The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty

Indeed, reflecting the widespread lack of trust in state institutions, it was not just the Nazis who had paramilitary groups. We have already seen the critical role that the paramilitary Free Corps played in fighting Communists in Munich and elsewhere. The Free Corps were only an arm’s-length distance from the SA, which had started out in 1920 as the Nazis’ “Gymnastics and Sports Section” and absorbed Free Corps veterans en masse, including Ernst Röhm, who became the SA’s commander. The Social Democrats had their paramilitary group too, called the Reichsbanner, and the Communists had theirs, the Red-Front Fighters’ League. Ominously, despite Prussia’s history of strong state institutions, the Weimar state never possessed a monopoly of violence.

These uncompromising positions and the electoral system based on proportional representation made it very hard for Weimar democracy to work. By 1928 fifteen different political parties were represented in the Reichstag, including the Saxon Peasants party and the German Farmers’ Party. Another twenty-six parties had run candidates unsuccessfully, diluting the votes of the main parties. No single party ever had a majority in any Weimar election, so every government was a coalition. For half of this period the government did not even have a majority in parliament, which meant that they had to build a new coalition for every piece of legislation. Between 1919 and 1933 there were twenty different cabinets, each one lasting an average of only 239 days. The resulting frustration and stasis led governments to increasingly rely on the prerogatives of the president to get things done. Extensive emergency powers granted to the president by Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution facilitated this presidential activism. Though these powers could in principle be overturned by a parliamentary vote, the president could dissolve the parliament, enabling him to use Article 48 as he wished. The first president, Friedrich Ebert, invoked Article 48 on 136 different occasions, even though it was supposed to be an emergency clause.

A Rainbow Coalition of the Discontented

Into this highly mobilized society with its fragmented party system came the Nazis. The Nazi Party evolved out of the German Workers’ Party, which had been founded in Munich in 1919. Adolf Hitler, then still a corporal in the army, was an early recruit and he quickly distinguished himself with his compelling oratory and was made head of propaganda. The name change in 1920 was designed to broaden the appeal of the party by adding “socialist” to the title. By 1921 Hitler’s ruthlessness and charisma had allowed him to take over the leadership of the party with complete authority over objectives and strategy. In November 1923 he made a mistake. He decided that the Nazis would be able to get local military units in Munich to support them in the so-called Beer Hall Putsch. It was a fiasco. The party was banned and Hitler was arrested.

That the putsch took place in Munich was not a coincidence. The Nazi party had been banned nearly everywhere in Germany after June 1922 when Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau had been assassinated by right-wing nationalists. But in Bavaria the party was still legal and flourished under the government of the right-winger Gustav Ritter von Kahr, who had supported paramilitary groups in 1918–1919 and maintained his own independent group, known as the Denizens’ Defense Force. The position of many conservatives was that the Nazis were criminals and thugs, but useful criminals and thugs; their energy could be harnessed to restore the pre-Weimar regime. The Beer Hall Putsch was a step too far, however. Kahr repudiated the putsch and the military held firm.

Nevertheless, Hitler’s subsequent trial shows that the local authorities were sympathetic to him. They made sure the trial was held in Munich and that Georg Neithardt, an avowed nationalist, was appointed as judge. Neithardt gave Hitler a platform to address the court for hours, turning the whole thing into what one journalist at the time referred to as a “political carnival.” After Hitler’s opening remarks, one of the judges declared, “What a tremendous chap, this Hitler!”

Hitler was sentenced to five years’ imprisonment, but was released early in December 1924, just thirteen months after his initial arrest. During his comfortable prison sojourn Hitler wrote his famous book Mein Kampf. He also learned a critical lesson—instead of the putsch, the Nazi party had to take the democratic path to power.

Yet as late as the 1928 election the Nazis were no more than a marginal party, polling at less than 3 percent. That all changed with the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the start of the worldwide Great Depression. Though the full brunt of this was not to hit Germany until 1930, already 1929 saw a collapse of investment. In 1930 national income fell by 8 percent. By 1931 it had fallen by one-quarter, by 1932 by almost 40 percent. Many Germans saw their earnings drop precipitously, but the greatest burden fell on those losing their jobs as the unemployment rate rocketed to 44 percent, the highest rate recorded in an advanced economy. For comparison, U.S. unemployment in 1932 was 24 percent while in Britain it was 22 percent.

Yet the unemployed themselves did not vote predominantly for the Nazis. They tended to support left-wing parties, as did those who were members of trade unions. Rather, it was the massive economic insecurity of the times that led the Protestant middle classes, shopkeepers, and farmers as well as the discontented urban youth to be attracted by the Nazis’ vague promises of national renewal. The Nazis became a catchall party for those disillusioned with the existing party system and the politics of Weimar, making the historian Richard Evans describe them as “a rainbow coalition of the discontented.”

In March 1930 the president, Paul von Hindenburg, appointed a new government with Heinrich Brüning of the Center Party as chancellor. The Center Party was only the third-biggest party behind the Social Democrats and the conservative German National People’s Party, and had 61 out of 491 seats. The appointment of Brüning by Hindenburg heralded the waning of parliamentary rule, as it was done without consultation with the parliament, and most of the new cabinet ministers had no affiliation with any of the parties. Brüning’s government was unable to pass a budget. In response Hindenburg dissolved the parliament. According to the constitution, new elections had to be held within sixty days. They saw the vote share of the Nazi party surge to 18.25 percent, giving them 107 seats in the new parliament. Hindenburg again named Brüning as chancellor and Brüning struggled on in the face of the mounting economic crisis until he was replaced by Franz von Papen in June 1932. The Communists, in cahoots with the Nazis, immediately tried to organize a no-confidence vote, but before they could manage it Hindenburg again dissolved the parliament. New elections were held after sixty days in July 1932, but in this period Hindenburg, and effectively Papen, could rule without parliamentary opposition. They took advantage of this opportunity on July 20 to issue an emergency decree, declaring Papen Reichskommissar (Reich Commissioner) for Prussia, giving him direct control over the Prussian government. This type of emergency decree would later be put to nefarious use by the Nazis, dismissing the democratically elected government of the state of Prussia and taking control of its massive security force. Papen himself didn’t seem to have any reservations about the overthrow of the democratically elected government in Prussia. In his memoirs he stated that his goal upon coming to power was to restore the imperial system and monarchy, and it appears that a plan to abolish elections later in 1932 was shelved only because of the threatened no-confidence vote. At this point, repeating the mistakes of other traditional elites, Papen hatched a strategy of using the popularity of the Nazis as a way to revert the political institutions to the status quo ante Weimar. This turned out to be a terrible miscalculation.

