Political Order and Political Decay (84 page)

In biological evolution, there are separate specific and general processes. Under specific evolution, organisms adapt to particular environments and diverge in their characteristics. This produces speciation; Charles Darwin's famous finches were the result of the birds' adaptation to a host of microenvironments. In the process of general evolution, disparate species evolve similar characteristics because they have to solve similar problems: thus sensory organs like eyes evolved independently across different species.

So too with human beings. When the first small group of behaviorally modern humans walked out of Africa into the Middle East about fifty thousand years ago, they began to diverge, to some extent genetically but more dramatically in terms of culture. There was a real precedent for the story of the Tower of Babel in the Bible: as humans spread to Europe, Asia, South Asia, Oceana, and eventually to the Americas, their languages and cultural practices began to differentiate as they settled into a wide variety of ecological niches. But there was at the same time a process of general political evolution at work: culturally diverse peoples had to solve similar problems, and they therefore came up with parallel solutions even though they had limited or no physical contact with one another.

I have described a number of major transitions in political institutions that have taken place across diverse societies around the world:

°
from band-level to tribal-level societies

°
from tribal-level societies to states

°
from patrimonial to modern states

°
the development of independent legal systems

°
the emergence of formal institutions of accountability

These political transitions occurred independently in societies with very different cultural norms. Segmentary lineages—tribalism—appeared in virtually all parts of the world at a certain moment in human development. All are based on a principle of descent from a common ancestor, and all are sustained by religious belief in the power of dead ancestors and unborn descendants over the living. Despite the minute variations in kinship organization that are the bread and butter of anthropology, the basic structure of tribal societies is remarkably similar across geographically separated societies.

Similarly, states began to appear at roughly the same point in history in Mesopotamia, China, Egypt, and Mexico, with generally similar political structures. They constituted larger-scale and wealthier societies that could generate sufficient military power to maintain their autonomy against less organized competitors. To do this, however, they all faced the problem of overcoming kinship as the primary principle of political organization and replacing it with a more impersonal form of rule. Different societies solved this problem in different ways, from the Chinese invention of the bureaucratic state to the Arab-Ottoman institution of military slavery, to the undermining of kinship itself and its replacement with feudal contract in the lands of Western Christianity. Finally, independent legal systems evolved in ancient Israel, the Christian West, India, and the Muslim world in the form of religious law administered by a hierarchy of priests, who had at least nominal authority over secular rulers. The content of these laws varied considerably from culture to culture, as did the degree and nature of institutionalization. But the basic structure of law as a set of community rules limiting the sovereignty of those holding the means of coercion was the same for all of these societies. Laws regulated family life, inheritance, and property, and provided for dispute resolution in a sphere somewhat protected from the state. The only major world civilization that did not develop rule of law in this sense was China, largely because it never developed a transcendental religion on which law could be based.

Not one of these transitions was universally achieved across all human societies. There are still a small number of surviving band-level societies in remote niches like the Kalahari Desert and the Arctic, and a significantly larger number of tribal societies in mountainous, desert, and jungle regions. One level of political organization is never fully superseded by another: thus in China, India, and the Middle East, segmentary lineages continued to exist long after the invention of the state. Only in Western Europe were segmentary lineages largely eliminated at a social level prior to the emergence of modern states. In other societies, the political power of the state was simply layered over existing lineage structures, and when it waned, the power of lineages revived. In the Middle East, tribalism remains a powerful force and competes with states for authority.

Under natural selection, individuals compete with one another and those that are best adapted to their environments survive. But Charles Darwin described a second evolutionary process, that of sexual selection, which at times operated at cross-purposes with the first. Males compete for access to females and oftentimes develop characteristics (like the antlers on bucks) that are markers for overall reproductive fitness within the species. But these same characteristics are not necessarily adaptive vis-à-vis other species and constitute a liability when a new type of predator is introduced into the environment. Specific evolution within a protected niche is often driven by sexual rather than natural selection, as local “arms races” between males of the same species play themselves out.

As the economist Robert Frank has pointed out, there is a political counterpart to sexual selection. Not every political or social institution that arises is the product of a remorseless struggle for group survival. Existing institutions can channel competitive behavior into alternative venues. Thus wealthy hedge fund managers do not compete through displays of physical prowess or combat with knives and clubs. They compete on the basis of the size of their funds or their art collections. As Frank points out, many of these competitions are over relative status and are zero-sum in character. That is, consumption has value only by virtue of being conspicuous, which leads to unwinnable races for ostentatious display. Thus the petty princes of Renaissance Italy competed to be patrons of the arts. While these investments had great value for subsequent generations, they did not help much in their military struggles against larger and better-organized external enemies like the Spanish and French kings.
2

DIMENSIONS OF DEVELOPMENT

This volume covers a period marked by the onset of the Industrial Revolution in Europe and America, and the remarkably high sustained levels of economic growth it made possible. By contrast, the agrarian societies in Europe, China, India, and the Middle East described in the first volume existed in a Malthusian economic world that made predation an economically rational mode of activity. Technological change occurred, but so slowly that per capita increases in output were quickly dissipated by population increase. With few opportunities for productive investment, political activity centered around one group organizing itself to extract agricultural surpluses from another group. This system produced magnificent cultural works and lavish lifestyles for elites, but condemned the vast majority of the population to hard lives as subsistence farmers. The main benefit it returned to the nonelites was a degree of security and political peace.

