The End of The End of History

I had a chance to speak with Prof Francis Fukuyama. This is the full version of the excerpt published in the East African of 22-28 March 2014.

You’re famous for proclaiming the ‘end of history’, with regard to political development. When you look at a continent like Africa, where are we – how far along are we on the path of the development of political societies?

There has been a lot of development along many dimensions in Africa in recent years. The African story is a very positive one. The problem in Africa all along has been a political one, not an economic one. This is a very resource rich continent – there is a lot of human resource and lots of entrepreneurial energy. I tjink the problem with Africa is a lack of strong institutions, beginning with strong states. By strong states, I don’t mean oppressing opponents and exercising lots of despotic police power; I’m talking about a state that can provide basic services, citizen security, rule of law, education and health. I think that for the first time you are now seeing the emergence of better-governed countries in Africa. This has also coincided with economic growth. Africa’s economic performance overall over the past decade to fifteen years has been really quite striking. I think there are a lot of things going right with this continent.

Is there a problem with African countries as currently constituted? One problem is the age-old one, of artificial borders; and the other is where one can make the rather unfriendly assumption that there are some countries that do not have the right to exist, because of their geography, or political development.

Of course one of the big problems with Africa is the irrationality of colonial borders because they didn’t necessarily correspond to nations. But Switzerland didn’t necessarily correspond to a nation either – it is made up of three different linguistic groups. I think that the real task is to create national identity out of the materials that exist. Certain countries in Africa have done this better than others. For example, Tanzania made many mistakes in the area of economic policy, but the one thing that it did invest in was a sense of national identity and a sense of national unity within the country. This is despite the fact that Tanzania is an ethnically diverse country. So I think that, in a way, the irrationality of those borders cannot excuse the failure to create a sense of national purpose. That’s why you need political leadership, and that’s why you need a kind of nation-building project underlying the emergence of good governments.

Africans have not been as brave as Europeans have been. If you look, for example, at Czechoslovakia, where a friendly decision was made in 1993 to separate. Except for Sudan and South Sudan, we have never quite gotten to the stage where we can separate if the nation does not make sense. Should we start thinking like that?

I think it is the case that, in certain countries, the nation-building project would be more feasible if you could easily adjust borders. I think the problem is that the stakes are regarded as high, and part of the reason is that there isn’t a thriving capitalist economy underlying the whole region. So for example, when the Czech Republic and Slovakia split up, or there’s going to be a referendum in Scotland later this year; in some respects those political break-ups don’t matter because everyone was embedded in a larger economic free trade zone within a thriving market economy. So if Scotland were to leave the United Kingdom (which I think would be a big mistake) it wouldn’t affect the economic welfare of anybody. In Africa, by contrast, politics has been seen as a means to economic power – to riches. That’s why you want to become President, so that you can exploit your office for your personal economic gain. As long as that’s the case, if you lose half the country, you’re losing half your economic base. And that’s why people don’t want to give it up. The stakes in politics are very often economic stakes as well, and that’s why breaking up is that much harder to do.

Is it the case perhaps that other continents had the opportunity to make mistakes, including civil strife and civil war, before they reached a certain level of equilibrium, whereas in Africa has always had outsiders coming in to stop these in their tracks, or not allowing them to happen in the first place. Thus we never quite reach the end of the process.

I’ve written a book called ‘The Origins of Political Order’, because it seems to me that many people in the developed world today don’t understand how arriving at a modern developed country was itself a very protracted, oftentimes extremely violent, process. It happened so many years in the past that people conveniently forgot about it. So you’re right – the unification of contemporary Germany was an extremely violent process, and in many respects the two World Wars were a by-product of that effort at German unification. Even in the United States, we like to think that it was just the peaceful settlement of an empty continent. But in fact it involved the relocation of tribal peoples out of their homelands and so forth. There was a lot of violence in the past to allow the current developed world to have its institutions of modern democracy. I guess the question for Africa is whether anyone should wish a similarly violent future for Africa, and I would certainly hope that that’s not the case. I think you’re also correct that Africa in a certain sense has never been allowed to develop on its own – it has been the subject of a great deal of superpower competition, and now economic rivalry from China, Europe and other parts of the world. And so you don’t see an indigenous development of institutions as in other parts of the world.