In the election of July 31, 1932, the Nazi vote share shot up to over 37 percent, giving them 230 seats in the Reichstag. After fruitless negotiations over a new government, Hindenburg again dissolved parliament and ruled unopposed through Papen. The next election in November saw the Nazis reduced to 33.1 percent of the vote with 196 seats. It was still a stalemate. Papen was replaced on December 3 by the Reich minister of defense, Kurt von Schleicher, a former general yearning to engineer a coup to set up a conservative authoritarian government with the support of the military but, crucially, without the Nazis. But this scheme came to nothing. Parliament’s disintegration was clear. In 1930 parliamentarians sat for 94 days and passed 98 laws, and President Hindenburg issued only 5 emergency decrees. By 1932 they sat for a puny 13 days and managed to enact just 5 laws. Hindenburg, on the other hand, was much busier, passing 66 emergency decrees. In a vain attempt to create a government that could function, Hindenburg agreed, at Papen’s urging, to appoint Hitler as chancellor, on January 30, 1933. Hitler convinced Hindenburg to dissolve the parliament. Until new elections were held on March 5, 1933, Hitler was in charge of the state.

On February 27 a Dutch Communist, Marinus van der Lubbe, possibly in collaboration with others, burned down the Reichstag. This gave Hitler the excuse he needed to declare that the act was the start of a Communist coup. He induced Hindenburg to use Article 48 to pass the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended most civil liberties in Germany, including habeas corpus, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, the right of free association and public assembly, and the secrecy of the post and telephone. With this decree in hand, Hitler was able to use all of the paramilitary and organizational might of the Nazi Party to intimidate and cow into submission any opposition before the March election. In this he was aided by Franz von Papen’s previous takeover of the Prussian government because Hitler got Göring appointed Prussian minister of the interior, effectively putting him charge of the police in half of Germany.

The next step was the Kroll Opera House, the Enabling Act, and the end of Weimar democracy.

The Zero-Sum Red Queen

However shocking, the collapse of Weimar democracy was not just a consequence of unforeseen events and Adolf Hitler’s force of personality. The Weimar Republic had deep fault lines that made the Red Queen effect potentially unstable, more pregnant with danger, more likely to get out of control. In this chapter, we study why this was the case in Germany and clarify the circumstances under which the dynamic contest between state and society can topple a nation out of the corridor.

The first of Weimar’s fault lines relates to the nature of the competition between state and society. The Red Queen effect in ancient Athens (Chapter 2) or in the U.S. case (Chapters 2 and 10) involved each side building up their capacity to have the upper edge, but this didn’t mean the state repressing and attempting to emasculate society. Nor did it involve societal mobilization aimed at completely destroying the elites. (For instance, even when an elite was ostracized from Athens, his property was not confiscated.) Indeed, Solon and Cleisthenes and U.S. founding fathers such as George Washington and James Madison emerged as arbiters acceptable to both elites and non-elites; they institutionalized the power of society as they were simultaneously contributing to the expansion of state capacity. This created a political environment in which state capacity developed with better regulation, institutions for provision of public services, and the ability to resolve conflicts—an example of “positive sum” Red Queen, where both sides ultimately strengthen as a result of their competition. The situation in Germany was different, more polarized. By polarization we mean that there appeared to be little room for compromise between the elites and the segment of society most mobilized and intent on leaving its mark on German politics (in particular, the workers’ movement and its most important organization, the Social Democratic Party). Consequently, rather than supporting state-society cooperation and broad-based state building, German Red Queen dynamics turned out to be much more “zero-sum,” with each side intent on destroying the other in order to be able to survive itself.

This zero-sum Red Queen in Germany was mostly but not entirely due to the attitudes of German elites. Elites in the army, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, academia, and the business world did not accept Weimar democracy and wanted to engineer a return to the more authoritarian, elite-controlled society of the famous nineteenth-century chancellor Otto von Bismarck. The army, dominated by the Prussian elite, associated the new democracy with the defeat in the war and the onerous terms of the Versailles peace treaty they had to accept. The business elite felt threatened by the Social Democratic Party and the mobilization generated by mass politics. These attitudes not only supported repression rather than compromise at critical points, they also created an environment conducive to the rise of various fringe, right-wing organizations, such as the Nazi Party.

This is most visible in the tacit support that the Nazis received from the German elite. It wasn’t only after the failed Beer Hall Putsch that Hitler and his allies received favorable treatment from the establishment. The police and judiciary often sided with the Brownshirts who beat up, and at times killed, Communists and Social Democrats, emboldening their campaign of terror. The statistician Emil Julius Gumbel put together data from 1919 to 1922 showing that 22 political murders committed by left-wingers led to 38 convictions and 10 executions, while the 354 political murders by right-wingers, mostly Nazis, led to only 24 convictions and no executions.

German universities too were siding with the right against the left. In the words of Richard Evans, “Where political allegiance of the young to the far right was at its most obvious was in Germany’s universities, many of them famous centres of learning, with traditions going back to the Middle Ages … The vast majority of professors … were also strongly nationalist.” In consequence, the universities were among the first institutions to embrace the Nazi ideology in the 1920s, with a huge number of university students joining the party. As we have seen, all of this came to a head after support for the Nazis began expanding, and large parts of the bureaucracy and the army, and most ominously the president, Hindenburg, took no action to stem their surge; they preferred the Nazis, whom they thought they could control, not just to the Communists but to the Social Democrats as well.

But why were German elites, officers, and bureaucrats so opposed to the Weimar experiment? Part of the reason is related to structural factors determining the nature of life in the corridor; they were mostly cut from the same cloth, rooted in the Prussian landed aristocracy. Landed interests have often viewed the strengthening of society and the beginnings of democracy in zero-sum terms, and for good reason. Industrialists and professionals can flourish in the corridor both economically and politically, because they have assets (in the form of their expertise, knowledge, and skills) that remain valuable even as the economy transforms, and because their urban existence gives them new opportunities to organize and remain politically relevant in the midst of the Red Queen dynamics. Not so for landowners, who fear losing their lands, which are much more easily taken away from them than the factories of industrialists and the skills of professionals. Indeed, societal mobilization often comes with demands for loss of economic, political, and social privileges for landowners, and the situation in the Weimar Republic was no different (even if such attempts were stymied by President Hindenburg, who was himself from the Prussian landed aristocracy and sympathetic to their concerns). Landowners also feared, again rightly, becoming marginalized as the political center of gravity shifted away from them as a result of democratic politics. All of this made them skeptical of the burgeoning Shackled Leviathan.

