The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty
About this book
A weak state may leave people exposed to private violence, inherited hierarchy, and local domination. An overpowering state can provide order while removing meaningful limits on rulers. Neither condition, the authors argue, is sufficient for liberty.
The 'narrow corridor' lies between them, where state capacity and social power develop together. Historical cases range across regions and periods to show societies entering, leaving, or failing to reach that balance through institutions and collective action.
Liberty is therefore presented as an ongoing process rather than a constitutional design installed once. The authors call the sustained competition between state and society the Red Queen effect: both must keep moving to preserve the balance.
The Narrow Corridor is comparative political-economy nonfiction by the authors of Why Nations Fail. Its broad framework invites comparison across cases, while the interpretation of individual histories remains part of the authors' argument rather than settled consensus.
Read a sample
5,025 words
Plain text
From the opening
PREFACE
Liberty
This book is about liberty, and how and why human societies have achieved or failed to achieve it. It is also about the consequences of this, especially for prosperity. Our definition follows the English philosopher John Locke, who argued that people have liberty when they have
perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit . . . without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other man.
Liberty in this sense is a basic aspiration of all human beings. Locke emphasized that
no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.
Yet it is clear that liberty has been rare in history and is rare today. Every year millions of people in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Central America flee their homes and risk life and limb in the process, not because they are seeking higher incomes or greater material comfort, but because they are trying to protect themselves and their families from violence and fear.
Philosophers have proposed many definitions of liberty. But at the most fundamental level, as Locke recognized, liberty must start with people being free from violence, intimidation, and other demeaning acts. People must be able to make free choices about their lives and have the means to carry them out without the menace of unreasonable punishment or draconian social sanctions.
All the Evil in the World
In January 2011 in the Hareeqa market in the old city of Damascus, Syria, a spontaneous protest took place against the despotic regime of Bashar al-Assad. Soon afterward in the southern city of Daraa some children wrote “The people want the fall of the government” on a wall. They were arrested and tortured. A crowd gathered to demand their release, and two people were killed by the police. A mass demonstration erupted that soon spread throughout the country. A lot of the people, it turned out, did want the government to fall. A civil war soon broke out. The state, its military, and its security forces duly disappeared from much of the country. But instead of liberty, Syrians ended up with civil war and uncontrolled violence.
Adam, a media organizer in Latakia, reflected on what happened next:
We thought we’d get a present, and what we got was all the evil in the world.
Husayn, a playwright from Aleppo, summed it up:
We never expected that these dark groups would come into Syria—the ones that have taken over the game now.
Foremost among these “dark groups” was the so-called Islamic State, or what was then known as ISIS, which aimed to create a new “Islamic caliphate.” In 2014, ISIS took control of the major Syrian city of Raqqa. On the other side of the border in Iraq, they captured the cities of Fallujah, Ramadi, and the historic city of Mosul with its 1.5 million inhabitants. ISIS and many other armed groups filled the stateless void left by the collapse of the Syrian and Iraqi governments with unimaginable cruelty. Beatings, beheadings, and mutilations became commonplace. Abu Firas, a fighter with the Free Syrian Army, described the “new normal” in Syria:
It’s been so long since I heard that someone died from natural causes. In the beginning, one or two people would get killed. Then twenty. Then fifty. Then it became normal. If we lost fifty people, we thought, “Thank God, it’s only fifty!” I can’t sleep without the sound of bombs or bullets. It’s like something is missing.
Amin, a physical therapist from Aleppo, remembered:
One of the other guys called his girlfriend and said “Sweetheart, I’m out of minutes on my phone. I’ll call you back on Amin’s phone.” After a while she called asking about him, and I told her he’d been killed. She cried and my friends said, “Why did you tell her that?” I said, “Because that’s what happened. It’s normal. He died.” . . . I’d open my phone and look at my contacts and only one or two were still alive. They told us, “If someone dies, don’t delete his number. Just change his name to Martyr.” . . . So I’d open my contact list and it was all Martyr, Martyr, Martyr.
The collapse of the Syrian state created a humanitarian disaster of enormous proportions. Out of a population of about 18 million before the war, as many as 500,000 Syrians are estimated to have lost their lives. Over 6 million have been internally displaced and 5 million have fled the country and are currently living as refugees.
