The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution

When this political system was transplanted to Melanesia, however, the result was chaos. The reason was that most voters in Melanesia do not vote for political programs; rather, they support their Big Man and their wantok. If the Big Man (and an occasional Big Woman) can get elected to parliament, the new MP will use his or her influence to direct government resources back to the wantok, to help supporters with things like school fees, burial costs, and construction projects. Despite the existence of a national government with all of the trappings of sovereignty, like a flag and an army, few residents of Melanesia have a sense of belonging to a larger nation, or being part of a social world much beyond their wantok. The parliaments of PNG and the Solomons have no coherent political parties; they are full of individual leaders, each striving to bring back as much pork as possible to his or her narrow base of supporters.4

Melanesia’s tribal social system limits economic development because it prevents the emergence of modern property rights. In both Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, upward of 95 percent of all land is held in what is known as customary land tenure. Under customary rules, property is private but held informally (that is, with no legal documentation) by groups of kinfolk, who have both individual and collective rights to different strips of land. Property has not only an economic but also a spiritual significance, since dead relatives are buried in certain spots on the wantok’s land, and their spirits continue to inhabit that place. No one in the wantok, including the Big Man, has the exclusive right to alienate title to the land to an outsider.5 A mining or palm oil company seeking a concession has to negotiate with hundreds or sometimes thousands of landowners, and there is no statute of limitations on land claims under traditional rules.6

From the standpoint of many foreigners, the behavior of Melanesian politicians looks like political corruption. But from the standpoint of the islands’ traditional tribal social system, the Big Men are simply doing what Big Men have always done, which is to redistribute resources to their kinsmen. Except that now they have access not just to pigs and shell money but also to revenues from mining and logging concessions.

It takes only a couple of hours to fly from Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea’s capital, to Cairns or Brisbane in Australia, but in that flight one is in some sense traversing several thousand years of political development. In thinking about Melanesia’s political development challenges, I began to wonder how any society had ever made the transition from a tribal- to a state-level society, how modern property rights had evolved out of customary ones, and how formal legal systems, dependent on a kind of third-party enforcement that does not exist in traditional Melanesia, first made their appearance. On further reflection, however, it seemed to me that it was perhaps a conceit to think that modern societies had progressed so far beyond Melanesia, since Big Men—that is, politicians who distribute resources to their relatives and supporters—are ubiquitous in the contemporary world, including the U.S. Congress. If political development implied movement beyond patrimonial relationships and personalistic politics, one also had to explain why these practices survived in many places and why seemingly modern systems often reverted to them.

The answers to many of these questions were not to be found in Political Order in Changing Societies; in revisiting Huntington’s topic, this prehistory would require considerable clarification.

Hence the current book, which looks at the historical origins of political institutions as well as the process of political decay. This is the first of two volumes, and it deals with political development from prehuman times up to roughly the eve of the French and American revolutions. The present volume is about the past—indeed, it starts not with recorded human history but with mankind’s primate ancestors. The first four parts deal with human prehistory, the origins of the state, the rule of law, and finally accountable government. The second volume will bring the story up to the present, paying special attention to the impact that Western institutions had on institutions in non-Western societies as they sought to modernize. It will then describe how political development occurs in the contemporary world.

It is extremely important to read this volume in anticipation of what is to come in the second. As I make clear in the final chapter of this book, political development in the modern world occurs under substantially different conditions from those in the period up until the late eighteenth century. Once the Industrial Revolution occurred and human societies exited the Malthusian conditions they had experienced up to then, a new dynamic was added to the process of social change that would have huge political consequences. Readers of this volume might get the impression that some of the long historical continuities described here mean that societies are trapped by their histories, but in fact we live today under very different and more dynamic conditions.

This book covers a large number of societies and historical periods; I also use material from disciplines outside my own, including anthropology, economics, and biology. Obviously in a work of this scope, I have had to rely almost exclusively on secondary sources for the research. I have tried to pass this material through as many expert filters as possible, but it is nonetheless likely that I have made both factual and interpretational mistakes along the way. While many of the individual chapters will not pass muster with people whose job it is to study particular societies and historical periods in depth, it does seem to me that there is a virtue in looking across time and space in a comparative fashion. Some of the broader patterns of political development are simply not visible to those who focus too narrowly on specific subjects.