The role of landowning elites in interwar Germany illustrates a broader point. We have so far emphasized the different nature of politics inside and outside the corridor, and in this chapter, we are seeing how the struggle between state and society may take a nation out of the narrow corridor. But clearly, the narrower the corridor, the easier it is for a society to spin out of it. Consider Figure 5, for instance. On the left panel, we see a corridor that is very narrow, while the one on the right is wider. In the next chapter, we’ll discuss the various factors that shape the corridor and how this determines the feasibility not just of staying in it, but also of getting into it. For now, we can note that the importance of the power and wealth of landowners, as in Weimar Germany, is one of the factors that makes the corridor narrower—because landowners’ fear of losing their lands and political power makes them unwilling to compromise and coexist with a mobilized society, while their intransigence helps radicalize society. So the situation in Germany looked much more like Panel A of Figure 5 and hence more fraught with instability.

Figure 5. The Shape of the Corridor

Even if the attitudes of the Prussian landowners and the structural difficulties that they posed for life in the corridor were not uncommon, the Prussian landed elites were better able to form a coalition to resist societal mobilization. To start with, many of the top officers, judges, and bureaucrats originated from this social class and shared their outlook. The Prussian elite had remained relatively coherent and politically dominant during the second half of the nineteenth century, even as social change was ongoing. This convinced them that they could control German politics, and if necessary dial back the clock to the days of Otto von Bismarck.

It wasn’t just the elite who showed little commitment to Weimar democracy. The votes of German workers were divided between many parties, but most importantly between the Communists and the Social Democrats. The Communists dreamed of engineering a Russian-style revolution and worked to undermine Weimar democracy and parliament, even sometimes in coalition with their mortal enemy, the Nazis. Though Social Democrats became the party most associated with the Weimar Republic, and had many pragmatic or even opportunistic leaders like Ebert, their commitment to democratic politics was also at times tenuous. They had their roots in Marxist politics and had only recently split with the Communists, not so much because they disagreed with the ultimate objective of setting up a socialist society, but on the issue of support for the German war effort. Compared to some other social democratic parties in Europe, German Social Democrats had a stronger Marxist pedigree, making them much more threatening to business elites and contributing to polarization.

The polarization that resulted from the lack of compromise and the adversarial approach of all sides was both a cause and a consequence of the nature of civil society organizations in the Weimar years. Had he witnessed it, Tocqueville would have been even more impressed by the bustling associational life of interwar Germany than he was with the mid-nineteenth century United States. And yet, all of this was along sectarian lines. Even in small towns, associations were divided between those of Catholics, nationalists, Communists, and Social Democrats. A youth with nationalist sympathies would belong to nationalist clubs, attend a nationalist church, and probably socialize and marry entirely within these nationalist circles. The same was true for Catholics, Social Democrats, and Communists. This polarized societal mobilization contributed further to a zero-sum Red Queen effect, which involved each side investing to undercut the other. There were no Solons or James Madisons to address both state and society in Weimar Germany.

All of this paved the way for the second fault line of Weimar democracy. Red Queen dynamics often increase tensions in society, so the capacity of institutions to resolve and contain these conflicts becomes particularly important to channel them in the direction of capacity-building competition rather than instability. The fact that the courts neither increased their capability to deal with myriad new disputes in Germany nor accepted the legitimacy of societal mobilization, especially from the left, meant that there were no impartial arbiters in these conflicts, and partly as a result, the conflicts intensified and society became more polarized. The fractured, gridlocked nature of parliament further empowered extremist parties and precluded democratic compromises that could have managed these conflicts. In a sense, the institutions could not run as fast as state and society, making the Red Queen much more likely to get out of control.

It isn’t only structural factors that influence how the struggle between state and society works out in practice. As we pointed out in Chapter 9, the leadership of certain groups or individuals can sometimes play a defining role, for better or for worse. The charismatic, albeit largely deranged, single-mindedness and vitality that Adolf Hitler brought to the fringe right-wing movements of interwar Germany no doubt contributed to the swift fall of the Weimar Republic and to the character of the murderous regime that replaced it.

With these fault lines and Hitler’s oratory and charismatic leadership, the ride of Weimar democracy was destined to be a bumpy one. But all of this might still have been long forgotten today had it not been for the third structural factor—the huge shock of the Great Depression, which intensified conflict and polarization in society and delegitimized the democratic institutions of the era, especially when the fractured parliament was unable to deal with the economic crisis. Weimar was now teetering on the edge of the corridor.

Despotism from Below

The problem with the Red Queen is that the same energy that fuels the building of the capacity of both state and society can also get out of control and destabilize life in the corridor. Yet ultimately, what doomed the burgeoning German Shackled Leviathan wasn’t a coup by Prussian elites or the army, which is what many among the traditional elites, like Kurt von Schleicher, were hoping to organize, as we have seen. Rather, it was a bottom-up societal movement that brought this episode to an end. Though there were some industrialists and elite bureaucrats, judges, and university professors who supported the Nazis early on, the party was mostly a movement of discontented middle classes and youth. Until well into the 1930s, the Nazi movement was little more than its Brownshirts wreaking havoc, getting into street brawls, and beating up and sometimes murdering Communists, Social Democrats, and Jews. As late as July 1932, Joseph Goebbels would use a campaign speech to urge, “Now, people, rise up, and let the storm break loose!” If the Nazi party was the agent coming from the bottom of society and taking Germany out of the corridor, shouldn’t this have led to a collapse of the state’s capacity and control over society? Shouldn’t we expect the post-Nazi society to look a little bit like Tajikistan after the fall of the Soviet Union or perhaps Lebanon?