The Gilgamesh Problem
The calamity unleashed by the collapse of the Syrian state is not surprising. Philosophers and social scientists have long maintained that you need a state to resolve conflicts, enforce laws, and contain violence. As Locke puts it:
Where there is no law there is no freedom.
Yet Syrians had started protesting to gain some freedoms from Assad’s autocratic regime. As Adam ruefully recalled:
Ironically, we went out in demonstrations to eradicate corruption and criminal behavior and evil and hurting people. And we’ve ended up with results that hurt many more people.
Syrians like Adam were grappling with a problem so endemic to human society that it is a theme of one of the oldest surviving pieces of written text, the 4,200-year-old Sumerian tablets that record the Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh was the king of Uruk, perhaps the world’s first city, situated on a now dried-up channel of the Euphrates River in the south of modern-day Iraq. The epic tells us that Gilgamesh created a remarkable city, flourishing with commerce and public services for its inhabitants:
Continue reading the sampleClose the sample
See how its ramparts gleam like copper in the sun. Climb the stone staircase . . . walk on the wall of Uruk, follow its course around the city, inspect its mighty foundations, examine its brickwork, how masterfully it is built, observe the land it encloses . . . the glorious palaces and temples, the shops and marketplaces, the houses, the public squares.
But there was a hitch:
Who is like Gilgamesh? . . . The city is his possession, he struts through it, arrogant, his head raised high, trampling its citizens like a wild bull. He is king, he does whatever he wants, takes the son from his father and crushes him, takes the girl from her mother and uses her . . . no one dares to oppose him.
Gilgamesh was out of control. A bit like Assad in Syria. In despair the people “cried out to heaven” to Anu, the god of the sky and the chief deity in the Sumerian pantheon of gods. They pleaded:
Heavenly father, Gilgamesh . . . has exceeded all bounds. The people suffer from his tyranny . . . Is this how you want your king to rule? Should a shepherd savage his own flock?
Anu paid attention and asked Aruru, mother of creation, to
create a double for Gilgamesh, his second self, a man who equals his strength and courage, a man who equals his stormy heart. Create a new hero, let them balance each other perfectly, so that Uruk has peace.
Anu thus came up with a solution to what we’ll call the “Gilgamesh problem”—controlling the authority and the power of a state so that you get the good things and not the bad. Anu’s was the doppelgänger solution, similar to what people today call “checks and balances.” Gilgamesh’s double Enkidu would contain him. James Madison, one of the founding fathers of the U.S. system of government, would have sympathized. He would argue 4,000 years later that constitutions must be designed so that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”
Gilgamesh’s first encounter with his double came when he was about to ravish a new bride. Enkidu blocked the doorway. They fought. Although Gilgamesh ultimately prevailed, his unrivaled, despotic power was gone. The seeds of liberty in Uruk?
Unfortunately not. Checks and balances parachuted from above don’t work in general, and they didn’t in Uruk. Soon Gilgamesh and Enkidu started to conspire. As the epic records it:
They embraced and kissed. They held hands like brothers. They walked side by side. They became true friends.
They subsequently colluded to kill the monster Humbaba, the guardian of the great cedar forest of Lebanon. When the gods sent the Bull of Heaven to punish them, they combined forces to kill it. The prospect for liberty vanished along with the checks and balances.
If not from a state hemmed in by doppelgängers and checks and balances, where does liberty come from? Not from Assad’s regime. Clearly not from the anarchy that followed the collapse of the Syrian state.
Our answer is simple: Liberty needs the state and the laws. But it is not given by the state or the elites controlling it. It is taken by regular people, by society. Society needs to control the state so that it protects and promotes people’s liberty rather than quashing it like Assad did in Syria before 2011. Liberty needs a mobilized society that participates in politics, protests when it’s necessary, and votes the government out of power when it can.
The Narrow Corridor to Liberty
Our argument in this book is that for liberty to emerge and flourish, both state and society must be strong. A strong state is needed to control violence, enforce laws, and provide public services that are critical for a life in which people are empowered to make and pursue their choices. A strong, mobilized society is needed to control and shackle the strong state. Doppelgänger solutions and checks and balances don’t solve the Gilgamesh problem because, without society’s vigilance, constitutions and guarantees are not worth much more than the parchment they are written on.
