Nation building and economic development

One of the most intriguing areas of social science research is that looking into the determinants of nation states, economic growth, and liberal democracy. Specifically, the examination of the paths of development. 

Francis Fukuyama's Political Order and Political Decay explores these themes (see review here by David Runciman). He explains development in terms of a framework which involves the interaction between ideas/legitimacy, social mobilisation, rule of law, state capacity, democracy, and economic growth. In this framework, in no particular order, national identities are forged, rule of law gets established and state building happens. A combination of these feeds into and also feeds from both democracy and economic growth.

Not only is the sequence of emergence of each of these attributes important, but also the time taken for their emergence. The latter is important given the time required for their strengthening and maturity. 

His comparative assessment of Europe, E Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa is illuminating. I made the table below to capture the sequence of development trajectories of some selected regions (1 indicating the first to emerge and 5 the last to emerge).

It is to be noted that state nor economic development has fully emerged in S Asia nor SS Africa, though the sequence of efforts in that direction is indicated.

This about geography and climate is important,

Certain topographies were better suited to the raising and deployment of large armies. In Eurasia (China and Russia primarily), relatively open land encouraged consolidation of large centralized states, while in sub-Saharan Africa, the difficulties of projecting power across vast deserts and tropical forests inhibited state formation. Europe was somewhere in between: its geography encouraged the formation of medium-sized political units, but it prevented any one of them from growing to a size that allowed conquest of the entire region... Latin America’s geography put it closer to sub-Saharan Africa than to Europe.

Europe experienced a long period of bitter and painful wars, which led to the strengthening of national identities and emergence of strong states. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Europe underwent violent upheavals,

One of the principal reasons for this was the extraordinarily high level of violence experienced by Europe during this period, beginning with the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, continuing through the wars of Italian and German unification, and ending with the cataclysms of the two world wars. High levels of military competition led to the formation and consolidation of strong, modern states, as in the Stein-Hardenberg reforms in Prussia. At the same time, rapid industrialization was drawing millions of peasants off the countryside and into dense, diverse cities. This shift created the conditions for the emergence of modern ethnolinguistic concepts of national identity, which in turn provoked further military competition. Nationalism helped to facilitate the consolidation of modern states... And both internal revolution and external war succeeded in wiping out entire social classes, like France’s venal officeholders and the Junker class in Germany, which had been pillars of the old oligarchic order... By 1945, Europe’s exhausted elites were ready to concede both liberal democracy and redistributive welfare states to ensure social peace.

In Europe generally state formation has been more recent, happening after national identities were forged and rule of law was established. In contrast, in East Asia, thanks to relative ethnic homogeneity, national identity formation did not require violent upheavals. Further, state formation too had much earlier roots. In fact, state with its modern trappings (centralised, bureaucratic, and impersonal) can be traced back to the Qin dynasty in the 2nd century BC in China. 

China and surrounding countries like Japan, Korea, and Vietnam developed governments based on the strong-state model and succeeded in reaching levels of political organization substantially higher than any of the indigenous societies of Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa. These state-building efforts were enhanced by great ethnic homogeneity, the result of many centuries of conquest and assimilation. These societies had a strong sense of shared culture based on a common written language and widespread elite literacy... China, Japan, Vietnam, and Korea could seek to modernize their economies while taking for granted the existence of a strong and coherent state as well as a well-established national identity.

On the contrast between Europe and E Asia,

The strong states of East Asia developed bureaucratic institutions before they had a rule of law, while in Europe the sequence was reversed. The precociously strong East Asian state was for centuries able to head off the emergence of independent social actors that could challenge its power. While European liberal democracy grew out of a rough balance of power between state and society, the state-society balance in East Asia favored the state. This meant that, in contrast to most of the rest of the developing world where state weakness was the central issue, what is lacking in East Asia is the limitation of state power through law or political accountability.

Latin America started out with a very unequal order where white settlers controlled the economic and political system over the indigenous labour and mestizos, and it did not experience anything like the violent wars and revolutions to unseat that oligarchy. It remains to this day. Further, ethnic diversity and slow or absence industrialisation meant that national identities were weak. 

Sub Saharan Africa was characterised by numerous small ethnic groups. Neither did it experience the violent wars and revolutions nor did it enjoy the economic growth necessary to create a large enough prosperous economic group (grounded either on aristocracy or trade or industry) who could be the elite class with the interest in building national identity or promoting rule of law and building states. Further, the European colonialism too reached Africa late in the nineteenth century, by when it was on its last legs. The colonists too therefore pursued a cheap "indirect rule" of relying on local African agents to extract taxes and slave labour for the American colonies. 

This is important 

The newly independent countries in sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, could not, and they needed to do everything at once—build modern states, establish national identities, create rule-of-law institutions, stage democratic elections, and promote economic development at the same time. While Europe and East Asia sequenced institutional development differently from one another, they had the luxury of doing this sequencing over long periods of time.

Further, by delaying the adoption of democracy till later into industrialisation and development of strong states, the North East Asian countries were able to avoid the problems of clientelism that affected countries like the United States, India, Latin America, and elsewhere. More on this in another post.

Fukuyama's theory finds resonance in the argument of the likes of Devesh Kapur about precocious democracy in  the context of India.