This was not a trivial advantage. In an age in which populations could drop by half or three-quarters as a result of hunger, disease, and outright butchery brought on by war and invasion, the sovereign's guarantee of peace was a critical public good. This system could be stable over many centuries because the differential in organizational ability between the elites and everyone else was self-reinforcing. While peasant revolts periodically broke out in agrarian societies from China and Turkey to France and Germany, they could always be contained and were usually savagely suppressed by the landowning elites. The reigning ideologies underpinning these systems all legitimated the stratification of human beings into different status groups or castes, and actively discouraged social mobility.

This low-growth, zero-sum economic world actually describes the situation of many extremely poor developing countries today. While it may in some theoretical sense be possible for a country like Sierra Leone or Afghanistan to turn itself into an industrial powerhouse like South Korea through appropriate investment, these countries' lack of strong institutions forecloses this option for all practical purposes. Rather than starting a business, a young entrepreneur is much more likely to enrich himself by entering politics, organizing a militia, or otherwise scheming to grab a share of the country's resource wealth.

As we have seen, this agrarian equilibrium was dramatically upset with the onset of industrialization in the nineteenth century. Continuous high levels of economic growth driven by technologically induced increases in productivity reordered societies in dramatic ways. Peasants who had been politically inert over the preceding centuries moved to cities or other centers of manufacturing employment, where they were transformed into an industrial working class. Residents of cities acquired higher levels of education and emerged as a new middle class. As Adam Smith explained, improved transportation and communications technology centered around waterways began to expand the size of markets dramatically in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This facilitated a massive change in the division of labor, which was the main driver of social change in Britain, Belgium, Germany, and France, a process that began to unfold in East Asia in the late twentieth century and is still ongoing in China in the early twenty-first.

The model of development described in chapter 2 shows that the three central political institutions—the state, rule of law, and accountability—come under pressure as rapid social mobilization fosters demands for political participation. This is the critical juncture at which the political institutions of the agrarian order either adapt to accommodate demands for participation, or else they decay (see
Figure 29
). The old social groups like large landowners or the parts of the state that allied to them (for example, the military) will try to block demands for participation. The ability of the newer social groups to force their way into the political system depends in turn on their degree of organization. In Europe and America, this proceeded in two stages, through the development of trade unions and then the organization of new political parties representing their interests. If those parties are accommodated within an expanded political system, the system will remain stable; if those demands are repressed, the stage is set for substantial political instability.

The outcome of these struggles is highly context dependent and never fully determined by structural factors alone. In Britain, the old agrarian elites either imperceptibly melded through intermarriage with the new bourgeoisie or else found new ways of maintaining their political status even as their economic position was eroded. In Prussia, Argentina, and other Latin American countries, they allied themselves with the state and used authoritarian power to suppress these new actors. In contemporary China, the state has sought to forestall this process by blocking the formation of independent trade unions that would facilitate collective action by workers, and by maintaining a high level of employment growth to keep workers satisfied.

In Italy, Greece, and nineteenth-century America, and in contemporary developing countries like India, Brazil, and Mexico, class issues could be partially diffused by traditional political parties recruiting new social actors into clientelistic political machines. These machines were extremely effective in accommodating rising demands for political participation and therefore contributed to the system's overall stability. On the other hand, clientelism encouraged outright corruption on the part of the political class and blocked the emergence of programmatic demands for policies that in the end would much better serve the interests of the new social groups being brought into the system.

The sequence illustrated in Figure 29 represents the classic path toward modernization taken by a number of countries in Western Europe, North America, and East Asia. It is not, however, the only possible route to modernization. Oftentimes, social mobilization has occurred in the absence of sustained economic growth, a phenomenon referred to earlier as “modernization without development” (see
Figure 30
). Under this scenario, social change occurs not under the pull of new industrial employment but under the push of rural poverty. Peasants flock to cities because they seemingly offer more choices and opportunities, but they are not subject to the rigors of an expanding division of labor as in the classic industrialization scenario. Instead of Gemeinschaft being transformed into Gesellschaft, Gemeinschaft simply implants itself in cities—kin groups and rural villages move intact to urban slums but retain much of their rural social organization and values under extremely marginal economic conditions. This is the type of modernization that occurred in Greece and southern Italy; it has taken place in countless developing countries from the Indian subcontinent to Latin America to the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa, where enormous cities have emerged in the absence of a vibrant industrial economy.