Uhh, Francis, Any Updates in the Works?

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As a firm believer that the best analyses of history come well after the fact and that any attempts to describe “history” within the context of the future is best left to Coney Island fortunetellers, I was always slightly annoyed by the arrogance of Francis Fukuyama’s celebrated prognostications in his 1992 auto-back-slapping rant “The End of History and the Last Man.” The fact that Western leaders rushed to praise Francis (essentially for praising them) and then took his book as license to carry on carrying on without concern for how the subtlties can come back to bite one in the ass was also annoying. Nothing’s ever that simple.

Oh, he left himself some wiggle room with predictions of minor fluctuations, but here, 12 years later, he might do well to revise a chapter or two given that:

A widely noted United Nations survey of 19,000 Latin Americans in 18 countries in April produced a startling result: a majority would choose a dictator over an elected leader if that provided economic benefits.

[…]

The United Nations report, also drawn from interviews with current and former presidents, political analysts and cultural and economic figures, showed that 56 percent of those asked said economic progress was more important than democracy.

Why is democracy doing so poorly in Latin America? In a word: corruption. More than that, however, it’s beginning to look like Fukuyama missed an essential horse-before-cart prerequisite in his estimates:

[T]he most immediate cause for alarm is the short-lived nature of individual governments and the havoc it can create. But the larger concern is that roiling instability is eroding the foundations of democracy.

In this climate, even competence has become cause for concern — the popular impulse being to find something that works and to stick with it, whether arrived at democratically or not. In Colombia, where a stable and popular government has made new strides in beating back a 40-year-old Marxist insurgency and reviving the economy, the temptation has been to extend extrajudicial authority to President Álvaro Uribe’s government and even change the constitution to permit his re-election. (emphases mine)

There are lessons in here for both the US and Iraq. For the US, the lesson is to stop promoting the idea that social programs can be done away because free markets alone will provide for us all so long as we untie the hands of business and industry. As we see in the safety-net-free countries of Latin America, “recent growth has not been widely shared, but concentrated in isolated pockets, usually attached to multinational investments that employ few people”:

Peru is a good example. It has the region’s most impressive economic growth, on paper, with the economy expanding about 4 percent a year since Mr. Toledo was elected in 2001. But that growth has not filtered down, and the deep disillusionment that failure has inspired is not lost on Mr. Toledo, whose approval rating is mired below 10 percent.

“What good is an impressive growth rate?” he said in a speech in May. “Wall Street applauds us, but in the streets, no. So what good is it?”

For Iraq and other hoped-for future democracies, the lessons are more complicated, but one bit is obvious: anti-corruption measures (read: regulation) and security must accompany democracy and this means protection both from those seeking power and those willing to be ruled:

On a morning in April, people in this normally placid spot in Peru’s southeastern highlands burst into a town council meeting, grabbed their mayor, dragged him through the streets and lynched him. The killers, convinced the mayor was on the take and angry that he had neglected promises to pave a highway and build a market for vendors, also badly beat four councilmen.
The beating death of the mayor may seem like an isolated incident in an isolated Peruvian town but it is in fact a specter haunting elected officials across Latin America. A kind of toxic impatience with the democratic process has seeped into the region’s political discourse, even a thirst for mob rule that has put leaders on notice.

In the last few years, six elected heads of state have been ousted in the face of violent unrest, something nearly unheard of in the previous decade.

In short, Fukuyama’s 1992 ideas about the inevitability of global “liberal democracy” could use a 2004 reality check. The path doesn’t seem to be quite a linear as he first predicted. Funny the way history does that, no?

19 thoughts on “Uhh, Francis, Any Updates in the Works?”

  3. Serious question – what’s so good about democracy anyway?
    It’s difficult to come up with an apples-to-apples comparison here. First and foremost historically liberal democracies have not gone to war with each other. Second, the previous post notwithstanding, average joes fare better under democracies. You don’t believe me? Your explanation for why people from all over the world are emigrating to the U. S. and Europe would be…

  5. DaveSchuler:
    “Your explanation for why people from all over the world are emigrating to the U. S. and Europe would be…”
    Perhaps not so much related to the level of “democracy” and “rule of law” in these advanced post-industrial economies, but maybe… well.. the fact that they ARE “advanced post-industrial economies”, with far larger potential for economic gain for these individuals [whether doctor-scientist-programmer level or car-washer/floor-mopper types].
    However free elections are, or how honest local offcials might be in states like Peru or Venezuela aren’t going to be a good metric of economic success or failure by themselves; (althought democracy and rule-of-law are certainly good aims in and of themselves, and can add stability to any national economy) The socio-economic structure of most Latin American countries is alien beyond most Americans’ comprehension; pat “remedies” for their social/economic ills, a la Fukuyama, have never worked, and probably never will.

  6. The technicalities of government structured for democracy only work in-so-far as they exist within an economic and social climate that provides opportunity for ‘betterment’.
    One reading of the situation in the US in the 1930’s is that FDR saved capitalism for the US by putting in place the regulatory structures and safety nets that began the movement toward greater wealth distribution to the laboring and entrepreneurial classes – such that wealth didn’t increase its concentratation.
    In particular, without a vigorous middle class and a lower class that believes they can ascend to the middle class, it is hard to see how a democracy can work.
    The bulk of the people have to have faith that the government isn’t putting its thumb on the scale in favor of wealth, corporate interests, and cronyism. If they don’t have this faith, democracy will fail. To the degree which government is doing those things which the non-wealth-controlling interests can support, the democracy can thrive.