Squeezed between the fear and repression wrought by despotic states and the violence and lawlessness that emerge in their absence is a narrow corridor to liberty. It is in this corridor that the state and society balance each other out. This balance is not about a revolutionary moment. It’s a constant, day-in, day-out struggle between the two. This struggle brings benefits. In the corridor the state and society do not just compete, they also cooperate. This cooperation engenders greater capacity for the state to deliver the things that society wants and foments greater societal mobilization to monitor this capacity.
What makes this a corridor, not a door, is that achieving liberty is a process; you have to travel a long way in the corridor before violence is brought under control, laws are written and enforced, and the state starts providing services to its citizens. It is a process because the state and its elites must learn to live with the shackles society puts on them and different segments of society have to learn to work together despite their differences.
What makes this corridor narrow is that this is no easy feat. How can you contain a state that has a huge bureaucracy, a powerful military, and the freedom to decide what the law is? How can you ensure that as the state is called on to take on more responsibilities in a complex world, it will remain tame and under control? How can you keep society working together rather than turning against itself, riven with divisions? How do you prevent all of this from flipping into a zero-sum contest? Not easy at all, and that’s why the corridor is narrow, and societies enter and depart from it with far-reaching consequences.
You can’t engineer any of this. Not that very many leaders, left to their own devices, would really try to engineer liberty. When the state and its elites are too powerful and society is meek, why would leaders grant people rights and liberty? And if they did, could you trust them to stick to their word?
You can see the origins of liberty in the history of women’s liberation from the days of Gilgamesh right down to our own. How did society move from a situation where, as the epic has it, “every girl’s hymen . . . belonged to him,” to one where women have rights (well, in some places anyway)? Could it be that these rights were granted by men? The United Arab Emirates, for instance, has a Gender Balance Council formed in 2015 by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice president and prime minister of the country and ruler of Dubai. It gives out gender equality awards every year for things like the “best government entity supporting gender balance,” “best federal authority supporting gender balance,” and “best gender balance initiative.” The awards for 2018, given out by Sheikh Maktoum himself, all have one thing in common—every one went to a man! The problem with the United Arab Emirates’ solution was that it was engineered by Sheikh Maktoum and imposed on society, without society’s participation.
Contrast this with the more successful history of women’s rights, for example, in Britain, where women’s rights were not given but taken. Women formed a social movement and became known as the suffragettes. The suffragettes emerged out of the British Women’s Social and Political Union, a women-only movement founded in 1903. They didn’t wait for men to give them prizes for “best gender balance initiative.” They mobilized. They engaged in direct action and civil disobedience. They bombed the summer house of the then chancellor of the exchequer and later prime minister, David Lloyd George. They chained themselves to railings outside the Houses of Parliament. They refused to pay their taxes and when they were sent to prison, they went on hunger strikes and had to be force-fed.
Emily Davison was a prominent member of the suffragette movement. On June 4, 1913, at the famous Epsom Derby horse race, Davison ran onto the track in front of Anmer, a horse belonging to King George V. Davison, according to some reports holding the purple, white, and green flag of the suffragettes, was hit by Anmer. The horse fell and crushed her, as the photograph included in the photography section shows. Four days later Davison died from her injuries. Five years later women could vote in parliamentary elections. Women didn’t get rights in Britain because of magnanimous grants by some (male) leaders. Gaining rights was a consequence of their organization and empowerment.
The story of women’s liberation isn’t unique or exceptional. Liberty almost always depends on society’s mobilization and ability to hold its own against the state and its elites.
Chapter 1
HOW DOES HISTORY END?
A Coming Anarchy?
In 1989, Francis Fukuyama predicted the “end of history,” with all countries converging to the political and economic institutions of the United States, what he called “an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.” Just five years later Robert Kaplan painted a radically different picture of the future in his article “The Coming Anarchy.” To illustrate the nature of this chaotic lawlessness and violence, he felt compelled to begin in West Africa:
West Africa is becoming the symbol of [anarchy] . . . Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels are now most tellingly demonstrated through a West African prism. West Africa provides an appropriate introduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that will soon confront our civilization. To remap the political earth the way it will be a few decades hence . . . I find I must begin with West Africa.