Obviously, that’s not what happened. Though the Nazi movement came from below, it did not weaken the state’s despotism and dominance over society; on the contrary, it strengthened them. There were domains in which Nazi control did reduce state capacity, most notably in the police, the judiciary, and the bureaucracy, with the arrival of ideologically committed or opportunistic Nazis who were unqualified for the job and uninterested in impartially carrying out their duties. But in most respects, the German state got more despotic and powerful under the Nazis, with the army growing in size and responsibility, the bureaucracy organizing mass deportations and exterminating Jews, and the security forces acquiring sweeping powers, as exemplified by the Gestapo. The Nazi program was one of increasing repression, weakening independent societal mobilization and associations, and intensifying the state’s supremacy over society. In this, the Nazis were similar to Italian fascists, who had been their role model. Hitler’s Beer Hall Putsch was inspired by Mussolini’s successful March on Rome. Mussolini captured the spirit of fascism and Nazism when he stated:

For the Fascist, everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value, outside the State. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State, the synthesis and unity of all values, interprets, develops and gives strength to the whole life of the people.

The historian of fascism Herman Finer summed up the philosophy of the fascist state as “There are no citizens … There are only subjects.” This philosophy owed much to fascism’s and Nazism’s militaristic origins and their refusal of any checks on the power of their leaders or the state once they took control. It was also rooted in the way in which these movements were reactions to the socialist and Communist societal mobilization, and thus viewed reestablishing the state’s despotic control over the left as their natural objective.

But more fundamentally, even absent these ideological leanings, it would not have been feasible for a nation like Weimar Germany to evolve in the same way as Lebanon today, given its history of strong state institutions. Once these institutions—the army, the police, the judiciary, and the bureaucracy—were there for the taking, any group that gained the political upper hand would take them and use them, whether or not it came from the bottom up or advocated thuggery. Thus even if the German Red Queen got out of control and passed the reins to a group originating in grassroots mobilization, once the nation was out of the corridor, the odds were always in favor of the state institutions’ being refashioned and used for the benefit of the new dominant group over others, especially after democratic and other constraints on state power were lifted. So as the Nazis destroyed the budding Shackled Leviathan and took power, they swiftly reestablished and intensified the state’s despotic dominance over society.

How the Red Queen Gets out of Control

The problem with the corridor is that you can leave it. We have seen one way this happens with the Weimar Republic as well as some of the reasons why this was likely to happen in Germany.

The three factors that put interwar Germany in a precarious position—polarization between state and society, making compromise unlikely and the Red Queen effect much more of a zero-sum affair; the inability of institutions to contain and resolve conflicts; and shocks destabilizing institutions and deepening the discontent—appear in one form or another in many other examples where the Red Queen gets out of control. But this doesn’t mean that there will always be a bottom-up movement undercutting the Shackled Leviathan, as in Germany. It could be the elites who reestablish the Despotic Leviathan as they emerge the stronger party out of the competition with society, or feel able or compelled to use whatever power they have to reassert their control, perhaps because they are themselves threatened by polarization. This, we’ll see, is what happened in Chile when Augusto Pinochet led a violent coup to overthrow democracy in 1973.

Or it may be certain segments of society that put an end to life in the corridor because they become convinced they can no longer control it, which is what brought down most of the Italian communes we studied in Chapter 5, and what we can see playing out in many parts of the world today.

How Much Land Does an Inquilino Need?

We have seen that Shackled Leviathans aren’t created overnight. They are the result of a long struggle between state and society. In 1958 Chile was experiencing the latest phase of such a struggle which had already led to the political emancipation of a large fraction of the rural labor force, known as inquilinos. Inquilino means “tenant,” but the connotation in rural Chile was a bit more sinister. While they were not slaves or serfs, in practice inquilinos were tied to farms, so much so that when people sold their farms, they also sold the inquilinos with them. Inquilinos worked on the farms and provided other “services” too. Particularly important among these services was their contribution to the political power of the landlords, since they were forced to vote the way their landlords told them to. When an election came around, landowners bused the inquilinos to the polling station, where they were given ballots and told whom to vote for. Their votes were not secret, and the landlords could observe the whole process. Anyone going against the landlords’ wishes ran the risk of being fired and dispossessed.

How could Chile have been in the corridor in 1958 with this sort of thing going on? Remember that being in the corridor is a process. The corridor can start when both state and society have modest but balanced capacities. In this Chile was no different from other places. Secret ballots only arrived in British elections in 1872. As late as 1841, conservative politician and three-time prime minister Lord Stanley could observe, “When any man attempted to estimate the probable result of a county election in England, it was ascertained by calculating the number of the great landed proprietors in the county and weighing the number of occupiers under them.” Indeed, in rural England, big landowners controlled a sufficiently large fraction of the voting population that their control determined the outcome of an election. As in 1950s Chile, if an “occupier” went against his landlord, there was going to be trouble. The great British economist David Ricardo recognized this in 1824, writing, “It is the most cruel mockery to tell a man he may vote for A or B, when you know that he is so much under the influence of A, or the friends of A, that his voting for B would be attended with the destruction of him. It is not he who has the vote, really and substantially, but his landlord, for it is for his benefit and interest that it is exercised in the present system.”

Lord Stanley’s logic applied in Chile too. During the debate in the Senate on the introduction of the secret ballot, socialist senator Martones argued in favor of introducing the secret ballot because

if that law [the old electoral law without a secret ballot] did not exist, instead of there being 9 Socialist senators there would be 18, and you [the Conservatives] would be reduced to 2 or 3 … [laughter] you laugh, but the truth is that there would be not 2 Conservative senators from O’Higgins and Colchagua, which corresponds exactly to the number of inquilinos in the fundos which belong to the Conservative hacendados in that region. Conservatives would have only one or perhaps none.

The secret ballot, enacted in 1958, had dramatic effects on elections in Chile. For one, it transformed the political prospects of Salvador Allende. Allende had run as the presidential candidate for the Socialist Party in 1952, getting a mere 5.4 percent of the vote. In 1958 he was the candidate for a coalition the socialists had built, known as the FRAP (Popular Action Front), and did a lot better, winning 28.8 percent of the vote, just 3 percent behind the winner, Jorge Alessandri.

Allende was a great example of the adage “If at first you don’t succeed, try again.” He did in 1964, and lost for a third time. But it was fourth time lucky in 1970. Though he only got 36.6 percent of the vote, just 1.5 percent more than his longtime opponent Alessandri, Congress elected him president with the support of the Christian Democratic Party, which had come third in the race for president. In 1970 Allende headed a new left-wing coalition called, somewhat ironically as it turned out, Popular Unity (U.P.). He was intent on transforming Chile into a socialist country.

