A great fuss was raised by Republicans during the late 1940s and 1950s about the so called “Loss of China.” The relatively ineffectual Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist Party had been defeated by the Chinese Communist Party and had to withdraw to the off shore island of Taiwan.
Counter to the views of the time, I thought that this was not necessarily a bad thing for the Chinese population due to its extreme impoverishment. I reasoned that it was better there be a strong government that would focus on improving the nation’s economy than a weak government struggling as a democracy and unable to bring about improvements.
I was influenced by the apparent rapid economic development of the Soviet Union.
Half a century later I read a review in the Financial Times, “Francis Fukuyama’s ‘Political Order and Political Decay’ “, by David Runciman:
“The explosive growth in industrial capacity and wealth that the world has experienced in the past 200 years has vastly expanded the range of political possibilities available, for better and for worse (just look at the terrifying gap between the world’s best functioning societies – such as Denmark – and the worst – such as the Democratic Republic of Congo). There are now multiple different ways state capacity, legal systems and forms of government can interact with each other, and in an age of globalisation multiple different ways states can interact with each other as well. Modernity has speeded up the process of political development and it has complicated it. It has just not made it any easier.
“What matters most of all is getting the sequence right. Democracy doesn’t come first. A strong state does. States that democratise before they acquire the capacity to rule effectively will invariably fail. This is what has gone wrong in many parts of Africa. Democracy has exacerbated existing failings rather than correcting for them because it eats away at the capacity of government to exert its authority, by subjecting it to too many conflicting demands. By contrast, in east Asia – in places such as Japan and South Korea – a tradition of strong central government preceded democracy, which meant the state could survive the empowerment of the people.
“This is an explanation of how we have got to where we are but it is not a recipe for making the world a better place. Telling people who want democracy to hold off in order to strengthen their state won’t wash, because having to live under a strong state in the absence of democracy is often a miserable experience: that’s why the Arab spring erupted in the first place. It is the basic tension in Fukuyama’s oeuvre: if we live in an age where democracy is the best idea but discover that democracy will only work if we defer it, then politics is going to be a horribly messy business.”