In a 2018 article, “Why Technology Favors Tyranny,” Yuval Noah Harari made yet another prediction about the future, arguing that advances in artificial intelligence are heralding the rise of “digital dictatorships,” where governments will be able to monitor, control, and even dictate the way we interact, communicate, and think.
So history might still end, but in a very different way than Fukuyama had imagined. But how? The triumph of Fukuyama’s vision of democracy, anarchy, or digital dictatorship? The Chinese state’s increasing control over the Internet, the media, and the lives of ordinary Chinese might suggest that we are heading toward digital dictatorship, while the recent history of the Middle East and Africa reminds us that a future of anarchy is not so far-fetched.
But we need a systematic way to think about all of this. As Kaplan suggested, let’s begin in Africa.
The Article 15 State
If you keep going east along the West African coast, the Gulf of Guinea eventually turns south and heads to Central Africa. Sailing past Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and Pointe-Noire in Congo-Brazzaville, you arrive at the mouth of the river Congo, the entry point to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country that is often thought to be the epitome of anarchy. The Congolese have a joke: there have been six constitutions since the country gained its independence from Belgium in 1960, but they all have the same Article 15. The nineteenth-century French prime minister Charles-Maurice Talleyrand said that constitutions should be “short and obscure.” Article 15 fulfills his dictum. It is short and obscure; it says simply Débrouillez-vous (Fend for yourself).
It’s usual to think of a constitution as a document that lays out the responsibilities, duties, and rights of citizens and states. States are supposed to resolve conflicts among their citizens, protect them, and provide key public services such as education, healthcare, and infrastructure that individuals are not able to adequately provide on their own. A constitution isn’t supposed to say Débrouillez-vous.
The reference to “Article 15” is a joke. There isn’t such a clause in the Congolese Constitution. But it’s apt. The Congolese have been fending for themselves at least since independence in 1960 (and things were even worse before). Their state has repeatedly failed to do any of the things it is supposed to do and is absent from vast swaths of the country. Courts, roads, health clinics, and schools are moribund in most of the country. Murder, theft, extortion, and intimidation are commonplace. During the Great War of Africa that raged in the Congo between 1998 and 2003, the lives of most Congolese, already wretched, turned into a veritable hell. Possibly five million people perished; they were murdered, died of disease, or starved to death.
Even during times of peace the Congolese state has failed to uphold the actual clauses of the constitution. Article 16 states:
All persons have the right to life, physical integrity and to the free development of their personality, while respecting the law, public order, the rights of others and public morality.
But much of the Kivu region, in the east of the country, is still controlled by rebel groups and warlords who plunder, harass, and murder civilians while looting the country’s mineral wealth.
What about the real Article 15 in the Congolese Constitution? It begins, “The public authorities are responsible for the elimination of sexual violence . . .” Yet in 2010 an official of the United Nations described the country as the “rape capital of the world.”
The Congolese are on their own. Débrouillez-vous.
A Journey Through Dominance
This adage is not apposite just for the Congolese. If you retrace the Gulf of Guinea, you arrive at the place that seemed to best sum up Kaplan’s bleak vision of the future, Lagos, the business capital of Nigeria. Kaplan described it as a city “whose crime, pollution, and overcrowding make it the cliché par excellence of Third World urban dysfunction.”
In 1994, as Kaplan wrote, Nigeria was under the control of the military with General Sani Abacha as president. Abacha did not think that his job was to impartially resolve conflicts or protect Nigerians. He focused on killing his opponents and expropriating the country’s natural wealth. Estimates of how much he stole start at around $3.5 billion and go higher.
The previous year the Nobel Prize–winning writer Wole Soyinka returned to Lagos, crossing the land border from Cotonou, the capital of neighboring Benin (which is shown on Map 1). He recalled, “The approach to the Nigeria-Cotonou border told the story at first glance. For miles we cruised past a long line of vehicles parked along the road right up to the border, unable or unwilling to cross.” People who ventured across “returned within an hour of their venture either with damaged vehicles or with depleted pockets, having been forced to pay a toll for getting even as far as the first roadblock.”