There was no consensus for this in Chilean society, but Allende had ridden a wave unleashed by the secret ballot and other political and social changes that were playing out along Red Queen lines. For example, 1958 also saw the legalization of the Communist Party, which formed part of the FRAP and then the U.P. In addition, voter registration became compulsory and failure to register could even be punished by a prison term. This led to a large increase in the electorate, from 1.25 million people in 1960 to 2.84 million in 1971, when illiterates were finally enfranchised. The Christian Democratic government of Eduardo Frei in the 1960s, brought to power in part in response to these changes, spearheaded not just a range of reforms, including land redistribution, but also a general strengthening of society. Finally, 1961 also saw the launch of President John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. On March 13 of that year Kennedy declared:

We propose to complete the revolution of the Americas, to build a hemisphere where all men can hope for a suitable standard of living and all can live out their lives in dignity and in freedom. To achieve this goal political freedom must accompany material progress … Let us once again transform the American Continent into a vast crucible of revolutionary ideas and efforts, a tribute to the power of the creative energies of free men and women, an example to all the world that liberty and progress walk hand in hand. Let us once again awaken our American revolution until it guides the struggles of people everywhere.

The frequent use of the word “revolution” is ironic, because the Alliance for Progress was partly a plan to stave off socialist revolution spreading throughout the continent. It was one of the policy responses of the U.S. government to the Cuban Revolution. (Another response was launched a month after Kennedy’s speech, in the Bay of Pigs, Cuba.) The Alliance argued that land reform would transform Latin America. As Kennedy put it, the Alliance planned “to satisfy the basic needs of the American people for homes, work and land, health and schools—techo, trabajo y tierra, salud y escuela.”

Unsurprisingly, tierra (land) was on the minds of a lot of newly politically enfranchised inquilinos. This, plus the fact it was now promoted by the U.S., put land reform on the policy agenda in 1964. In 1967 Frei launched an agrarian reform program aimed at redistributing land and expropriating all farms that were over the equivalent of 80 hectares in the Maipo Valley. (This meant that farms could be larger in places where land was of lower quality.) In anticipation of the land reform, some 200 rural unions, which were then illegal, had organized. They were legalized by the same piece of legislation. By 1970 there were close to 500 such unions. There was a surge in labor strikes, which went from 88,000 in 1960 to 275,000 in the year 1969.

Illustrating once again the Red Queen in action, in response to this societal mobilization Frei didn’t just initiate land reform; he also increased the state’s capacity. In particular, Frei attempted to reduce the ability of politicians to use clientelistic policies to buy support without doing much for the population they were supposed to serve. He did this in various ways, for example, using a line-item veto to eliminate “pork barrel” expenditures from bills, and also by reducing the ability of congresspeople to influence public works projects and salaries. The jurisdiction of Congress and the Senate with respect to the budget was also curtailed.

There were significant obstacles to Allende’s agenda. For example, he did not have a majority in Congress. Even his presidency had been due to the Christian Democrats who had only voted for him after he agreed to amend the constitution with a “statute of guarantees.” These introduced a gamut of new individual rights into the 1925 constitution. The amendments clearly show what the Christian Democrats and others were concerned about. One clause states, “It cannot be constitutive of crime or abuse to sustain and spread any political idea.” Others deal with a fear that the education system might be taken over as a tool of propaganda, for example, stating, “The education that is imparted through the national system will be democratic and pluralistic and will not have official party orientation. Its modification will also be carried out democratically, after free discussion in the competent bodies of pluralist composition.” Other clauses indicate a concern about paramilitary groups. One asserted, “The public force is constituted solely and exclusively by the Armed Forces and the Carabineros, essentially professional, hierarchical, disciplined, obedient and non-deliberative institutions.” They were right to be concerned.

Once in power Allende started to implement his plan. This involved intensifying land reform and expropriation, and creating worker cooperatives. He also had plans to massively nationalize industry. Other aspects of his economic policy involved granting workers huge pay raises. Some of these policies, such as pay hikes for government workers, could be implemented by presidential decree. But others required the agreement of Congress. What would Allende do when this was not forthcoming? Operate outside the constitution? This is what the statute was supposed to prevent, but who was going to enforce the statute?

In March 1971, Allende gave an interview to the French Marxist philosopher Régis Debray. At one point Debray pointed out, “You … have the Executive Power. But not the Legislative, the Judicial, or the repressive apparatus. The legality, the institutions, these were not made by the proletariat; the Constitution was made by the bourgeoisie for its own purposes.” Allende responded:

Evidently, you’re right, but listen to me a little, we’re going to get there. What did we say in the election campaign? We said that if it was difficult to win the election and not impossible, the stage between victory and the takeover of the government was going to be very difficult and it was even harder to build, because we were making a new path, a Chilean road for Chile, the Chileans for our country. And we have said that we will take advantage of those aspects of the current Constitution to make way for the new Constitution, the People’s Constitution. Why? Because in Chile we can do it. We present a project and the Congress rejects it; we will organize a plebiscite.

So Allende was advancing his belief that socialism could be implemented in Chile via constitutional means. Even though he lacked a legislative majority, he could move the project ahead via direct appeal to the people, via a plebiscite. Quite how that was going to work was not clear. After all, Allende had won only 36.6 percent of the vote. When Debray pushed him, Allende noted:

We win within their rules of the game. Our tactic was correct, theirs was wrong. But I told the people: Between September 3 and November 4, Chile is going to shake more than a soccer ball kicked by Pele.

While Allende may have believed that he could move Chile to socialism via constitutional means, many in his own coalition didn’t, and Allende couldn’t control them. Groups of workers occupied farms and factories, ignoring the legal processes, and the government moved in to ratify the occupations. Land reform and nationalization became chaotic. As the newspaper El Mercurio pointed out in an editorial in 1972, “Neither the President of the Republic, Salvador Allende, nor the parties of the U.P… . believe, even remotely, that repressive measures can be taken against groups of workers, farmers, and students who violate the law.” Such groups understood this and took advantage of it. These actions were increasingly justified by the notion that the political institutions were creations of U.P.’s opponents and therefore were designed to defend the status quo—a status quo that the U.P. was dedicated to uprooting. This was again a zero-sum Red Queen effect, very different from what we witnessed in ancient Greece or the United States. As it played out, Chilean politics became even more polarized. The auditor general decried the polarization of politics, arguing at a news conference that an institution such as his was neither “revolutionary or reactionary.” Compromise was necessary, but there was an unwillingness to compromise. Senator Carlos Altamirano of the Socialist Party argued:

There are those who pretend to urge “democratic dialogues” with Christian Democracy. As Socialists we say that a dialogue is possible with all those forces who clearly define themselves as against exploiters and against imperialism. We foster and will develop dialogue at the level of the masses, with all the workers, whether they are our militants or not, but we reject dialogues with reactionary and counter-revolutionary leaderships and parties.

