Drawing on the insights of his mentor Samuel Huntington, Fukuyama argued that political order was all about institutions, and that liberal democracy in particular rested on a delicate balance of three distinct features — political accountability; a strong, effective state; and the rule of law. Accountability required mechanisms for making leaders responsive to their publics, which meant regular free and fair multiparty elections. Fukuyama showed how throughout human history these three factors had often emerged independently or in various combinations. China, for example, developed a state long before any existed in Europe, yet did not acquire either the rule of law or political accountability.
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During the globalization euphoria of the s some pundits were writing that the individual state was too small to solve social and economic problems. Now the tone has changed. Fukuyama notes the wide variation in the strength of contemporary states. African failed states host terrorists, corruption, and disease. Brittle Middle Eastern states are the object of movements to strengthen, reorganize, or sweep them away. States in East Asia are generally doing well, whether democratic or not. Among the older established states, some, including the United States, are at risk of institutional decay. Extending to the present day his study The Origins of Political Order , which ends at the French Revolution, P olitical Order and Political Decay asks why some polities have been able to create states based on consensual rules of behavior that bind even the most powerful elements of society, reconciling administrative and judicial autonomy with social accountability, whereas others have not. The earlier volume showed that historically, states developed out of patronage networks of descent lineages or clients, which evolved with varying thoroughness into an impersonal, rule-following administrative apparatus. First, many in the tropics never got off the ground, since geography and disease conspired against the transplanting of European settlers and their efficient institutions, while unhelpful economic endowments and imposed colonial structures often stymied indigenous institutional development.
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The book follows Fukuyama's book, The Origins of Political Order , written to shed light on political institutions and their development in different regions. Fukuyama stresses the importance of the three pillars of the modern state, as described in the first volume in the series, The Origins of Political Order :. In other words, in an ideal system, a powerful and efficient state is kept in check by the people, and by the law, which can bind the state itself. Different regions and countries developed these three institutions, if at all, at different times. India developed institutions akin to the rule of law early in its history, but not strong states. An ideal modern state, as conceived by Fukuyama, must have all three institutions in a delicate balance. Only in certain parts of Europe, in the late 18th century, did all three institutions come together to what we now recognize as a modern liberal democratic state.
Bring on volume two. Taking up the essential question of how societies develop strong, impersonal, and accountable political institutions, Fukuyama follows the story from the French Revolution to the so-called Arab Spring and the deep dysfunctions of contemporary American politics. He examines the effects of corruption on governance, and why some societies have been successful at rooting it out. He explores the different legacies of colonialism in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and offers a clear-eyed account of why some regions have thrived and developed more quickly than others. And he boldly reckons with the future of democracy in the face of a rising global middle class and entrenched political paralysis in the West. A sweeping, masterful account of the struggle to create a well-functioning modern state, Political Order and Political Decay is destined to be a classic.