PART ONE

Before the State

1

THE NECESSITY OF POLITICS

During the forty-year period from 1970 to 2010, there was an enormous upsurge in the number of democracies around the world. In 1973, only 45 of the world’s 151 countries were counted as “free” by Freedom House, a nongovernmental organization that produces quantitative measures of civil and political rights for countries around the world.1 That year, Spain, Portugal, and Greece were dictatorships; the Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites looked like strong and cohesive societies; China was caught up in Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution; Africa saw the consolidation of rule by a group of corrupt “presidents for life”; and most of Latin America had fallen under military dictatorship. The following generation saw momentous political change, with democracies and market-oriented economies spreading in virtually every part of the world except for the Arab Middle East. By the late 1990s, some 120 countries around the world—more than 60 percent of the world’s independent states—had become electoral democracies.2 This transformation was Samuel Huntington’s third wave of democratization; liberal democracy as the default form of government became part of the accepted political landscape at the beginning of the twenty-first century.3

Underlying these changes in political systems was a massive social transformation as well. The shift to democracy was a result of millions of formerly passive individuals around the world organizing themselves and participating in the political life of their societies. This social mobilization was driven by a host of factors: greatly expanded access to education that made people more aware of themselves and the political world around them; information technology, which facilitated the rapid spread of ideas and knowledge; cheap travel and communications that allowed people to vote with their feet if they didn’t like their government; and greater prosperity, which induced people to demand better protection of their rights.

The third wave crested after the late 1990s, however, and a “democratic recession” emerged in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Approximately one in five countries that had been part of the third wave either reverted to authoritarianism or saw a significant erosion of democratic institutions.4 Freedom House noted that 2009 marked the fourth consecutive year in which freedom had declined around the world, the first time this had happened since it established its measures of freedom in 1973.5

POLITICAL ANXIETIES

At the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century, malaise in the democratic world took several distinct forms. The first was the outright reversal of democratic gains that had occurred in countries such as Russia, Venezuela, and Iran, where elected leaders were busy dismantling democratic institutions by manipulating elections, closing down or buying independent TV and newspaper outlets, and clamping down on opposition activities. Liberal democracy is more than majority voting in elections; it is a complex set of institutions that restrain and regularize the exercise of power through law and a system of checks and balances. In many countries, official acceptance of democratic legitimacy was accompanied by the systematic removal of checks on executive power and the erosion of the rule of law.

In other cases, countries that seemed to be making a transition from authoritarian government got stuck in what the analyst Thomas Carothers has labeled a “gray zone,” where they were neither fully authoritarian nor meaningfully democratic.6 Many successor states to the former Soviet Union, like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in Central Asia, found themselves in this situation. There had been a broad assumption in the years following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that virtually all countries were transitioning to democracy and that failures of democratic practice would be overcome with the simple passage of time. Carothers pointed out that this “transition paradigm” was an unwarranted assumption and that many authoritarian elites had no interest in implementing democratic institutions that would dilute their power.

A third category of concern has to do not with the failure of political systems to become or remain democratic but rather their failure to deliver the basic services that people demand from their governments. The mere fact that a country has democratic institutions tells us very little about whether it is well or badly governed. This failure to deliver on the promise of democracy poses what is perhaps the greatest challenge to the legitimacy of such political systems.

An example of this was Ukraine. Ukraine surprised the world in 2004 when tens of thousands of people turned up in Kiev’s Maidan Square to protest manipulation of that country’s presidential election. These protests, which came to be known as the Orange Revolution, triggered a new election and the rise of the reformer Viktor Yushchenko as president. Once in power, however, the Orange Coalition proved utterly feckless, and Yushchenko himself disappointed the hopes of those who supported him. The government quarreled internally, failed to deal with Ukraine’s serious corruption problem, and presided over a meltdown of the economy during the 2008–2009 global financial crisis. The result was the election in early 2010 of Viktor Yanukovich, the very man accused of stealing the 2004 election that had triggered the Orange Revolution in the first place.

Many other species of governance failure plague democratic countries. It is well understood that Latin America has the highest level of economic inequality of any region in the world, in which class hierarchies often correspond to racial and ethnic ones. The rise of populist leaders like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia is less a cause of instability than a symptom of that inequality and the feeling of social exclusion felt by many who are nominally citizens. Persistent poverty often breeds other kinds of social dysfunctions, like gangs, narcotrafficking, and a general feeling of insecurity on the part of ordinary people. In Colombia, Mexico, and El Salvador, organized criminality threatens the state itself and its basic institutions, and the failure to deal effectively with these problems has undermined the legitimacy of democracy.

India, to take another example, has been a remarkably successful democracy since its independence in 1947—an achievement all the more remarkable given its poverty, ethnic and religious diversity, and enormous size. (Why a longer historical view of Indian political development should lessen our surprise is the subject of chapters 10–12.) Nonetheless, Indian democracy, like sausage making, looks less appealing the closer one gets to the process. Nearly one-third of Indian legislators, for example, are under some form of criminal indictment, some for serious crimes like murder and rape. Indian politicians often practice an overt form of patronage politics, in which votes are traded for political favors. The fractiousness of Indian democracy makes it very hard for the government to make major decisions on issues like investments in major infrastructure projects. And in many Indian cities, glittering high-tech centers of excellence exist next to African-style poverty.

