State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century

State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century Francis Fukuyama Date: May, 2004   —   $14.28   —   Book product page Rating:

This is an interesting and disappointing book. Fukuyama, despite hanging out with the neo-con crowd, is a pretty bright guy. Unfortunately, like many pretty bright guys, he's really long-winded and tends to ramble.

Fukuyama starts off really strong, defining states as a function of strength and scope: Strength being "the ability to plan and execute policies and to enforce laws cleanly and transparently," and scope being "the different functions and goals taken on by governments. He then makes a nifty little graph and plots some countries on it.

You want to be in quadrant I or at least quadrant II, but you don't want to be in quadrant IV and quadrant III indicates a failed state. The lesson being that state strength is more important than the amount of services a state provides. So far, so good.

Then Fukuyama goes on - and on, and on, and on -  with a survey of management practices and how they translate over to government bureaucracies. Short story: Other people always screw things up. While you can precisely describe a state's functions, as soon as people are involved in implementing them, everything goes out the window.

Or if you wanted to sound super-smart, you'd say, "Organizations are pervaded by norms and a-rational sources of behavior, which has important behavioral consequences." Whatever.

The important part is, there are three phases to nation building: post-conflict reconstruction, creation of self-sustaining institutions, and creating a strong state. We, and the international community, have had mixed results with phase one (Kosovo and East Timor being the shining examples cited), and much less success with phases two and three,

"It is not clear, given the low to nonexistent level of stateness in many failed states, whether there is any real alternative to a quasi-permanent, quasi-colonial relationship between the "beneficiary" country and the international community. In a sense, the latter has recreated the earlier mandatory system of the League of Nations period in which certain colonial powers were given explicit charter to govern a territory on its behalf. The problem with our current system is that contemporary norms do not accept the legitimacy of anything other than self-government, which makes us then insist that whatever governance we do provide be temporary and rule transitional. Since we do not in fact know how to transfer institutional capacity in a hurry, we are setting ourselves and our supposed beneficiaries up for large disappointments."

Sobering stuff. I previously blogged on Fukuyama's slide into depression over state building as applied to Iraq,

"Increasingly, I find it hard to imagine a series of events that will lead to a good outcome. There's a much easier path towards civil war than there is to a stable, democratic Iraq. In the long run, this has not made us more secure, it has made us less secure. It is appalling."

Unfortunately, I live in interesting times. And it's not going to get any less exciting from here on out.