Francis Fukuyama: Democracy's Failure to Perform

good evening ladies and gentlemen an academy and i welcome you to the marcus bearish lecture the american academy in berlin established the marco spirit distinguished visitor ship in the humanities in order to facilitate access to important scholarship and academic debate the lecture is named for marco speery former CEO of bosch about whom it was said at the time of his death philosophers and management are rare Marco's Birla was one and I'm very pleased that his daughter Nora bearish and others who have supported this visitorship are present tonight I turn to our guests more remarkable than Frank Fuuka Fuuka Yama's Fujiyama as a public intellectual then his government career his academic appointments now as my colleague at Stanford his many books is the fact that Frank has hobbies he takes pretty seriously he is a photographer rights god forbid advising motorists ago and makes furniture not any old furniture but reproductions of what we call federalist design he even does inlay work so if you have any wishes in owning federalist furniture he is the man to turn to and I'm sure he would give you a good price he is also the director of the center on democracy development and rule of law at Stanford's Freeman spogli Institute for International Studies since coming to Stanford Frank has been primarily concerned with political order and governance his two most recent books have been the origins of political order and political order and political decay in reality these two books our two volumes of one book amounting to more than 1200 pages I can see with authority having read them that they are greatly rewarding as they tackle throughout history what is a macro question down to some micro detail when the second book was published in 2014 The Economist wrote a basic rule of intellectual only journalists can write em sorry there must be some here but only the self-important journalists of The Economist would write this way a basic rule of intellectual life is that celebrity destroys quality while I'm not sure that this is hint verbally so but since I agree with the economists punchline I will continue to quote superstar academics abandoned libraries for the lecture circuit too many speeches must be given and backs slept slapped to leave time for serious thought Francis Fukuyama is a glorious exception to this rule now you must admit the coming to that punchline was worth reading all the other stuff whether it was correct or not Francis professor Fukuyama first became famous with his 1992 book the end of history and the last man its core thesis appeared earlier in a 1989 essay in the national interest its title the end of history may be among the most superficially bandied about in publishing history but then knowledge of Hegel and Nietzsche is not that widespread the knowledge of Marx not widespread any longer but I would like to say this afternoon Frank and I met with President Gauck who was interested in seeing a meeting and talking with mr. Fujiyama and I can say to you that not only does mr. Gao remember the end of history but he accurately and had understood it and he still agreed with it so this was for at least for me a very satisfying and gratifying experience I hope for you too Frank I'm not going to set the record straight about all the wrong things said about the book Frank himself does that much better than I could do for instance in the afterword to the 2006 paperback edition however when taking another look at this extraordinarily rich and complex if at times perhaps a touch hyperbolic book I came across what I shall call an adumbration not a prediction and adumbration that is worth bringing to your attention as it was written in 1992 I quote there is at present a constant flow of people from countries that are poor and unstable to those that are rich and secure that has affected virtually all states in the developed world this flow constantly increasing in recent years could be suddenly accelerated by political upheavals in the historical world Fujiyama then goes on to mention how difficult it is for liberal democracies to bar immigrants because it is so hard to formulate any just principles for exclusion that does not seem or nationalist thus violating those universal principles to which liberal democracies are committed pretty good Frank pretty good and I asked him last night whether he remembered this he had no recollection whatsoever that's also pretty good you say important things and don't remember them incidentally you should also know that our speakers doctoral thesis at Harvard was on Savia threats to intervene in the Middle East okay at the time I left Stanford for Berlin Frank's office in my office way across the corridor from one another since he has become a center director now he has moved but wherever he may be located he is an outstanding wonderful colleague welcome Frank so thank you very much that was a wonderfully generous introduction as Gerhardt said it's been a delight really to be a colleague of his in the years that I've been at Stanford and I must say we miss him terribly and we were upset that the American Academy stole him and we want him back because he is really an invaluable part of our team at my Center and at the Institute where I work so we are eagerly awaiting your return Gerhart and Regina as well so let me explain to you what I'm going to talk to you about today so there is a crisis going on in the world over democracy so I want to explain the dimensions of that and some of the reasons why I think that is occurring this being the American Academy I think you will probably excuse me if I actually talk about the United States a certain amount because of all the places where democracy is problematic I wouldn't have thought that it would be in my own country but this year has been a very very peculiar political year and were unfortunately not out of it yet so we will and I suspect have plenty of time in the question and answer period to talk about this so the question is democracy in decline I think has been in the minds of many people there is a special interest of the journal of democracy that it's a journal published by the National Endowment for democracy in Washington devoted to the subject in which I had an essay and in fact if you want to read a written version of what I'm going to talk to you tonight about it's in that January 2015 issue but I think that we are in fact going through what my colleague Larry diamond labels a democratic recession we need a little bit of context for this so between the early 1970s and the mid 2000s we experienced what my professor at Samuel Huntington labeled the third wave of democratization in 1970 there are approximately 35 electoral democracies in the world but beginning with the Spanish and Portuguese transitions and continuing through Latin America and then in way culminating in the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 the number of democracies around the world expanded steadily and even today the number depending on how you measure democracy stands at about 110 to 115 so we went from about a third of the world's countries having some form of electoral contestation to two-thirds of the world experiencing that but there is no question that we're living in a tough time for democracy right now Freedom House that publishes a numerical measure of political rights and civil rights every year has recorded an aggregate decline in the overall level of democracy throughout the world for nine years running behind these numerical shifts I think you're seeing several things happening so one of them is the fact that there are a lot of now are there there are a number of big powerful non democracies that are on the move particularly Russia and China they have territorial ambitions they look like they're successful and they're being imitated in other parts of the world or they're being looked up to and admired there is authoritarian learning there's been adaptation by authoritarian governments I think both Russia and China were frankly freaked out by the color revolutions like the orange revolution in Ukraine or the Rose Revolution in Georgia these attempted grassroots expression of popular unhappiness with authoritarian regimes and they've reacted they've adjusted I think mr. Putin's behavior in the last several years is directly the result of his worry that an orange revolution would be replicated in Moscow itself and this almost happened after the last time that he was elected president and his second go-around