Map 1. West Africa: The Historic Asante Kingdom, Yorubaland and Tivland, and Wole Soyinka’s Route from Cotonou to Lagos
Undeterred, Soyinka crossed into Nigeria to find somebody to take him to the capital, only to be told, “Oga Wole, eko o da o” (Master Wole, Lagos is not good). A taxi driver came forward pointing to his bandaged head with his bandaged hand. He proceeded to narrate the reception he had received; a bloodthirsty gang had pursued him even as he drove his car in reverse at full speed.
Oga . . . Dose rioters break my windshield even as I dey already reversing back. Na God save me self . . . Eko ti daru [Lagos is in chaos].
Finally, Soyinka found a taxi to take him to Lagos, though the reluctant driver opined, “The road is ba-a-ad. Very bad.” As Soyinka put it, “And thus began the most nightmarish journey of my existence.” He continued:
The roadblocks were made up of empty petroleum barrels, discarded tires and wheel hubs, vending kiosks, blocks of wood and tree trunks, huge stones . . . The freelance hoodlums had taken over . . . At some roadblocks there was a going fee; you paid it and were allowed to pass—but that safe conduct lasted only until the next barrier. Sometimes the fee was a gallon or more of fuel siphoned from your car, and then you were permitted to proceed—until the next barrier . . . Some vehicles had clearly run a gauntlet of missiles, cudgels, and even fists; others could have arrived directly from the film set of Jurassic Park—one could have sworn there were abnormal teeth marks in the bodywork.
As he approached Lagos, the situation grew worse.
Normally the journey into the heart of Lagos would take two hours. Now it was already five hours later, and we had covered only some fifty kilometers. I became increasingly anxious. The tension in the air became palpable as we moved nearer to Lagos. The roadblocks became more frequent; so did the sight of damaged vehicles and, worst of all, corpses.
Corpses are not an unusual sight in Lagos. When a senior policeman went missing, the police searched the waters under a bridge for his body. They stopped looking after six hours and twenty-three corpses, none of them the one they were seeking.
While the Nigerian military looted the country, Lagosians had to do a lot of fending for themselves. The city was crime ridden and the international airport was so dysfunctional that foreign countries banned their airlines from flying there. Gangs called “area boys” preyed on businessmen, shaking them down for money and even murdering them. The area boys weren’t the only hazard people had to avoid. In addition to the odd corpse, the streets were covered in trash and rats. A BBC reporter commented in 1999 that “the city is . . . disappearing under a mountain of rubbish.” There was no publicly provided electricity or running water. To get light you had to buy your own generator. Or candles.
The nightmarish existence of Lagosians wasn’t just that they lived in rat-infested, trash-strewn streets and saw corpses on the sidewalk. They lived in continual fear. Living in downtown Lagos with the area boys wasn’t fun. Even if they decided to spare you today, they might come after you tomorrow—especially if you had the audacity to complain about what they were doing to your city or didn’t show them the subservience they demanded. This fear, insecurity, and uncertainty may be as debilitating as actual violence because, to use a term introduced by political philosopher Philip Pettit, it puts you under the “dominance” of another group of human beings.
In his book Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government, Pettit argues that the fundamental tenet of a fulfilling, decent life is non-dominance—freedom from dominance, fear, and extreme insecurity. It is unacceptable, according to Pettit, when one has to
live at the mercy of another, having to live in a manner that leaves you vulnerable to some ill that the other is in a position arbitrarily to impose.
Such dominance is experienced when
the wife . . . finds herself in a position where her husband can beat her at will, and without any possibility of redress; by the employee who dare not raise a complaint against an employer, and who is vulnerable to any of a range of abuses . . . that the employer may choose to perpetrate; by the debtor who has to depend on the grace of the moneylender, or the bank official, for avoiding utter destitution and ruin.
