If there is no state, there can be no rule of law, or liberal democracy. The longue durée (long term) is important to Fukuyama, above all because the modern territorial state has become the indispensable kingpin of political order. Some readers won’t much fancy the jargon, so let’s reach for the vernacular, to explore Fukuyama’s unaltered conviction that liberal democracy has the winds of long-term evolutionary trends in its sails. They ‘dictate the emergence of certain broad institutional forms over time’. It is guaranteed by the ‘clear directionality’ of ‘the process of political development’ that is pushed and pulled by long-term ‘general evolution’ trends. On a higher, long-term plane ‘liberal democracy constitutes a universal evolutionary model’. The bigger historical picture is different, and the future bright.

But all this decadence in the realm of ‘specific evolution’ is seen by him as remediable (how it’s to be fixed, he doesn’t say). Fukuyama worries as well about the shrinking middle class, which he deems the social bedrock of liberal democracy. A third of the parliamentary winners of India’s 2014 elections, he notes, are facing criminal indictments, including serious charges such as murder, kidnapping and sexual assault. American government, ‘hardly a source of inspiration around the world at the present moment’, resembles a bloated and dysfunctional ‘vetocracy’ distorted by lobbyists and big money. No state, no rule of law, no democracy is the complex algorithm that structures the book’s six hundred plus pages, in support of his view that liberal democracy centred on free elections remains the world’s number one political preference.įukuyama admits of troubles in the house of democracy. Its lengthy argument can be summarised in a single sentence: without the prior establishment of a well-armed and functional territorial state, and without an independent judiciary responsible for overseeing the rule of law that robust state power then makes possible, modern liberal democracy simply cannot happen.

Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy is the second volume of Fukuyama’s investigation of the origins, evolution and decay of political institutions. Nearly three decades later, things look grim for his ‘end of history’ thesis, though close readers of the latest book by Fukuyama will surely conclude that although his thinking has since become guarded by qualification, and by convolution, his old story of American triumph in the world of ideas hasn’t fundamentally changed. On the eve of the collapse of the Soviet empire, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama surfed to fame after pronouncing the global victory of the idea of American-style ‘liberal democracy’.

Political decay