The apparent chaos and corruption of democratic politics in India has frequently been contrasted to the quick and efficient decision making of China. Chinese rulers are not constrained by either a rule of law or democratic accountability; if they want to build a huge dam, bulldoze neighborhoods to make way for highways or airports, or mount a rapid economic stimulus package, they can do so far more quickly than democratic India.

A fourth broad source of political anxiety concerns the economy. Modern global capitalism has proved to be productive and wealth-creating beyond the dreams of anyone living before the year 1800. In the period following the oil crises of the 1970s, the size of the world economy almost quadrupled,7 and Asia, based on its openness to trade and investment, saw much of its population join the developed world. But global capitalism has not found a way to avoid high levels of volatility, particularly in the financial sector. Global economic growth has been plagued by periodic financial crises, striking Europe in the early 1990s, Asia in 1997–1998, Russia and Brazil in 1998–1999, and Argentina in 2001. This instability culminated, perhaps with poetic justice, in the great crisis that struck the United States, the home of global capitalism, in 2008–2009. Free markets are necessary to promote long-term growth, but they are not self-regulating, particularly when it comes to banks and other large financial institutions. The system’s instability is a reflection of what is ultimately a political failure, that is, the failure to provide sufficient regulatory oversight both at a national and an international level.8

The cumulative effect of these economic crises has not necessarily been to undermine confidence in market-based economics and globalization as engines of economic growth. China, India, Brazil, and any number of other so-called emerging market countries continue to perform well economically based on their participation in global capitalism. But it is clear that the political job of finding the right regulatory mechanisms to tame capitalism’s volatility have not yet been found.

POLITICAL DECAY

The latter point suggests an urgent but often overlooked area of concern about democracy’s future. Political institutions develop, often slowly and painfully, over time, as human societies strive to organize themselves to master their environments. But political decay occurs when political systems fail to adjust to changing circumstances. There is something like a law of the conservation of institutions. Human beings are rule-following animals by nature; they are born to conform to the social norms they see around them, and they entrench those rules with often transcendent meaning and value. When the surrounding environment changes and new challenges arise, there is often a disjunction between existing institutions and present needs. Those institutions are supported by legions of entrenched stakeholders who oppose any fundamental change.

American political institutions may well be headed for a major test of their adaptability. The American system was built around a firm conviction that concentrated political power constituted an imminent danger to the lives and liberty of citizens. For this reason, the U.S. Constitution was designed with a broad range of checks and balances by which different parts of the government could prevent other parts from exercising tyrannical control. This system has served the country well, but only because at certain critical junctures in its history when strong government was necessary, it was possible to forge the consensus to bring it about through the exercise of political leadership.

There is unfortunately no institutional guarantee that the system as designed will always check tyrannical power yet allow exercises of state authority when the need arises. The latter depends in the first instance on the existence of a social consensus on political ends, and this has been lacking in American political life in recent years. The United States faces a series of large challenges, mostly related to fixing its long-term fiscal situation. Over the past generation, Americans have spent money on themselves without paying their own way through taxation, a situation that has been exacerbated by years of too-easy access to credit and overspending on both a household and governmental level. The long-term fiscal shortfall and foreign indebtedness threaten the very basis of American power around the world, as other countries like China gain in relative stature.9

None of these challenges is so enormous that it cannot be resolved through timely, if painful, action. But the American political system, which should facilitate the formation of consensus, is instead contributing to the problem. The Congress has become highly polarized, making the passage of legislation extremely difficult. For the first time in modern history, the most conservative Democrat in Congress is more liberal than the most liberal Republican. The number of seats in Congress won by a margin of 10 percent or less, meaning that they are up for grabs by either party, has fallen steadily from nearly two hundred in the late nineteenth century to only a little more than fifty in the early 2000s. Both political parties have become much more ideologically homogeneous, and deliberative debate between them has deteriorated.10 These kinds of divisions are not historically unprecedented, but in the past they have been overcome by strong presidential leadership, which has not been forthcoming.