When members of the Christian Democrats reached a tentative compromise with the government, it was sunk by their own conservative faction, who warned of the “communist threat.” The die was cast. Violence erupted on all sides.

When questioned by Debray on how he would deal with opposition violence, Allende had said, “We are going to contain it, first, with the force of its own law. In addition, to the reactionary violence we are going to answer with revolutionary violence, because we know that they are going to break the rules of the game.” Allende was right that the other side would break the rules of the game, but quite wrong on how he could counter it with revolutionary violence.

He was brought down by a coup on September 11, 1973. There had been a failed attempt earlier in the year, and Allende’s opponents were pushing the army to try again. El Mercurio published an article in June that stated, “In order to accomplish this task of political salvation, we have to renounce all political parties, the masquerade of elections, the poisoned and deceitful propaganda, and turn over to a few select military men the task of putting an end to political anarchy.”

The process of social mobilization and the strengthening of society that took place in Chile in the 1960s was matched by the strengthening of the state, but this only led to more radical demands after 1970. These radical demands stoked fear among the Chilean elites who worried about mass expropriation of land and businesses. The elite’s reaction threw Chile out of the corridor.

This fire was being fueled by the U.S. government’s policy even as Kennedy was heralding a “revolution” of political freedom for Latin America. The CIA was pouring money and effort into Chile to destabilize Allende’s government. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Activities report on “Covert Actions in Chile, 1963–1973,” declassified in 2010, observes that the CIA tried to intervene in all areas of Chilean life to alter the political realities. It gave over $2 million to the Christian Democratic Party to help fund its 1964 election campaign. Another $4 million was provided to anti-Allende parties after 1970. It poured $1.5 million into El Mercurio, which was judged to be the most influential anti-Allende newspaper. It financed “democratic trade unions” against the Communist-led union confederation. President Nixon directly ordered that the CIA try to stop Allende taking power after his election. The Senate report notes:

After Allende finished first in the election … President Nixon met with Richard Helms, the Director of Central Intelligence, Henry Kissinger and John Mitchell. Helms was directed to prevent Allende from taking power … It quickly became apparent that a military coup was the only way to prevent Allende’s accession to power. The CIA established contact with several groups of military plotters and eventually passed weapons to one group.

The coup was supposed to start with the kidnapping of the head of the military, General René Schneider. Schneider was shot and killed and the coup collapsed in a fiasco. The extent to which the CIA helped precipitate the 1973 coup is controversial, with some relevant U.S. documents still classified. The Senate report concludes that while “there is no hard evidence of direct U.S. assistance to the coup,” nevertheless “the United States—by its previous actions, its existing posture and the nature of its contacts with the Chilean military—conveyed the signal that it would not look with disfavor on a military coup.”

The coup, on which the U.S. did not “look with disfavor,” unleashed a torrent of violence and murder on the Chilean people. Around 3,500 people were killed for their political beliefs and activities; tens of thousands were imprisoned, beaten, and tortured. Tens of thousands were fired from their jobs because of their political affiliation. Unions were banned, collective action became impossible, and Congress was duly closed. What had started with the usual race between state and society in the corridor and an intensification of society’s mobilization in the 1960s got out of control and ended up with Chile spinning out of the corridor and into a seventeen-year period of despotism.

*

—

So in the Chilean case, we are again seeing the zero-sum Red Queen, leading to polarization and attempts by the two sides to undercut each other rather than finding a middle ground or compromise. The structural factors that made the corridor particularly narrow and the Red Queen fraught with danger for the Weimar Republic had many parallels in the Chilean case. It started with the landed elites, terrified of land reform and the eclipse of their political power, which fueled a broader unwillingness by the elite to accept societal mobilization and redistribution. Mounting polarization, resulting from the intransigence of the elite and from the radical Marxist ideology of Allende’s government, was a defining factor as well. So was the inability of Chilean institutions, including Congress and the courts, to mediate the conflict. Both groups thus came to the conclusion that the conflicts would be resolved by force. There was no external shock like the Great Depression destabilizing Chile, underscoring that a country can easily leave the corridor without an external rupture. All the same, Allende’s policies and the elites’ uncompromising opposition created a severe recession of their own making, adding to the turmoil.

Chile, like Germany, left the corridor. In this case, it wasn’t the Brownshirts, but an elite-supported military coup that ended the prospects of the Chilean Shackled Leviathan (at least for a while).

For Whom the Bells Toll

In 1264 a solemn meeting took place in the city of Ferrara in northern Italy. It was chaired by the Podestà, who, as we saw in Chapter 5, was an external executive brought in to run the government of the republican Italian communes. The record of the meeting states:

We Pierconte of Carrara, podestà of Ferrara, in a full assembly of all the people of the city of Ferrara in the piazza of the city, gathered in the usual way by the tolling of bells, by the wish, consent and order of the whole commune and population gathered in this assembly … have decreed as follows … The magnificent and illustrious Lord Obizzo, grandson and heir of the late magnificent Lord Azzo of happy memory … is to be Governor and Ruler and General and permanent Lord of the City of Ferrara and its districts at his own will. He is to possess jurisdiction, power and rule in the City and outside it and to have the right to increase, do, order, provide and dispose as he shall wish and as shall seem useful to him. And in general he is to have powers and rights as permanent Lord of the City of Ferrara and its district to do and arrange all things in accordance with his wishes and orders.

Perhaps we need to run that by you again. The “whole commune and population,” gathered in an assembly, had created a “permanent Lord.” Things then got even weirder because this wasn’t just about Lord Obizzo, since the statement continued, “We wish all the above to apply in perpetutity not only to the Lord Obizzo … but after his death we wish his heir to be Governor and Ruler and general Lord of the City.” It wasn’t just a permanent personal lordship, it was hereditary; it was the creation of dynastic rule consummated by the “whole commune and population” meeting “in a full assembly of all the people.” The republican commune had voted itself out of existence.

