed, strong political institutions are often necessary to get economic growth going in the first place. It is precisely their absence that locks failed or fragile states into a cycle of conflict, violence, and poverty.

The first and most important institution that fragile or failing states lack is an administratively capable government. Before a state can be constrained by either law or democracy, it needs to exist. This means, in the first instance, the establishment of a centralized executive and a bureaucracy.

 

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BUREAUCRACY

How study of the state is the study of bureaucracy; recent efforts to measure the quality of government; variance in the quality of government across countries and the need for a historical understanding of these outcomes

For many people around the world, the central problem of contemporary politics is how to constrain powerful, overweening or, indeed, tyrannical governments. The human rights community seeks to use law as a mechanism for protecting vulnerable individuals from abuse by states—not just authoritarian regimes but also liberal democracies that are sometimes motivated to bend the rules in pursuit of terrorists or other threats. Prodemocracy activists, such as those that led the Rose and Orange Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine, and the Tunisian and Egyptian protesters at the start of the Arab Spring, hoped to use democratic elections to hold rulers accountable to their people. In the United States, citizens are constantly vigilant against real and perceived abuses of government power, from excessively onerous environmental requirements to restrictions on guns to domestic surveillance by the National Security Agency.