as president when you had you know a couple hundred thousand young Russians out on the streets and so that has been motivating him the Chinese similarly do not want any of this kind of instability many authoritarian countries around the world had passed laws restricting civil society they're virtually carbon copies of one another they don't want certainly foreign funding but even domestic groups that organize any form of collective action had been actively actively suppressed and I think here in Europe you're hearing some very unusual things what I thought was remarkable about this speech of Viktor Orban in Romania a couple of years ago I'm sorry no no he's from Hungary but he gave the speech actually in Bucharest so Viktor orbán's speech in Romania didn't I mean he actually made a call for illiberal democracy he said that the model is not liberal democracy it is a different form of democracy that is much more controlled in majoritarian and not really the kind of democracy that we've understood either in North America or in the European Union and so there is a growing self-confidence on the part of these authoritarian regimes a great deal of pushback now why is this happening I think they're basically three reasons so the first really has to do with failures in developed democracies I think that ultimately you know what supported the third wave of democratization was the perceived success of democracy in the parts of the world where you had developed democracies that is to say Europe and the United States both of these regions have had major financial crises economic setbacks high levels of employment in the past decade the United States I think complimented this by making some very big mistakes and foreign policy in the invasion of Iraq other things that it undertook in recent years the second thing has to do with the perceived success of authoritarian regimes and particularly China I think that China in fact has become the outstanding model for a country that is quite successful at modernization really unlike Russia not dependent on a single commodity coming out of the ground but really a modern you know well-balanced economy that yet is under the heels of a very authoritarian dictatorship and so that again affects the perceptions but the final issue is the one that I want to develop at greater length which is democracies failure to perform and I think that in a sense that has been the crisis that not just new democracies or would-be democracies like Ukraine have been suffering from but also developed ones including my own country the United States so me being a professor I'm going to have to give you some definitions here in order to set a conceptual framework for what I want to what I want to talk about in my book I've argued the book that Gerhard referred to I say that there's really three separate components of a modern political system the first is the state the state according to Max Weber is a legitimate monopoly of force over a defined territory I think that's a very good definition if what it means is basically that states are about power states are about being able to generate power and to use it to protect their community from external and internal threats to enforce laws and to deliver basic services infrastructure education health the kinds of things that people expect in a modern society the second pillar is rule of law now you can distinguish between what is sometimes called rule by law in which law is simply used as commands of the executive that's what the Chinese have the Communist Party lays down laws that people have to obey that is not rule of law rule of law exists only when the executive the sovereign the Prince the king the Prime Minister also falls under the same laws that apply to other people in the society and therefore the state is about creating and using power and the rule of law in the most fundamental sense is a limitation of power means that power cannot be used arbitrarily but must be used in conformity with generally accepted rules reflecting the values of the underlying society then finally there's democratic accountability which we understand as free and fair multi-party periodic free and fair elections the purpose of these procedures is to guarantee substantive accountability meaning the government ought to serve the interests of the whole community and not just the elite that is running the government so in a way a modern political system is a kind of miracle because it both generates a huge amount of power if you think about say the power of the American presidency with nuclear weapons and all of the other resources at the president's disposal but that power must be constrained by these other two institutions the rule of law on the one hand and democratic accountability on the other and so adjust and successful modern system has to have balance if you have only the state without the institutions of constraint you have a dictatorship that's China China has a pretty good strong state has no rule of law and of course no democracy so it's a dictatorship on the other hand if you only have the institutions of constraint but no state you get something like Nigeria or Afghanistan where you know you have some degree of democratic legitimacy some degree of law but a completely weak state that cannot meet the needs of of its citizens final definition is the difference between what Weber called a patrimonial state and what he called a modern state a patrimonial state is a state where the rulers believe they own the political system and basically are in the of extracting resources from the rest of the society using politics as their instrument so when you had kings and queens or emperors you know you could literally give away a province to your daughter as a wedding present because you owned that territory it was a dynastic possession today we nobody really pretends that they own countries outright so we have what political scientists label neo patrimonial ISM where you have the outward form of a modern country with you know presidents and season and the like but the reality is that the elites are in it to extract resources they want to go into politics in order to enrich themselves and their families by contrast a modern state is impersonal meaning that your relationship to the state does not depend on whether you're a friend or a relative or you know a sidekick of the of the of the president it simply depends on your status as as a citizen now this is a really important point I think the the Western world and particularly the United States has focused on the constraint pillars particularly the democracy pillar in its attempt to spread institutions like-minded institutions around the world Americans in particular really care about democracy they like elections but it turns out that the really difficult act of political institution building is actually not holding free and fair elections because that goes on in quite a few countries and we've got the means of monitoring elections and helping that process along the really difficult political transition is the one between a patrimonial or a neo patrimonial state and a modern state that is the critical thing that really I think has become the new dividing line in world politics so let me give you a couple of oh and well so there there are several actually illustrations of this you simply look at what the unite States did in Afghanistan and Iraq where we were trying to create you know some form of liberal democracy in both of those places the Democratic part of it you know we had worked okay we got elections or election like events in both places to take place where you had leaders elected that had some degree of democratic legitimacy where the United States failed utterly was to create modern states so in neither of these places do you have a government that is capable of protecting its own citizens or is you know not essentially a form of kleptocracy in which corruption is rife you know at all levels of the government the United States invested a huge amount of its own treasure and lives in trying to bring this about and I think it was a almost complete failure and I think that that division between patrimonial States and modern states is really the dividing line and much of world politics so Ukraine is a is I think a illustration of this you had a democratic revolution back in 2004 the Orange Revolution that failed to go on to the next stage which was to actually develop a modern state it remained a kleptocracy in the hands of a number of oligarchs it was highly