To understand what happened in Ferrara, and in much of the rest of communal Italy, we need to back up a little. We have already seen how the communes emerged in the early Middle Ages from the roots of Lombard and Carolingian participatory political institutions, and how they created elaborate systems of republican government supporting Shackled Leviathans. The communes were also helped by the legacy of Rome, where elites were urban and consequently easier to control by society, which was also organized in urban areas. But the elites did not disappear after the communes took over power. They often maintained landed estates and feudal ties in the countryside, which enabled them to preserve their wealth and political influence. Communes tried to fight against this, and passed laws attempting to restrict feudal relations, stating things like “No man is to become the vassal of any other or swear fealty to him.” In the commune of Perugia this was taken to the extreme, and anyone involved in an oath of vassalage, including any notary who recorded it, could be subject to capital punishment. One of the concerns was that vassals could be easily armed and threaten to destabilize the communes, and they were.

In line with the logic of the Red Queen, and to paraphrase William Shakespeare, “the course of true competition never did run smooth.” This was certainly true for competition between elites and the communes. Elites didn’t take the creation of the communes lying down. They began to organize. Indeed, while the communes emerged, elites started to form a type of association, called a consortium (consorzeria). These were alliances whereby elites agreed to come to each other’s aid, especially in their struggle against the communes. A consortium agreement of 1196 records: “We swear to help each other without fraud and in good faith … with our tower and common house and swear that none of us will act against the others directly or through a third party.”

The reference to a tower is significant. Throughout Italy, elites began to build towers. Communes were soon promulgating laws limiting the height of these towers, which still dot the skyline in modern Bologna and Pavia. (A photo of some of the remaining towers of Bologna is included in the photography section.) In effect these towers were fortifications. The traveler Benjamin of Tudela observed in the 1160s that in Genoa “each householder has a tower to his house and at times of strife they fight each other from the tops of the towers.” He noted something similar in Pisa. In 1194 a Genoese citizen recorded fighting in the city of Pistoia between two groups, called the Blacks and the Whites.

The Blacks had fortified the tower of messer Iacopo’s sons and from there they did much harm to messer Ranieri’s sons. And the Whites had fortified messer de Lazzari’s house … That house did much harm to the Blacks with crossbow fire and stones, so that they could not fight from the street. When the Blacks saw that they were being opposed by servants inside the house, Vanne Fucci and some of his companions went up to it, attacked it frontally with crossbow fire and then won it by setting fire to one side of the house and entering it by the other side. Those who were inside began to run away and they pursued them, wounding and killing and plundering the house.

Something was clearly going wrong with conflict resolution in many of the communes. The Blacks and the Whites were competing elite consortia, and they were feuding incessantly. This type of feuding between elite Italian families was enshrined in literature by William Shakespeare’s Capulets and Montagues in his play Romeo and Juliet. In Reggio an actual feud, between the Da Sesso and Da Fogliano families, went on for fifty years and claimed possibly 2,000 lives. At one point the Da Fogliano family laid siege to the Da Sessos, who, rather than surrender, reportedly discussed drawing lots to eat one another. Apparently a less bad end than capture!

Members of the elite didn’t just fight one another, they also threatened the whole edifice of republican rule. Many communes had been unable to remove all elite privileges and feudal relations. As late as 1300 in many places, including Milan, Genoa, Pisa, Mantua, Modena, and Ravenna, elites still controlled various customs, taxes, and the right to issue coins and determine weights and measures. Some, like the Visconti family in Milan, actively exercised these rights. Properties of citizens in several communes were restricted by various types of fiefs, and contracts were signed on the basis of feudal laws and customs.

In opposition to this elite activity and continued privilege, the citizens mobilized in the guise of the Popolo, the people. In Chapter 5 we briefly mentioned an executive office called the Capitano del Popolo, which was in charge of organizing the people. The Popolo was a countermobilization against the elite. In Bergamo every member of the Popolo had to swear the oath:

I shall do the best that is in my power to see that the council … and all the offices and honours of the commune of Bergamo should be chosen in the interest of the community and not by reason of any party or parties… .

If any party or alliance in the city of Bergamo or any gathering takes up arms or begins to fight and if they intend to act against the honour and good estate of the podestà … or against the commune or this corporation (the Popolo) … I shall defend and aid and maintain the … podestà … and the commune in every way of which I am capable.

The existence of the Popolo is in itself an indication that all wasn’t well in the communes. Society needed to organize to defend the communes from the elites. But couldn’t the commune and its legal institutions have dealt with fighting elites? Why did the people have to take things into their own hands? The Popolo justified itself in Bologna by arguing that it was needed so that “rapacious wolves and meek lambs should be able to walk with equal steps.” The rapacious wolves were the elites, the ordinary people the lambs. The roots of the Popolo differed in different cities. Some came from guilds, some from area associations, and many had military elements. They modeled themselves on the communes, hence the key role of the Capitano, the first of whom seems to have appeared in Parma in 1244. They stipulated fixed representation for their members on the boards of the commune. In Vicenza, as early as 1222, half of the positions in the commune were allocated to the Popolo. At the same time, they demanded that elites should have only limited representation in such offices. They even demanded greater legal rights than the elites. In Parma “the oath of any member of the Popolo is to be full proof against any magnate or powerful man,” while the same wasn’t true in reverse. By the 1280s in Florence and Bologna the Popolo was drawing up lists of elite families and demanding that they make payments as guarantees for their future good behavior.

To make things worse, the cleavage between elites and the Popolo was not the only division that rocked Italy. The communes, you will recall, were nominally part of the Holy Roman Empire, the successor state to the eastern part of Charlemagne’s Carolingian Empire, which he had divided between his sons. Though the communes had gained their de facto independence, there were still those who supported the empire, and those who opposed it. The former became known as Ghibellines, a name supposedly derived from the castle of Waiblingen, a property of the Hohenstaufens, the ruling dynasty of the empire for most of the twelfth century and the family of its most dominant ruler, Frederick Barbarossa. The latter were called the Guelfs, derived from the German Welf, the family name of one of Frederick Barbarossa’s main challengers, Otto IV. The conflict between the Ghibellines and the Guelfs was just as acrimonious as that between elites and the Popolo. When the Guelfs took control of the government of Florence in 1268, they immediately drew up a list of the Ghibellines, 1,050 people in all, 400 of whom were sent into exile.

