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Wolf lunches with Fukuyama

by Robert Teitelman | Published May 31, 2011 at 2:07 PM

Over the weekend, the Financial Times ran as usual one of its signature features, "Lunch with the FT." Now most of these journalistic repasts are enjoyable rambles across the bright surface of a celebrity's life--a politician, a novelist, a movie star, a financier-- punctuated by random talk about the restaurant, the food, the gossip. This week marks the lunchtime convergence of two serious heavyweights: FT economics columnist Martin Wolf and Francis Fukuyama, the writer and academic most famous for "The End of History and the Last Man" and the more recent first of two volumes, "The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution," which has been ballyhooed as his great work. Now the ever-serious Wolf does not seem a likely candidate for one of these lunches, which tend to resemble wandering and serendipitous essays more than his own rigorously argued columns; and Fukuyama, wreathed in a misty reputation for profundity, hardly seems like an approachable figure. But it works. Wolf is attentive and Fukuyama chatty. The tone is established immediately. Fukuyama is late, making the imperturbable (and apparently punctual) Wolf "anxious." He calls his office to make sure Fukuyama is not there. He sips water and waits; you can sense his foot tapping. Finally, Fukuyama appears, apologizing and blaming his publicist. Relief. Of course, the two men know each other. Wolf had lectured before Fukuyama's class at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies. They order; no wine. Fukuyama turns out to be a regular fount of opinion, offering views on Dominique Strauss-Kahn, China, the U.S. political system, sub-Saharan Africa, Pakistan and the Arab uprisings. Some of these views are surprisingly speculative and grandly deterministic. "But one thing that has always struck me is that there is no high level of abstraction in the Chinese religion or Chinese thought," he says. "The idea that there are hidden forces, which are universal, like gravity, which apply throughout the universe, is very western. Chinese religion is particularistic. And I think to this day, if you think about high-level theory, it's still not coming from Asia." Notice the quick jog from China to Asia. Notice the urge to dichotomize and the certitude. Well, it is lunch after all.

More seriously, Wolf leads Fukuyama to discuss liberal democracy, which, in "The End of History," he once characterized, in Wolf's formulation, as "the only way to run a modern state." Fukuyama draws the broad distinction between "high-quality authoritarian states" mostly in Asia and "deadlocked, paralyzed, democratic" states in the West with lots of checks and balances. Clearly, he's suggesting two large cases: China and the U.S. It's true, he says, that messy democracies with checks and balances make it easier to get rid of bad leaders and offer citizens some dignity, thus avoiding a popular explosion of discontent. But, he goes on, "in many ways, Asian government, not just China, but Singapore and in an earlier day, Japan and South Korea, had governments that looked more like a corporate board of governance because there's no downward accountability whatever. You don't have to deal with constituents. ...You run the whole country like a corporation, and I think that's one of their advantages at the moment."

"At the moment." Fukuyama is leaving himself an escape hatch. Who knows how his views will evolve to accommodate the next moment, the next twist in the road. Now there's no doubt that democracies like the U.S. can decay and devolve, just as authoritarian states can become kleptocracies or lunatic asylums. But what is Fukuyama really saying here? First, that modern nations are really economic entities; that their overpowering reason for existing is to ensure growth, development and amass power. This is a kind of latter-day mercantilism from 10,000 feet. Second, that democratic accountability is a burden and inefficient and that corporations do these things much more effectively. You don't have to get all patriotic, of course, to realize that while economics played a role in the founding of, say, the American republic, it was not necessarily the major factor behind the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Indeed, American democracy was designed to be messy; and in those messy interstices, American commercial dynamism flowered. Fukuyama is making a case that puts him roughly in the same camp as Thomas Friedman, who in the process of proselytizing for a flat, globalized world can't help but be impressed with the ability of China's authoritarian state to get things done. It's essentially a declinism argument.

Fukuyama is also running against the tide of much of the thinking about corporate governance that prevails in the West. He argues that "high-quality authoritarian states" are currently succeeding by modeling their governance structure on corporate boards. But in the U.S. and in Europe, boards have long been under attack, and intense pressure has been applied to make them more like the liberal democratic political systems, with checks and balances and ultimate control by shareholders. He doesn't discuss this, but later in the lunch, he offers another sweeping judgment about the role of "authority" in the West. He seems to be in favor of it, not because it has any larger value, but because it's efficient. "[Authority is] actually a big problem in western public administration because I think good governance is a kind of aristocratic phenomenon. And, we don't like deference to experts and we don't like delegating authority to experts. Therefore, we ring them around with all these rules, which limit their discretion, because we don't trust them. The disease has gone furthest in the United States." Again, the grand judgments. Is there a middle ground between authority and limited discretion? How does public administration, or regulation, fit into a democracy where economic growth is only one of a number of imperatives? Is he suggesting that no one regulates the regulators, a situation akin to Plato's philosopher-kings?

As Wolf tartly comments, Fukuyama's "view seems to be that the world is caught between too little democracy in the east and too much in the west." Wolf is being kind. Fukuyama clearly believes that, at this moment, too little democracy is better than too much. (This also raises a question: How do you rein in "too much" democracy? One answer: checks and balances, which Fukuyama seems to believe are inefficient and messy.)

Wolf's lunch with Fukuyama does capture the quicksilver, here-today-gone-tomorrow quality of Fukuyama's mind. He is wide-ranging and provocative, particularly over a chatty lunch, and he touches on issues that swim just beneath the surface. It's true that "The End of History" was widely distorted and misunderstood by commentators who never read it. But it is also true that Fukuyama was attempting to slap a political endpoint that, beyond the dynamics of Hegelian theory, was simply not justified by what we know about the wandering paths of human history; he was like the banker declaring the end of cycles. Now, as he attempts to define "The Origins of Political Order," to set down some truths about people and politics and the states they create and destroy, he seems intent on asserting more of the kind of universals that he believes "Asians" have so little feel for--building "high-level theory" that will survive the moment. If his lunch chatter is any evidence, he'll be revising those universal ideas soon. -- Robert Teitelman

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