corrupt and as a result of that mr. Yanukovych was reelected in a free and fair election in 2010 and then all these young people had to come out in Maidan square again to get him out of power a second time and so this should make people that are residents of the European Union actually proud and happy that what they wanted you know the issue was that he switched the away from from EU accession to aligning with Russia what did that choice mean it wasn't a choice over democracy everybody admitted that Yanukovych was democratically elected what that choice meant was the choice between living in a world of modern states in which there is a clear distinction between public interest and private interest and where the state is supposed to serve public interest that's the European Union that's what the European Union represented to all of those you know pro-democracy protesters in Maidan square that we're taking all of those personal risks they did not want to be sucked into this Russian style kleptocracy which is what Yanukovych and all of these other oligarchs behind the throne represented all right so that is really the issue that we have with mr. Putin right now if there is an election in Russia today even though it's not a free you know and fair I mean you manipulate selections and the media all of that's true but there's no question that he's popular there's no question that majority of Russians would vote for him for president today so what's wrong with that regime the fact is that it is a kleptocracy in which the big players are basically in it you know to enrich themselves from mr. Putin all the way down to you know all of his local cronies on the ground that's the big issue now the failure of democracy to perform in that state function of providing basic services has also plagued and diligent emitted other existing democracies take the example of India so India since independence has actually been a very good democracy with one brief interlude in the 1970s during the emergency there is a free press it's very competitive there's a lot of political competition changes between major parties that contest things all the time in the late 1990s there was a study that was done by Jean drehs who is a Indian activist of schools elementary schools in a number of northern Indian states in which she found that almost 50% of school teachers were being paid to be teachers and were not showing up for work they just weren't showing up in the classroom so nobody in India thinks this is a good thing there's a big hue and cry the press is very critical the government the opposition parties say you've got to fix this so they spend a number of years in all sorts of different reforms I try to put little video surveillance cameras in every classroom and so forth they do another survey ten years later and what do you think the percentage is it basically hasn't moved they're still almost 50 percent of school teachers aren't showing up for work this is a bad thing for India you know it's a really bad thing when your teachers don't come to your classrooms and it's something that everybody wants to solve and it seems to be one of those things that somehow is beyond the capacity of a contemporary Indian government to solve and I think one of the reasons they voted for mr. Modi now already like a year and a half ago was that they were tired of this feckless democracy that couldn't build infrastructure couldn't get teachers to show up in the classroom and they wanted some strong leader that would do this and unfortunately I'm not sure that you know he's kind of strong in the wrong places he he's really not in fact delivering on that all right so I don't think it's going to destabilize democracy in India but it makes the quality of life in India you know very poor you're not educating people in the way that you ought to be so final a final example is very close to home which has to do with the euro crisis so of course Greece could not manage its fiscal accounts in the years leading up to up to the the crisis why did this happen well there are a number of you know I'm not going to rehearse all the arguments about the poor design of the euro zone and so forth but if you look at Greek politics again in a certain way there is a relationship between Greek democracy and what happened so the regime of the Colonel's the authoritarian regime of the Colonel's is displaced by a genuine democracy in 1974 pesach and new democracy the to center left and center-right parties exchanged power on numerous occasions in the decades since that but Greece remains essentially what we political scientists call a clan holistic political system which means that with every change in parties the entire public sector would empty out and party you know the new party in power would put its own party workers in these positions of authority and because Greek civil servants could not be fired it wasn't just a wholesale change and I mean the size of the bureaucracy you know continued to grow to the point where they had you know on the eve of the crisis something on the order of seven times the per capita number of civil servants that Britain did you know and so that was you know a fundamental reason underlying their their fiscal problem and it is one thing that they do not want to change I mean they considered selling the Parthenon but giving up this ability to distribute political you know government offices through patronage is such a core part of the way that the parties operate that that's been you know the real source of resistance so again there is a problem of governance a deep problem in the quality of the state in this case linked to in the Nate I mean I guess what I'm saying is that democracy actually in in these cases is not a solution in it is been a certain extent a part of the problem now I'm going to switch over and talk a little bit historically about the United States because I think it actually might give us some insight into both the origins of state weakness and also some of the solutions and if I can give a very schematic history so Donald Trump which I'm sure is on your minds is not a new phenomenon he actually represents a strand of American populism that has been around for a very long time in the immediate aftermath of the the ratification of the Constitution in creation of the United States American government was a very elite driven thing most it was very small most of the people that worked in the American government were graduates of Harvard and Yale they came from this planter gentry a lead in Virginia Massachusetts and so forth this all began to change in the 1820s as one state after another opened up the franchise to all white males United States was really the first country to have Universal white male franchise they did it good 70 years before Britain you know did the same thing and the politicians faced this problem how do I get voters to the polls in a society where the average level of education probably was about fourth grade people were living on isolated farms it was not an urbanized society and so forth and that's when they invented the political party and that's also when they invented cliental ISM meaning you exchanged a vote for a job in the post office or something of that sort the critical election where this really kicked into place was in 1828 Andrew Jackson ran against John Quincy Adams John Quincy Adams was a Boston Brahmin he was the son of the second President of the United States he was a graduate of Harvard University he travelled extensively in Europe he could speak a number of European languages Andrew Jackson was a frontiersman from rural Tennessee he was of Scotch Irish descent he was a brawler an Indian fighter heavy drinker he drove the Seminoles and the Cherokees out of their native reservoirs and he was the victor of the Battle of New Orleans in the word 1812 which propelled him into national politics and he beat the Boston Brahmin because of this new opening up the electorate because ordinary ordinary Americans could identify with Andrew Jackson they could not identify with the Harvard educated John Quincy Adams and that's where the populist tradition really starts he was very suspicious of a National Bank he really didn't want a strong federal government and so that you know so he was the Donald Trump of the 1820s he was calling on those same Wellsprings of democratic populism that was very anti elitist and very distrustful of the existing elites that had been running the country up to that point he gets elected says two things first I won the election