Well into the 1970s Swedish law permitted the black practice of eugenics. Until 1950 an Oxford or Cambridge grad could cast two votes per British election. The "democratic" state has produced legions of governance weirdisms (and worse) over the years. Still today, the state makes or breaks democracy, say John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge in The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State [Amazon.com] – and much remains recently broken. More than US$6 billion (Dh22bn) was spent on the Obama-Romney presidential election in 2012, twice what the 2000 election cost. American hospitals have a code denoting an injury from being hit with a turtle. The National Security Agency helps itself to everyone's emails.
The Fourth Revolution isn't just a catalogue of disorders. Micklethwait and Wooldridge, both of The Economist (editor-in-chief, and management editor and "Schumpeter" columnist, respectively), have a clear purpose here: to announce that the values of classical liberalism – in particular, individual freedoms – are in danger and that something can, and must, be done.
“The modern overloaded state is a threat to democracy: the more responsibilities Leviathan assumes, the worse it performs them and the angrier people get – which only makes them demand still more help. That is the vicious circle of progressive politics,” the authors write.
Western states regulate too much, fund too many entitlements and pursue too many quixotic missions like “defeating terrorism”. These “bloated” states become prey to special interests. “Most American politicians would rather appear naked in public than take on … the American Association of Retired Persons.” Ideological logjams clog legislation. Politicians “bribe their way to power”, promising more and more, and kicking the bill further and further down the road. Voters succumb to apathy, short-sightedness and contempt for elected leaders. The house is crumbling, it seems.
But since the 17th century, the authors say, western states have been “winning” the governance contest. They took the cup from the Ottomans and the Chinese and consolidated their preeminence over the course of three “revolutions” enshrining security, liberty and welfare as the state’s preserve – each revolution epitomised in the persons of Thomas Hobbes, John Stuart Mill and Beatrice Webb, respectively. (The Thatcher-Reagan-Milton Friedman reforms of the 1980s were an unfinished revolution.)
Micklethwait and Wooldridge’s historical survey is smooth enough that it could contribute to an introduction to politics for high school students. (A useful thing.) But this isn’t critical history; it’s a superficial sketch that sanitises much and dwells little on trade, plunder, colonialism, fear of communist revolution, superpower rivalry and whatever else has given the western state a leg up. In particular, the rubric of three revolutions (plus the half) is so unpersuasive it is distracting.
The book may not be scholarship, but it's great partisanship. Micklethwait and Wooldridge openly admit they're fighting a corner: a global competition is under way. While western democracies sputter and lurch, authoritarian states like China and Singapore boast high growth and efficient policy-making. Dismayed by western dysfunction, developing countries may be swayed instead by the "Beijing consensus". The "fourth revolution", then, is a noble contest to reform the state so that democracy can function, thereby preserving and promoting classical liberal values, above all, freedom. As such, The Fourth Revolution is a playbook for Team Liberty.
Even so, the book isn’t a defence per se of liberalism. The authors spend little time justifying themselves. Their claim, for example, that democracy promotes innovation requires little backup, it seems. Still, enough qualifications and subtleties decorate the authors’ arguments that they can’t be charged as plain ideologues. Capitalism, they admit in passing, creates inequality. Democracy is “culturally rooted” and doesn’t reflect some universal principle. Their liberalism rejects the libertarian view that government is “at best, a necessary evil”.
This is pragmatic partisanship – less concerned with proving their side is right, the authors are rather more concerned with what the right side should do.
In part, The Fourth Revolution reads like a crisp clearing of the haze that swirled around the West's presumed victory at the end of the Cold War, a mood famously captured by Francis Fukuyama in his 1989 essay The End of History? in which he wrote of "…the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to western liberalism" – a triumph that may have marked "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government".
Reading The Fourth Revolution makes it hard to believe Fukuyama was ever taken seriously – a striking contrast as they're all on the same side: Fukuyama thought they'd already won in 1989; Micklethwait and Wooldridge say the contest is still getting under way and whether they'll win remains an open question.
So, what to do?
Predictably, the authors say western states must be shrunk. “Self-denying ordinances” must constrain the state to a narrower field of responsibility. Privatisation should be pursued, budgets balanced and entitlements properly funded. Sunset clauses must be included in all laws and regulations. Technology must be used to revolutionise services. Individual rights: more; social rights: less. Management theory can help: league tables, measurement, outsourcing, consumer choice, decentralisation and economies of scale all deserve consideration.
It is already being done, they tell us. Now that Sweden hasn’t had eugenicists on its payroll for a generation it’s shrinking its state in the name of sound governance – all without diminishing, the authors argue, the country’s legendary quality of life. China is diligently scouring the world for best practices.
The Fourth Revolution is written for the West; in particular it seems, it is written for people in Washington. Still, reading the book in Turkey, as I did, was instructive. Micklethwait and Wooldridge repeat the cheap trope that Turkey's prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has taken on the pretensions of an Ottoman sultan. (The Economist dressed up the prime minister in sultanic robes for one of its covers in June 2013.) But no sultan ever made such a fetish, as Erdogan has, of the ballot box – his winning streak at heavily contested, highly subscribed polls suggests he has had his reasons.
And while the feverish tension in Turkey today is, to a significant degree, between the values of liberal democracy and those of authoritarian, top-down modernisation – to use the rubric of The Fourth Revolution – these contesting forces are not necessarily mutually exclusive, not least because the prime minister, the domineering political force in the country, embodies both.
Erdogan may claim electoral might means right; the authors of The Fourth Revolution remind us that the architects of modern democracy, people like the American founding father John Adams, had subtler, less-assured views. Democracy, Adams feared, could "crush" liberty under a tyranny of the majority.
And that’s just what many government opponents say rules Turkey today. (Technically, a tyranny of the plurality.) Narrowing the definition of democratic legitimacy to winning votes, Erdogan has leveraged this legitimacy to justify widening his authority, assuming a licence to railroad policy, undermine and overrule institutions, and suppress freedoms of expression, assembly and protest. What’s missing on the winner’s side of Turkish electoral politics is precisely what Micklethwait and Wooldridge find lacking in the liberal heartlands of the West today: wariness of democracy’s power.
Micklethwait and Wooldridge suggest unburdening the state by outsourcing certain state powers to technocrats and local governments. The Turkish case suggests this can only be done if a mature system of checks and balances is already well entrenched.
For example, with Erdogan regularly bashing the Turkish central bank, literally mocking the institution’s nominal independence, what kind of technocrats would come forward to take on more duties? Only yes-men and women, presumably. Meanwhile the mayor of Istanbul – the elected head of a city of 14 million – has been, for all intents and purposes, reduced to the role of the prime minister’s secretary for the city: just compare Istanbul’s Master Plan, ratified in 2009, with where the bulldozers and cranes are deployed today to see how much of the city’s shape has been decreed not by city hall, but by the prime ministry in Ankara.
There are many other instances where the messy, often counterintuitive complexity of at least one emerging market (Turkey) suggests the liberal-authoritarian dichotomy or the idealised contrast between Washington and Beijing in The Fourth Revolution is too narrow to spur anyone other than would-be reformers of the West. But this highlights the book's conceit: the West must model functional liberal democracy if emerging markets are to follow. A debatable conceit, suggesting a valuable debate.
Caleb Lauer is a regular contributor to The National.