Pettit recognizes that the threat of violence or abuses can be as bad as actual violence and abuses. To be sure, you can avoid the violence by following some other person’s wishes or orders. But the price is doing something you don’t want to do and being subject to that threat day in and day out. (As economists would put it, the violence might be “off the equilibrium path,” but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t affect your behavior or have consequences that are almost as bad as suffering actual violence.) As Pettit sees it, such people
live in the shadow of the other’s presence, even if no arm is raised against them. They live in uncertainty about the other’s reactions and in need of keeping a weather eye open for the other’s moods. They find themselves . . . unable to look the other in the eye, and where they may even be forced to fawn or toady or flatter in the attempt to ingratiate themselves.
But dominance doesn’t just originate from brute force or threats of violence. Any relation of unequal power, whether enforced by threats or by other social means, such as customs, will create a form of dominance, because it amounts to being
subject to arbitrary sway: being subject to the potentially capricious will or the potentially idiosyncratic judgement of another.
We refine Locke’s notion and define liberty as the absence of dominance, because one who is dominated cannot make free choices. Liberty, or in Pettit’s words, non-dominance, means
emancipation from any such subordination, liberation from any such dependency. It requires the capacity to stand eye to eye with your fellow citizens, in a shared awareness that none of you has a power of arbitrary interference over another.
Critically, liberty requires not just the abstract notion that you are free to choose your actions, but also the ability to exercise that freedom. This ability is absent when a person, group, or organization has the power to coerce you, threaten you, or use the weight of social relations to subjugate you. It cannot be present when conflicts are resolved by actual force or its threat. But equally, it doesn’t exist when conflicts are resolved by unequal power relations imposed by entrenched customs. To flourish, liberty needs the end of dominance, whatever its source.
In Lagos liberty was nowhere to be seen. Conflict was resolved in favor of the stronger, the better-armed party. There was violence, theft, and murder. Infrastructure was crumbling at every turn. Dominance was all around. This was not a coming anarchy. It was already there.
Warre and the Leviathan
Lagos in the 1990s may seem an aberration to most of us living in security and comfort. But it isn’t. For most of human existence, insecurity and dominance have been facts of life. For most of history, even after the emergence of agriculture and settled life about ten thousand years ago, humans lived in “stateless” societies. Some of these societies resemble a few surviving hunter-gatherer groups in the remote regions of the Amazon and Africa (sometimes also called “small-scale societies”). But others, such as the Pashtuns, an ethnic group of about 50 million people who occupy much of southern and eastern Afghanistan and northwestern Pakistan, are far larger and engaged in farming and herding. Archaeological and anthropological evidence shows that many of these societies were locked in an even more traumatic existence than the inhabitants of Lagos suffered daily in the 1990s.
The most telling historical evidence comes from deaths in warfare and murder, which archaeologists have estimated from disfigured or damaged skeletal remains; some anthropologists have observed this firsthand in surviving stateless societies. In 1978, the anthropologist Carol Ember systematically documented that there were very high rates of warfare in hunter-gatherer societies—a shock to her profession’s image of “peaceful savages.” She found frequent warfare, with a war at least every other year in two-thirds of the societies she studied. Only 10 percent of them had no warfare. Steven Pinker, building on research by Lawrence Keeley, compiled evidence from twenty-seven stateless societies studied by anthropologists over the past two hundred years, and estimated a rate of death caused by violence of over 500 per 100,000 people—over 100 times the current homicide rate in the United States, 5 per 100,000, or over 1,000 times that in Norway, about 0.5 per 100,000. Archaeological evidence from premodern societies is consistent with this level of violence.
We should pause to take in the significance of these numbers. With a death rate of over 500 per 100,000, or 0.5 percent, a typical inhabitant of this society has about a 25 percent likelihood of being killed within a period of fifty years—so a quarter of the people you know will be violently killed during their lifetimes. It is hard for us to imagine the unpredictability and fear that such brazen social violence would imply.
Though a lot of this death and carnage was due to warring between rival tribes or groups, it wasn’t just warfare and intergroup conflict that brought incessant violence. The Gebusi of New Guinea, for example, have even higher murder rates—almost 700 per 100,000 in the precontact period of the 1940s and 1950s—mostly taking place during peaceful, regular times (if times during which almost 1 in 100 of the population gets murdered each year can be called peaceful!). The reason appears to be related to the belief that every death is caused by witchcraft, which triggers a hunt for the parties responsible for even nonviolent deaths.