so therefore I should appoint who gets to work in the US government and secondly he didn't use quite these terms but he said in effect it doesn't take a genius to run the American government any ordinary American can do this and this is what opens up a 100-year period in American history that goes under the name of the spoils system or the patronage system in which virtually every job in the US government from the federal level down to your local fourth class postmaster was delivered was was given out as a result of a payment by a politician to some political supporter which naturally leads to very corrupt political machines like Tammany Hall in New York City and the like now the question that I think faces many young democracies is how do you get out of this system of pervasive corruption if you look at Mexico Indonesia Brazil all of these countries have a system like this in which there is a large degree of corruption and a distribution of government offices that weakens state quality because you're giving important positions to political hacks as payoffs for political support right and when we look down on countries like that saying oh they're very corrupt they don't know what they're you know they don't know what modern good government looks like you know I think especially if you're an American saying this you just don't know your own history because this was exactly the nature of American government back in that period so how did it happen that the United States eliminated this system it was so if in some sense the system had been created by American democracy it was solved by American democracy in the 1880s the country was undergoing a massive social transformation as a result of technology the railroads were the Internet of their era they're knitting together the country in a vast Continental sized market in which farmers in Kansas and Iowa could ship their crops to Europe you know on the new transportation systems that were being created country was urbanizing and there are a lot of new middle-class professionals that did not like this old corrupt inefficient system of government that had been created under the patronage system and there was a big grassroots movement to fix it now none of the incumbent members of Congress in the 1880s had any interest in political reform whatsoever they had no interest in good government because why did they get elected in the first place it was because of their ability to give out offices as campaign favours right so this is the this is the big problem in political reform is it's not because people don't understand what a modern system of government is it's because the incumbent power holders do not want things to be different and that you cannot get them out of power unless you create a political movement to displace them in this case there was a an accident which was James Garfield gets elected in 1882 as president of the United States he's immediately shot by would-be office seeker who thinks he should be the consul appointed the Consul to France he hasn't gotten the job so he's angry and he shoots the president president dies and Congress is now sufficiently embarrassed that the president of the US has been assassinated because of the patronage system and so they passed something called the Pendleton act that for the first time actually puts the Civil Service on a merit basis you have to take a civil service examination in order to be appointed to a government office the American system being what it is it's a very slow process until most federal officials are actually appointed on the basis of expertise or you know an exam but that's really how the transformation happens it is a profoundly political act will not happen in the absence of grassroots support together with strong political leadership from the top and in those years the u.s. was very fortunate that leaders like Theodore Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson that actually cared about this issue and that's how reform happen if it's going to happen in India or Brazil or Mexico or another developing country at the present moment that's how it's got to happen there as well it's got to happen as a result of a political process so I'd now like to turn to the United States today because I think that we have not returned to this client allistic system of the 19th century but we've returned to some version of political decay which I think has been affecting our politics and really making democracy not perform well in the United States and I would say that it's the collision of several things so some of them are going on in American society one of them is simply polarization right in American politics for most of the 20th century the two parties Republicans and the Democrats overlapped very substantially this is something actually political scientists are pretty good at measuring beginning in the 1990s they began to pull apart and today there is ZERO overlap between the parties whatsoever in terms of ideology so the most liberal Republican is considerably more conservative than the most conservative Democrat so the parties have become actually more like European parliamentary parties in terms of ideological homogeneity and this in turn reflects a sorting of Americans by you know residential neighborhood in fact one of there's a political scientist at Stanford that did a study that showed that in terms of who Americans want their child to marry they carry that care much more about them marrying someone from the other political party than they do someone from a different race or religion or you know ethnic group this polarization has become very you know personal in a sense so that's one thing that's going on another thing that's going on is the coalescing of very well resourced and very well organized interest groups now a lot of these are associated with corporations and banks you know that have a lot of the money but there are also public sector unions you know every disease in the United States has an interest group that lobbies for more you know federal money supporting research on that disease and the of course in a democracy has to respond to interest groups I mean that's a fundamental right of citizens to band together to push for their interests but I think the process is now subject to so much money and so much professionalization that overall it you know in the aggregate it becomes very unrepresentative and I think that's one of the things that has fundamentally convinced many Americans that the system is stacked against them that if you are a member of Congress you have to listen to these powerful lobbyists and you don't listen to you don't listen to ordinary citizens all right so that's on the side of society on the on the institutional side we have a very different kind of political system from other developed democracies founding fathers were very suspicious of a centralized executive power and they created a system of checks and balances deeply embedded in the Constitution that check that power so you've got two powerful houses of Congress separate houses you got a separately elected president you've got a judiciary that can overturn legislative acts and then you've got devolution to state and local levels and we've been adding new checks all the time that aren't in the Constitution such as senatorial holds where any one of a hundred senators can block any executive branch appointment they want and so currently there's a backlog of something like you know 60 ambassadors and federal judges you know that simply will not get through the Senate because some individual senator wants to stop that and so when you put these two together the institutions plus the polarization plus the powerful interest groups you get this situation that I call V tock recei meaning rule by veto where the way our system is organized a small a powerful minority group can block action by the whole community simply because the system the institutional rules privilege them so you know the American corporate tax rate is 35% it's much higher than the average for the OECD every tax expert in the country both Republicans Democrats agree that that nominal rate ought to be lowered and then you should get rid of all the special subsidies and tax exemptions tax expenditures in our 10,000 page disgraceful tax code you cannot do this in current circumstances because the individual interest that would be hurt by getting rid of the special privileges are so well-organized that despite the fact that everybody in principle agrees that the common good would