How do we get to Denmark?

Francis Fukuyama is rare amongst scholars in being unafraid to ask large questions. He first achieved fame, if not notoriety, by his thesis that, with the collapse of communism, we had reached the ‘end of history’. The rise of terrorism and the return of authoritarianism in parts of the Soviet empire led to this thesis being caricatured as implying the end of all political conflict. What Fukuyama meant, however, was that, for the first time, there were no longer ideological challenges to the dominance of liberal democracy. He reasserts this conclusion in The Origins of Political Order: ‘Liberal democracy as the default form of government has become part of the accepted political landscape at the beginning of the 21st century.’

The Origins of Political Order is concerned, however, not with the end of history but with its beginnings. It asks how human societies came to advance from tribalism to develop modern political institutions, including a well-functioning state and the rule of law. We take our political institutions for granted but suffer from ‘historical amnesia’. We have no idea how they arose. ‘How do we get to Denmark?’, asks Fukuyama, and answers, ‘Even Danes don’t know.’ Some developing countries have, of course, been unable to achieve modern institutions, and Fukuyama hopes that this book, the first of two volumes, may act as a kind of handbook for democratisers. This first volume analyses the development of institutions until the French and industrial revolutions.

Even a cursory glance at the continents of the world is sufficient to show that nations develop institutions at different rates. Democracy and the rule of law took root in Scandinavia, but not in Russia, despite similar climatic and geographical conditions. Most cases of successful authoritarian modernisation are in east Asia — South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and, of course, China — rather than in Africa or the Middle East.