  7. JimPortlandOR:
    One reading of the situation in the US in the 1930’s is that FDR saved capitalism for the US by putting in place the regulatory structures and safety nets that began the movement toward greater wealth distribution to the laboring and entrepreneurial classes – such that wealth didn’t increase its concentratation.
    That’s exactly the argument that Walter Russell Mead makes in his book Power, Terror, Peace, and War. He calls it Fordism since it includes mass production and mass consumption as well the regulatory structures and safety nets you refer to.
    Jay C.:
    Your comment would appear to presume that liberal democracy is not relevant to a nation becoming an advanced post-industrial economy. Do you have examples? I think I would say that liberal democracy was necessary if not sufficient to such a result.

  9. Democracy fares best when the nation already has a large middle class. I think this stems from both the education factor and the self interest factor. A middle class tends to value education highly, and seeks, nay, demands a role in the political process. This has been true since Athens and remains true today in the nascent democracies of south east asia.
    If democracy is defined as the general franchise, the west did not develop the groundwork for its advanced post-industrial economy under democracy, but under a diffuse aristocracy of landed, title-less gentry. As wealth and education spread down and out to the ‘down and outs’ so did the demands for representation.
    To promote democracy around the world therefore, it is imperative to foster and protect the middle classes. The best way to do this IMO is to fight corruption and theft, and free trade for all. And that wont happen by itself, there is no historical imperative to the policy work.
    I never got around to reading Fukuyama, but from what I picked up through osmosis he was a marxist in many ways. Was he popular with the neocons?

  10. christ almighty, you scared the bejesus out of me when I scrolled down to see the title of the post. I’m far enough behind on work I get paid for, and I was pretty sure that I hadn’t promised YOU GUYS any work.
    good post though. History appears to be a lot less linear than the other Francis thinks.
    cheers
    Francis

  11. ax,
    Fukuyama is a Hegelian, although all Marxist are Hegelian not all Hegelians are Marxist…the term “progressive” is really the American way of saying Hegelian (You know Yanks don’t like to look and sound European), there are Right and Left Hegelians.

  12. Oh,
    The “White-Man’s Burden” would be an example of Right-Hegelianism. The attempt to “force/seduce” a society/culture to “evolve” from their primitive state to…well…to utopia (liberal democracy/communist)…you get the gist.

  13. “a majority would choose a dictator over an elected leader if that provided economic benefits”
    That’s a pretty important qualifier, mind you, especially considering that the only dictatorship in modern Latin American history that provided meaningful, tangible economic benefits (without massive external subsidies, as was the case for the Cuban socialist worker’s paradise until the 1990s) was Pinochet’s. The only other economically successful authoritarian regimes I can think of were/are in southeast and east Asia (Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong).
    Heck, I suspect a good percentage of Americans or Europeans would support a dictatorship if it was guaranteed to provide substantially better economic growth. (Ceteris peribus, they don’t, but that’s more because authoritarian rulers, of the left or right, rarely are economic liberals in the classical sense, than because of the mode of government.)

  14. I suspect a good percentage of Americans or Europeans would support a dictatorship if it was guaranteed to provide substantially better economic growth.
    hmmm…
    First of all, you changed the qualifier. It was not “substantially better” in the original. The article explains that the benefits the Latin American upper classes are seeing are not at all trickling down. That, I assume, has to do with the lack of social programs in place to redistribute the wealth somewhat.
    Personally, I would not choose a dictator rather than have to tighten my belt for a decade or so and, more importantly, do the work myself to effect change. I would not respect anyone who would either. You see Americans as much lazier than I do, apparently.

  15. You see Americans as much lazier than I do, apparently.
    No, but I think there’s a fair percentage of people in any society, even America, who are willing to tolerate authoritarian rule if they think something “better” is going to come out of it. It’s not a question of laziness; many people just like political leaders who “do something,” even if there’s limited regard for constitutionalism in their behavior.
    (In any event, there’s an implied comparison in the qualifier “if it provided economic benefits”; to provide economic benefits something must result in a substantive difference in economic outcomes, no?)

  16. “There are lessons in here for both the US and Iraq. For the US, the lesson is to stop promoting the idea that social programs can be done away because free markets alone will provide for us all so long as we untie the hands of business and industry.”
    That was an unexpected sentence in context at that point of the post. I guess it might be true that we can’t “do away” with (all) social programs for reasons vaguely related to what you are talking about. But the difference in society and social programs found in Latin America and the United States is so enormous that it doesn’t argue against even fairly dramatic limiting or reduction of social programs. Unless you are arguing that more is better when it comes to social programs. And I’m not sure that you are.
    As for all the people who seem to think that advanced technological societies and advanced capitalism are mostly unrelated…..I’m not convinced that they are wholly or even largely separate issues.

  17. That was an unexpected sentence in context at that point of the post. I guess it might be true that we can’t “do away” with (all) social programs for reasons vaguely related to what you are talking about. But the difference in society and social programs found in Latin America and the United States is so enormous that it doesn’t argue against even fairly dramatic limiting or reduction of social programs. Unless you are arguing that more is better when it comes to social programs. And I’m not sure that you are.
    The “out of context” charge is fair…I could have connected the dots a bit better there.
    My point comes more from the way “The End of History” was celebrated by free markets advocates and is used to form this false notion that since “that’s all in place” (i.e., the worlds’ nations will effectively evolve into liberal democracies on their own accornd) we can now move full steam ahead toward a social-programs-free economy.
    The connection is the underlying threat of revolutionary style social upheaval that’s kept democratic governments from doing away with the “bread” part of their “bread and circus” approach to placating the masses. If the ones in power assume that revolutions are a thing of the past, because, what would one revolt for if we all have this “good-as-it-gets” style liberal democracies, the ones in power might underestimate the important balance FDR-type social programs provide.
    I hear again and again that they are antiquated and should be done away with. I think Latin America is teaching us that the time for that may not yet have arrived.

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