be served by this kind of tax reform you you just can't bring it about and so you've got many you know Congress has not passed a budget under its own rules of regular order in over a decade and in fact the only reason we got a budget passed this year is that John Bainer quipped you know the last thing he did as Speaker of the House was to get this budget through and then he quit because he knew that the Republicans would never really come you know having actually voted for a budget and it kind of indicates you know the degree of you know of deadlock in the country now one final thing I want to point out which has really been brought home by the rise of Trump and what's you know this extraordinary campaign season is what's happened to the white working-class in the United States and there's actually now been a number of books written because there's a lot of data that's been collected on what's been happening to this group so as you're probably aware they've not done well in terms of real incomes male workers are actually learning earning less than they were not just in 2008 before the crisis but actually you know than they were in the 1970s when it was their fathers that were employed but in a way the worst thing are the social competence of that loss of income and status drug use is an epidemic among the white working-class it turned out in the New Hampshire primary and I think all the candidates were surprised by this the single biggest thing on the minds of these voters in the primary and by the way New Hampshire's a state that's probably 99% white right so the thing that was foremost in their mind was heroin addiction because it's an epidemic you know among ordinary Americans in that state as it is in rural Indiana or Kansas or any number of places that you don't associate with that kind of dysfunction the number of children growing up in single-parent families for working-class Americans is now 70% you know in the 1980s the number of african-americans growing up in single-parent families hit 70% and at that point everybody said this is a major crisis you know in in the black underclass there's a huge debate about that but this group you know of white workers is now experiencing that and so to me it doesn't seem unreasonable when you go to a voter like that when Donald Trump says I want to make America great again they remember that America was great in the time of their father or maybe their grandfather when you know most white males had a decent job in a manufacturing sector was earning probably you know twice as much as they are in real terms now had a lot of security a lot of social support and lived in communities that were socially coherent and they don't do that anymore and so you say well why is there so much anger in the United States well you know I think that's part of the reason why and neither political party has helped them really the Republicans basically have been being for open immigration free trade all of these things that have been helping to erode you know their their real incomes and the Democrats you know have been caught up in identity politics so they care about you know gay marriage environmentalism feminism you know catering to different kinds of ethnic groups and the one ethnic group that they don't have any appeal for our white working-class you know this new kind of white under which is rapidly becoming a white underclass and that's why I think you get a anti-establishment politician you know that can feed on that anger now something else is going on also because it's not just this group that is supporting Donald Trump I mean he does seem to have some traction with you know with other groups in American society as well but you know it's a problem that I think is very clearly in front of us and and really the political system has not served to solve it I'm going to end by just giving you some reason to be a little bit more optimistic about the future of democracy in the world because I do think that there are there are changes that are underfoot that may actually change this analysis down the road and that really has to do with the global economy we're going through a major major transition right now you know in the past decade the so-called emerging market countries and primarily China you know reached 50 percent of global output and growth in Latin America in sub-saharan Africa in East Asia was really being powered by China together you know created a commodity boom that was lifting the boats of many people around the world but it was also supporting authoritarian government governments that could extract resource rents and therefore did not have to tax their own populations and therefore could not be held accountable by their own populations that's Iran Russia Venezuela you know there's a list of countries like that something big is happening I think the slowdown in China is quite historic I think it's much worse certainly than the government pretends I mean the government says they're growing at six point nine percent most Chinese I talk to businessmen think that the rate is really substantially lower than that and that has led to this collapse of commodity prices beginning with energy and in some sense you know the reason that authoritarian government seemed like a plausible alternative in the decade just passed is that Russia China you know Venezuela all these other countries looked like they were doing well that they were growing you know that they had strong governments and so forth and that period is at an end I you know it could also be a very dangerous period when you get this kind of authoritarian government that loses its economic performance legitimacy and then has to go back on nationalism or you know foreign adventurism in order to legitimate itself so I'm not saying the world is necessarily going to be more peaceful but I do think that the relative you know prestige of these different models is is likely to change and the United States is actually not doing badly despite all of our Washington dysfunction still an extremely entrepreneurial economy you know we've got one of the lowest unemployment rates now in the developed world and so forth and so things could change and I think I would say that in terms of my agenda for how to promote democracy worldwide we got to fix Europe in the United States you know we that the Institute you can't do anything about the societies and these kind of larger underlying social issues but you can fix institutions and you can fix specific policies you know if you understand properly what the source of the dysfunction is and I think that is the agenda that is in front of all of us both European and American so thank you very much for your attention and I look forward to questions so no thank you Frank that was great as always two questions a one um the I mean you talk a lot about the role of the state in controlling a geographic area but some observers now are questioning how much the geographic area is as important as it once was which of course applies how important is the state some like our New America colleague Prague Khanna has talked about you know power is becoming more diffuse it's in one hand it got you know governments at the national level are less powerful at the municipal level maybe more powerful than you have individual actors who have more wealth more power they are taking away from the power of the states so I'm curious where you come down on that and then the other question I would just ask Anthony downs wrote a lot about you know rational choice theory difference between two choice systems multiple choice systems the u.s. of course being a two choice system might the u.s. benefit from having a more multiple choice system if we had a multiparty democracy in other words with the incentives of parties be different if it's you against me my party is always right yours is always wrong you know if you make it a multiple choices that change that right so on the product kind of question is an empirical matter I think there's no question that power has been leaching away from not just States but many other kinds of hierarchical institutions around the world and that's a result I think of you know a lot of social phenomenon you know it's the information revolution so we know much more about what governments do and when people get this kind of information they don't like it for the most part in their it makes the mistrustful of government and therefore less willing to grant them the kind of automatic legitimacy that they once were it has to do with higher