The future of American politics rests not just in politics but also in society. The polarization of Congress reflects a broad trend toward the growing homogenization of neighborhoods and regions, as Americans sort themselves out ideologically by where they choose to live.11 The trend towards associating only with like-minded people is strongly amplified by the media, where the proliferation of communication channels ends up weakening the shared experience of citizenship.12

The American political system’s ability to deal with its fiscal challenges is affected not just by the Left-Right polarization of Congress but also by the growth and power of entrenched interest groups. Trade unions, agribusinesses, drug companies, banks, and a host of other organized lobbies often exercise an effective veto on legislation that hurts their pocketbooks. It is perfectly legitimate and indeed expected that citizens should defend their interests in a democracy. But at a certain point this defense crosses over into the claiming of privileges, or a situation of gridlock where no one’s interests may be challenged. This explains the rising levels of populist anger on both the Right and Left that contribute to polarization and reflect a social reality at odds with the country’s own legitimating principles.

The complaint by Americans that the United States is dominated by elites and powerful interest groups reflects the reality of increasing income and wealth inequality in the period from the 1970s to the early 2000s.13 Inequality per se has never been a big problem in American political culture, which emphasizes equality of opportunity rather than of outcomes. But the system remains legitimate only as long as people believe that by working hard and doing their best, they and their children have a fair shot at getting ahead, and that the wealthy got there playing by the rules.

The fact is, however, that rates of intergenerational social mobility are far lower in the United States than many Americans believe them to be, and lower than in many other developed countries that traditionally have been regarded as rigid and stratified.14 Over time, elites are able to protect their positions by gaming the political system, moving their money offshore to avoid taxation, and transmitting these advantages to their children through favored access to elite institutions. Much of this was laid bare during the financial crisis of 2008–2009, when it became painfully clear that there was little relationship between compensation in the financial services sector and real contributions to the economy. The industry had used its considerable political muscle to dismantle regulation and oversight in the previous decade, and continued to fend off regulation in the crisis’s aftermath. The economist Simon Johnson suggested that the power of the financial oligarchy in the United States was not too different from what exists in emerging market countries like Russia or Indonesia.15

There is no automatic mechanism by which political systems adjust themselves to changing circumstances. The story of the failure to adjust, and thus the phenomenon of political decay, is told in later pages of this volume. There was no necessary reason why the Mamluk Sultanate in Egypt couldn’t have adopted firearms earlier to meet rising external threats, as the Ottomans who ultimately defeated them did; nor was it inevitable that emperors in the late Ming Dynasty in China would fail to tax their citizens adequately to support an army that could defend the country from the Manchus. The problem in both cases was the enormous institutional inertia existing behind the status quo.

Once a society fails to confront a major fiscal crisis through serious institutional reform, as the French monarchy did after the failure of the Grand Parti in 1557, it is tempted to resort to a host of short-term fixes that erode and eventually corrupt its own institutions. These fixes involved giving in to various entrenched stakeholders and interest groups, who invariably represented people with wealth and power in French society. The failure to balance the country’s budget led to bankruptcy and the delegitimization of the state itself, a course that finally terminated in the French Revolution.

The United States is not in nearly as serious a moral and fiscal crisis as ancien régime France. The danger, however, is that its situation will continue to worsen over time in the absence of some powerful force that will knock the system off its current dysfunctional institutional equilibrium.

FANTASIES OF STATELESSNESS

A common thread links many of our contemporary anxieties about the future, from authoritarian backsliding in Russia to corruption in India, to failed states in the developing world, to entrenched interest groups in contemporary American politics. It concerns the difficulties of creating and maintaining effective political institutions, governments that are simultaneously powerful, rule bound, and accountable. This might seem like an obvious point that any fourth grader would acknowledge, and yet on further reflection it is a truth that many intelligent people fail to understand.

Let’s begin with the question of the receding of the third wave and the democratic recession that has taken place around the world in the 2000s. The reasons for our disappointments in the failure of democracy to spread do not lie, I would argue, on the level of ideas at the present moment. Ideas are extremely important to political order; it is the perceived legitimacy of the government that binds populations together and makes them willing to accept its authority. The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the collapse of one of democracy’s great competitors, communism, and the rapid spread of liberal democracy as the most widely accepted form of government.

This is true up to the present, where democracy, in Amartya Sen’s words, remains the “default” political condition: “While democracy is not yet universally practiced, nor indeed universally accepted, in the general climate of world opinion democratic governance has achieved the status of being taken to be generally right.”16 Very few people around the world openly profess to admire Vladimir Putin’s petronationalism, or Hugo Chávez’s “twenty-first-century socialism,” or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s Islamic Republic. No important international institution endorses anything but democracy as the basis for just governance. China’s rapid growth incites envy and interest, but its exact model of authoritarian capitalism is not one that is easily described, much less emulated, by other developing countries. Such is the prestige of modern liberal democracy that today’s would-be authoritarians all have to stage elections and manipulate the media from behind the scenes to legitimate themselves. Not only has totalitarianism virtually disappeared from the world; authoritarians pay a compliment to democracy by pretending to be democrats.