Speaking about economics, is there a different path or route to economic development, as opposed to always having to choose between raw capitalism and pure socialism?

First of all, I do not think the two choices you mentioned were ever the only two choices you had. If you look at North America or Europe, nobody has pure capitalism. In fact, in order for a market economy to work, you have to have a government. You have to have a state and regulatory capacity and the ability to enforce rules, which means sufficient political power. You cannot have a free-for-all without enforcement by mafias or militias or that sort of thing. It is the case that every modern capitalist society has chosen its own level of regulation, so in the United States there is a smaller state than in Europe, but each of these areas have pretty large states. It is a problem for Americans, because in the 1990s there was a feeling that the US had found the model for capitalism, but this model blew up in 2008 in the financial crisis. It turned out that the American financial sector was too lightly regulated. Alan Greenspan was wrong – we needed more regulation in these big banks, derivatives and all that. I think that, actually, everybody’s model constantly needs adjustment. No one gets it completely right, and we have to learn from mistakes and experiences of other countries.

But Alan Greenspan was a superstar. And the reason I bring this up is that there was a similar thing in Africa – the search for superstars. A decade and a half ago, presidents such as Museveni and Kagame were all the rage. For some reason, those have proved disappointing, and now there’s another search for African superstars.

Of course Alan Greenspan turned out to not be a superstar in retrospect. The bigger problem in Africa is that leaders have not been willing to step down. So if Meles Zenawi or Museveni had left after two terms – eight or ten years – they would be remembered like George Washington. If you look at the record, many African leaders stay on for twenty or thirty years, so whatever they accomplished in the first part of their term gradually starts deteriorating; the levels of corruption and cronyism start to increase, and staying in power becomes an end in itself. I’m not sure whether the solution is in formal term limits, but I do think that any political leadership needs a system of succession, and a system of grooming a new generation of leaders so that young people can take over, and there can be new ideas and the rule of law.

Two questions though – if the two had left, having come in as revolutionary leaders – there was so much to do that they would not have had the chance to do so. The other one is that there would have been no exit plan – they would not have survived in their countries, and perhaps would have had to seek to be in think tanks in the West. There are few institutions that support a former president who chooses to remain at home in Africa.

That is definitely a problem, but in a sense you can do a lot in a decade. But a leader always has to ask – who will succeed me – because if everything depends on me, then that’s a problem. Many of these revolutionary, charismatic leaders who led their movements through difficult periods, that have come from nothing to run a country, tend to personalise power. ‘I’m the one who can do everything’. Any leader has got to think – ‘what comes after me?’ and is what I create going to survive, and I think that is the mark of a great leader.

There’s a question that’s becoming more and more scary. That’s the rise of bandit leadership, where people who are essentially gangsters rise to leadership and get hold of the state. In effect the entire state becomes a bandit state.

It’s definitely a problem in Latin America, and there it’s fed by a global market for drugs and all sorts of illicit products. I think that what you need to combat that is states that exert real authority over their territory. By that I don’t necessarily mean efficient military power, it’s also a question of legitimacy. The people have to accept the authority of the state as a monopolist of power and to exercise control over the territory.

But isn’t it extremely difficult? Isn’t it far easier for a warlord to offer a hundred million dollars than to go off searching for a million votes?

If you actually look at the history of how states came to be, in many cases the warlord took over, and over time institutionalised the state and the warlord actually becomes a legitimate ruler. That’s how a lot of European monarchs started out. But legitimacy is the key here, because if a warlord begins to provide services, peace and evenhanded justice, then suddenly the warlord is no longer just a warlord – the warlord is a king and a ruler who has a certain degree of legitimacy. So I think that what a state does in terms of services to its citizens ultimately matters more than the origins of the state. The worst situation is that which has prevailed in Somalia over all these years, where you don’t actually have a monopoly over power. Legitimacy can come through democratic elections, but it can also come through being an effective ruler.

But it strikes me that you’re describing a Hezbollah situation – they provide security and civil services such as sanitation in a way that’s more efficient than the state. 

The reason that Hezbollah can do that is that the Lebanese state is very weak, so I’m certainly not recommending that as a route. States need to this themselves, and a legitimate state needs to do that. I think one of the great weaknesses of many new democracies is that they haven’t figured out how to provide these basic services to their citizens that would guarantee that they become the legitimate rulers of their territories. They need to focus on that issue.