levels of education therefore higher levels of expectation of what governments should do for you and in that respect there's this great asymmetry so how many of you have ever woken up in the morning saying dammit I'm so grateful that the garb she was picked up properly you know this morning whereas the day that the garbage doesn't get picked up for some reason you say dammit you know what's wrong with this government you know so you've you just got this problem of you know expectations and I think that some people you know then embrace this and say this is great this is citizen power this means that governments will be more accountable I think the actual result is mixed because there are certain functions that governments are absolutely required to do particularly you know getting back to their fundamental characteristic which is the ability to use force to enforce rules so in this modern world yes it's true that you got transnational corporations and transnational drug gangs and you know a lot of things moving back and forth who's going to who's going to enforce the law you know that has to be done by a state on a territorial basis and I don't think you can get away from that fundamental function and therefore this weakening of governments I think is problematic and it's also problematic in theoretical terms like how do you hold you know I think Europeans are restless how do you hold Google accountable you know to Europe et Europe because it's not located in Europe or it's kind of located in this you know vast vast ether on the question of the electoral system so my colleague at Stanford Larry diamond has really been pushing for the United States moved to the kind of limited preference ballot that the Australians use where you don't just pick your first choice but you pick a second and third and fourth choice as well and that would eliminate the problem we had in Gore V Bush where basically Bush was elected because all of Ralph Nader's votes subtracted from the ones that should have gone to Gore and therefore he lost the state of Florida and therefore he lost the election as a whole and so this should empower third parties to rise and you know Tom Friedman at the New York Times a number of other people have been pushing you know to change to a different kind of electoral system now I am happy to experiment with this but I suspect that it may not actually do any good first of all it so the assumption is that there's actually this big group of moderate centrist voters out there that are just dying to be able to vote for a Michael Bloomberg or somebody in the middle of the you know political spectrum and I'm not sure that that's true and what it may in fact do is empower the extremes you know to form yet more extreme parties and then you can't actually form a majority government and so you have to have a coalition and you're still back the same you know problems that that you've got now so maybe it'll work but you know maybe not yeah yes montre Bischoff I just would have the three questions simply now the first is it really you know I'm still even if you tried it's the end to be somewhere optimistic I'm still very pessimistic for the simple reason you said one of the root causes for your optimism would be slow prose in what we call to develop being world if that is true I come to the first statement you crowded the guard was crowding about refugees about people fleeing see an economic failure in sir country and moving to where it's more successful so there may be you know for me that is not held said is a threat that is in those countries we don't have economic success sets those people will trust overseas economic says they may have a better life my second observation at the beginning when you were defining what you define as democracy I asked myself and you said you know I said still in my mind there are two ways to only there's one way to change that's a problem you describe for the United States Teddy's grassroot development and a wise government at said point in time now say it made by maybe very accidental since it's going to happen and I don't said is a recipe there for anybody to say okay now let's start some grassroot movement and let's be let's wait said some nice government comes around my question is in how far do you believe said globalization also played a big role in the feeling of most of the people said world has become so complex you know and so difficult and you see in most of the developed countries globalization has at least made a minority far better off since aware before but maturity doesn't feel it if you look at the United States most of the middle class is even worse off since a bear before yeah so third question is you asked you said one of the root of one of the bases is also the rule of law and that reminds me of a statement of a Japanese professor once when we were talking about development we face that says resyncs you need for development it's a good teacher a good policeman and a good tax collector hmm interesting enough he never talked about any elections you know and some of my feeling is that especially in the United States politics see over emphasis on election instead of the rule of law has also been some of the root causes we have seen in South countries where you rightly pointed to the fact that we were never able to establish because we too much emphasized elections in States a rule of law in the sense you defines a rule of law not using law now I finish okay so on your first question about migration I'm not sure that there is a strong immediate correlation between the rate of economic growth when the rate at which people want to leave the country sometimes actually in periods of rapid growth that's when people leave because their expectations have suddenly been raised but they're somehow not quite meeting them like in Korea you know you have this big outflow of migrants from Korea right in the period of the Korean economic miracle so I just think that that's going to be a constant it's probably not going to be affected so much by the commodity slowdown and so forth now with globalization it produces winners and losers it is not the general it's wrong to talk about the middle class generally there there's a class divide that really is at the high school versus college level in the United States people above that dividing line have done really really well as a result of globalization and so there's this huge class divide that's opened up you know between these two groups and in most developing developed countries you know working-class people are a smaller proportion of the population and they have definitely I think been hurt by globalization and so everywhere you look not just in the United States but in Europe you know in Hungary and Russia in Turkey I mean who votes for these authoritarian populist politicians it is all kind of lower middle class people that are not beneficiaries of globalization in fact may be threatened by loss of jobs and you know and so forth yeah on the rule of law well that's what I was trying to say I mean I actually think that state capacity you know is is something that has been under emphasized by by the United States just because we don't like you know States and we tend to focus all of our efforts on Elections and and democracy I think that's true enough the the trouble with rule of law as an objective for how to implant it is we don't have any idea you know we just don't have an idea I mean we don't understand how the rule of law rose in you know that's part of the reason I wrote these books was try to teach myself about how this stuff came about so I so I think you're right that you need balance you know you need all three of these things if you just have a state that's not a good thing so you need the state constrained by these other other institutions so maybe why don't we go yeah I was interested in listening to you talk to give some sort of hope that Donald Trump was actually part of a long tradition in American politics but my question was whether or not you went as far as I was just reading a book by Robert Reich who is that the oligarchs are actually undermining rule of law by using market powers political power to then deregulate to undermine antitrust to bust unions which go as far as that it's not cyclical but actually more historic but it's actually yeah so right uh so in a way that was what I was arguing that collectively you do have these very powerful interest groups and they do have an undue influence so you know like one example of this is this carried interest provision in American tax law by which all these hedge fund managers get taxed at 15% whereas everybody that earns their living you know by going to work has to pay a 35 or 37 percent you know tax rate nobody thinks that this is really justified except for the people that benefit from it but you can't get rid of it because you know the lobby in favor this is really really powerful so that you do get these real distortions I think in representation however I think the rise of Donald Trump shows that actually these interest groups cannot determine elections because all of the big bucks in the Republican Party was behind Jeb Bush it was not behind Donald Trump and here he comes and upsets the you know he basically has taken over the Republican Party and of course he's a rich guy himself but I just think that there's no cohesive group of oligarchs in the United States were meeting in some close room you know saying okay who are we going to make president this year you know that that's just not the way our system works so there's still competition and it's still you know it's still an open system but it is really not as nearly as representative as it could be or is it ought to be yeah hi thanks so much for your talk I just had a quick question Daniel Dresner wrote an article for The Washington Post about three days ago saying that Donald Trump's leadership and winning all of these um primaries are and that it was has to do with um the collective-action problem however according to the median voter theory he would not actually be someone who could win and none of his policies would actually prevent this drug use or single-parent family home so my question is is there something else aside from that oh there's a lot of things that explain his rise so I think the collective-action problem just refers to the fact that all of the so-called establishment or moderate Republicans were up til this past week they spent all their energy attacking each other and none of them would withdraw from the race and therefore they split you know the non Donald Trump vote so that was one and it's just kind of an accident who was running and and the results of the first couple of primaries and so forth I think it goes without saying that Donald Trump's solutions do not in any remote way actually suit the interests of you know of these people except you know just sticking it to the establishment but but you know he does not have a solution this is you know this has been a consistent problem I think for that group of voters is that they historically have tended to vote for Republican candidates whose economic policies actually make their situation worse and the reason that they've done this is this so-called what's wrong with Canada's problem that you know they're they're loyal to the Republican Party on cultural issues you know guns abortion patriotism so forth and the Democrats as I said just don't offer them a home because they really are preoccupied with this kind of identity politics that doesn't include them as one of the identities that they particularly want to cultivate so so I think there's a lot of complex reasons why you know Trump ended up on top how about back there thank you very much there was one element in the progressive movement you explained and that was Supreme Court people like Louis Brandeis who didn't believe in big businesses running government they they fought their battle and helped to bring the progressive movement about but when you look at the Supreme Court today equalling money with free speech do you see hope well this is a subject that Gerhard can actually tell you much more knowledgeably about than I can but it's it's not true that the Supreme Court was a big help to the progressive movement justices in the late 19th century were very conservative they invalidated a lot of progressive laws I mean one of the most famous was Lochner versus New York and what 1905 where basically they threw out this child labor law saying that it violated freedom of contract so and actually that conservative court resistance to progressive legislation you know continued up through the New Deal you know and then Roosevelt had a big confrontation where he tried to pack the cord and he back down from that but then I think the the court realized that they had to back down a little bit as well and so it then shifted so they played a so this is so this is in a larger perspective the checks and balances system there are very few countries in which courts have the kind of power to continue to adjudicate legislation that has been passed by the legislature the way you do in the United States in in Europe in a parliamentary system when the Parliament votes on a health care law that's it then the government executes that law in the United States we well in the United States by contrast the law is passed by Congress and then the people that don't like the law say okay now we're going to fight it in the implementation stage we're going to launch lawsuits to invalidate the law we're going to use administrative procedures to prevent the implementation of the law and so the partisan you know contestation never ends it just never ends in the American system so that's why I think in a larger sense you know the courts sometimes play a progressive role sometimes not but in aggregate it's one of the veto points that tends to slow down the ability of the American system to act decisively there's one that was even further back there yeah thank you for your attention with respect for a quote that I draw from Richard Quest actually on CNN he said that we're currently in the face were we faced four basic fundamentals and in this regard he couldn't see whether or not democracy at all in place a roller has any leverage on it those four issues which would be lack of growth demographic issues over there goodness of households in Slate households and private households together and of course the lack of government and they'll deliver all over the world what would you say in this respect does it matter at all whether it's a dictatorship where it's a democratic legitimate government sooner or later every country needs to deliver to its people well for the promise to prosperity how do we get further in this respect do we need some supranational approaches of which currently of course like other problems and issues to be solved what would what would you regard is your approach Thanks well what I was trying to argue in the talk as a whole is that we need to focus heavily on state capacity to basically deliver these fundamental services I completely contest the idea that democracy is is irrelevant to this process because people want democracy it's simply a fact that given the kind of levels of education and the expectations that people have the idea that you could in the Democratic world all of a sudden say Oh actually we're going to close the doors on all public processes we're going to turn over decision-making to a small elite group you're not going to know what they decide but just trust them because they're going to make really good decisions and they will deliver the things that you care about that it isn't going to happen in a million years it's just not going to happen legitimacy is very firmly you know on the side of ever-expanding you know public participation that's just a fact of life and I think the likelihood that the you know these Asian authoritarian systems are going to look more like you know Western ones then the reverse is very likely to happen because that's you know that's I think one of the consequences of modernization so I think in a democracy you have to use democracy to build up you know the state capacity to actually do these things that's why I was giving you the example of the Progressive Era how did we get to better quality government in the late 19th century it wasn't by by passing democracy it was by using democracy and the desire that people have for effective government to actually reform the system and I I just don't see a t'v you know way of proceeding in them in the modern world okay how about let's let's go back there's one person here and then in the front I have one question on China and your optimism as the Communist Party is drawing its legitimacy from growth and nationalism a lot of Chinese analysts argue that with the staggering economic growth the government will be eventually more nationalistic what is it stance on that well it's already nationalistic you know one of the things that really worries me about China is that nationalism has become part of the legitimacy of the Communist Party and they are simply much more assertive than they were before 2008 you know they're militarizing the South China Sea in slow stages they're very calm and they're not doing it in a hurry but it's clear what they're doing in that region now for a variety of reasons you know I think they've recognized that the model that got them up to this point simply has run out of steam it's an export-driven model that was based on creating manufacturing industries by mobilizing a lot of peasant labor in the countryside and putting them in factories in big cities and then selling that on world markets and none of the features of that are still in place there's a they can't export you know more than they're doing right now their costs are going up they have no mobilise ablai BER left and so they've realized for the last at least the last ten years that they have to be moved to a more consumption driven domestic consumption driven economy that is based on increases in productivity President Xi is not doing anything to promote that if anything he's moving in the opposite direction you know towards restriction on market activity restrictions on personal freedom clamping down on universities and you know people that really don't you know tow the the party line and it's really a you know questionable whether he he truly understands what's necessary to carry China to the next stage of economic growth if he cannot do this then I think there's a real danger because nationalism then replaces performance as the basis of the regime's legitimacy and that then leads to big collisions with China's neighbors with the United States with you know the rest of the world so I'm you know I'm quite worried about that part of the world because I think you know it could become much more unstable than it has been over the last thirty years okay what are we thank you I wonder if I could ask you to revisit the the moment in your lecture when you're kind of narrating the transition from a client istic system to a what you call a modern system and in the case of the United States you talked about this as being somewhat of an accident the case of Garfield being assassinated by a guy who wanted a job and the client istic system didn't quite work out for him the Congress got embarrassed and passed a series of laws in that direction that seems to me like a somewhat unsatisfying answer to the question of how you get from client ISM to to an impersonal to it to a notion of the state which is which runs along impersonal lines but i but i but i asked about that so i so I wonder if you want to say something more about that but I asked about it because particularly in the in the current context we don't have necessarily problems with client ism and nepotism per se but we certainly have a context in which the the impersonality of the system seems to be at risk whether or not actors on the inside of the outside of the government and so so I actually wonder whether and this is kind of a second question but I wonder whether the word modern to describe this kind of state system that you're talking about which works along impersonal lines and the rule of law is really the right word because it seems like the modern in that case only existed for about twenty-five years after World War two and so the modern existed in the past and maybe doesn't exist now so the way you get political reform I think is it's the same everywhere you need a grassroots movement you need a popular I'm speaking about democracies now you need a grassroots movement and there was a big grassroots movement in the 1880s in favor of cleaning up the system they just couldn't get it through Congress because of the resistance of members of Congress you need leadership in the form of people that have an idea and a clear agenda and want to steer that popular anger in the right direction but then you know the Garfield assassination was just a trigger a lot of times you an Tanaka's system out of its equilibrium without having some kind of an exogenous shock so in this case it was an assassination it could be a war it could be a financial crisis it could be a lot of other things that all of a sudden forced people to think differently about the way they're doing things I had hoped that the financial crisis in 2008 would be a sufficient trigger to you know to trigger a much more thoroughgoing reform of the American system and unfortunately because the policymakers acted quickly and they put a floor under the you know the financial the economic fallout people kind of forgot about it as if the crisis hadn't happened now I defend my use of the term modern system this is one of the big themes in in both volumes of my book is that a modern political system has been achieved by many societies over time but it is fragile because it's kind of unnatural what is natural is to appoint your family members and your close friends to positions of power in the government and unless there are very powerful incentives to not do that that's what people are going to do and that means that political decay what I call political decay which is the capture of state institutions by elites of different sorts is a kind of natural phenomenon people try to do this over time and that means that a modern system needs to be renewed periodically it's not a kind of stable equilibrium than once you get there your hole is going to be like that and so that's what I see happening in the United States we had this patronage system in the 19th century we got rid of it and now it's come back in this different form where it's not a job in the post office but it's you know the lobbyists with campaign contributions and we've once again got to clean that system up I mean right now I don't see a path forward to that but you know that's the task I think that's ahead of us yes could I come back to the country in which you are yes yes as as a German I sometimes have suffered an acute accusation that we do too many things wrongly but I in the life of tonight's discussion I have discovered that it is one thing we have done well we send you Trump early bases sufficiently second is a German who in his youth was re-educated demócrata tell you by your folks would come over in measured against your criterias on a modern society democracy do you have some idea with the necessary for lightness but nevertheless about where how we perform here where our strength and our weakness oh that's easy so that's an easy question thank you like so yes fine fine so in other lectures I have asserted that there is no general crisis of democracy around the world and one of my leading examples that is your country Germany because I think German democracy has actually been working quite well over the last you know 15 years or so you've kind of got the opposite situation that the United States has the u.s. is so polarized and angry that we can't agree on anything the criticism that's made here is that the two major parties are so similar and there's so much consensus that it's kind of boring and there's not really a lot of you know serious political choices to be made I would much I would trade your system for our system any day and it's also the case you know the the the agenda you know 2010 you know Reuters labor market reforms that was very difficult you know there are many other democracies in which you would not be able to pull that off and Germany did it you know so I think it's not the case that democracies generically cannot make difficult decisions or you know come to consensus on important policy issues he lost the election so that's that's right but he did it you know the system the system did it and it performed fairly well so I think you should quite you know you should be quite pleased with you know the way your system has been working in recent years yeah thank you Frank that was a great performance Frank arrived yesterday from California tomorrow morning very early he has to go to Frankfurt and then he has to return to California we are just extremely grateful now I have one criticism of your lecture and its rhythm in the last five minutes you suggested that you would give us some reasons to be more optimistic that should have lasted 15 minutes not 5 minutes I'm still leaving pretty depressed on the whole thank you very much

Channel: American Academy in Berlin

Views: 46,019

Keywords: francis fukuyama, american academy in berlin, democracy, the american interest

Id: gF8CJSQf238

Length: 81min 33sec (4893 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 05 2016