By now we have some sense of what went on in Ferrara. The creation of the communes had induced a reaction from feudal elites. This is turn led to a reaction by the citizens in the form of the Popolo. The Popolo started tilting the legal system in its favor, banning elites from representation in the commune and fixing its own representation in undemocratic ways. Elites in turn tried not just to subvert the system but also to overthrow it. Often they did this in the name of a “party” like the Guelfs, who in Florence and Lucca named the king of Sicily, Charles of Anjou, as Podestà for a term of six years, in effect delegating to him the task of choosing who would run the cities. When Guelfs took over Florence and Bologna, all public positions, including military ones, were reserved for party members. Often parties took the names of individual elite families and provided a vehicle for the overthrow of the commune. In Milan there were the Visconti and Della Torre parties; in Como the Rusconi and Vittani; in Bologna the Lambertazzi and Geremei; and in Orvieto the Monaldeschi and Filippeschi parties. The elites were at first successful in increasing their control over republican regimes. In Ivrea, outside Turin, the city promised loyalty and even “vassalage” to the Marquis of Montferrat, promising him half of the city’s revenues and allowing him to name the Podestà. In other instances, as in Venice, until then one of the most successful Italian city-states, the elites simply changed the rules to exclude others from political power. Military muscle also helped consolidate the rule of the Bonacolsi family in Mantua in 1272, the Polentas in Ravenna after 1275, the Da Caminos in Treviso in 1283, and the Malatestas in Rimini after 1295. By 1300 at least half of the cities that previously had communes were under despotic rule. The consequences were soon obvious. In Ferrara, where we began, popular participation in councils was severely restricted and guilds and confraternities were suspended. The new lords had started calling the shots.

Against this creeping elite power, the Popolo reacted, but not just by fighting against the elite. If political power was likely to completely revert to the elite, then it was better to overthrow the whole system. It started in Piacenza in 1250 when, spearheaded by the Popolo, Uberto de Iniquitate was elected as Podestà and an official of the Popolo for one year. But soon the position was extended to five years with the stipulation that if he died his son would assume the office. Such events were common. Buoso da Dovara initially received the position of Podestà in Cremona for ten years in 1248. By 1255 he had a lifetime Podestà-ship in Soncino. Uberto Pallavicino received lifetime positions as Podestà in Vercelli, Piacenza, Pavia, and Cremona. In Perugia the Popolo helped to catapult Ermanno Monaldeschi into power. After he left office, one of Monaldeschi’s supporters proposed that the constitution be suspended and a commission of twelve people formed to reshape the city’s institutions. The commission decided to endow Monaldeschi with almost absolute power and the title of gonfaloniere (standard-bearer) for life.

In effect the communes were doomed because of the conflicts they could not contain. They could not eliminate the threat of elites, which triggered the countermobilization of the people. The conflict between the two groups could not be contained by the institutions either, and indeed both groups were happy to work outside them and even overthrow them. The resulting instability led to the communes’ demise. In Ferrara, Lord Obizzo and his family looked like a safer bet than continual conflict and violence or, worse, elite takeover.

The Allure of Autocrats

The way Italian communes dismantled their participatory institutions and disbanded themselves in the process is puzzling at first. Wouldn’t society want to defend its existence in the corridor?

We have argued that the answer is yes, but only if people think they can stay in the corridor despite the power and opposition of the elite. If they become pessimistic that the Red Queen dynamics will increasingly advantage the elite and thus lead to the elites’ despotism, then they may opt for passing the power to an unaccountable autocrat who, they hope, will be more favorable to their interests than an elite-dominated regime would. Though this is often just wishful thinking, it hasn’t stopped societies from destroying their own Shackled Leviathan to get the upper hand in their struggle with the elite.

A common factor in the history of the demise of Italian communes and the overthrow of the Weimar and Chilean democracies is the power and opposition of landed interests, which made the corridor narrower and led to an increasingly polarized society. The Red Queen effect, in turn, became much more of a zero-sum, existential fight rather than a race between state and society that advanced the capacities of both. This is visible in the Italian case from the fact that the elites started fighting not just to increase their standing against the communes but to destroy them, and the communes came to view coexistence with the elites as impossible, preferring autocracy to the elites’ creeping influence.

Machiavelli summed this up well in The Prince when he observed that

the people do not wish to be commanded or oppressed by the nobles, while the nobles do desire to command and to oppress the people. From these two opposed appetites, there arises in cities one of three effects: a principality, liberty, or licence. A principality is brought about either by the common people or by the nobility, depending on which of the two parties has the opportunity. When the nobles see that they cannot resist the populace, they begin to support someone from among themselves, and make him prince in order to be able to satisfy their appetites under his protection. The common people as well, seeing that they cannot resist the nobility, give their support to one man so as to be defended by his authority.

Machiavelli is in fact identifying a force propelling many modern-day movements sometimes labeled “populist.” Though the term originates with the late nineteenth-century U.S. Populist movement, exemplified by the People’s Party, its recent specimens, even if diverse, disparate, and lacking a generally agreed definition, do have some common hallmarks. They include a rhetoric that pits the “people” against a scheming elite, an emphasis on the need to overhaul the system and its institutions (because they are not working for the people), a trust in a leader who (supposedly) represents the people’s true wishes and interests, and a repudiation of all sorts of constraints and attempts to compromise because they will stand in the way of the movement and its leader. Contemporary populist movements, including the National Front in France, the Freedom Party in the Netherlands, the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (United Socialist Party of Venezuela) started by Hugo Chávez, and the Republican Party refashioned by Donald J. Trump in the United States, all have these features, as did the earlier fascist movements (though they augmented them with a stronger militarism and fanatical anticommunism). As in the case of the Italian communes, the elite may in fact be scheming and against the common people, but the claim that a populist movement and its all-powerful leader will protect the people’s interests is just a ruse.

Our framework helps clarify what drives these populist movements and why they threaten the stability of a society in the corridor. Red Queen dynamics are never tidy and orderly. If they work within the corridor, they can increase the capacities of both state and society. But as we have seen, they can become polarized and zero-sum. Even worse, when the institutions are not up to the task of containing and resolving these conflicts and when the competition between the elite and the non-elites seems not to generate gains and real power for non-elites, trust in the very institutions that make up the corridor may fall apart. This is part of what transpired during the Weimar Republic: democratic institutions became gridlocked, the judiciary and security forces could not adjudicate the conflicts in society, and the economy collapsed—with dire consequences for many Germans. The same process happened in the Italian communes as people in many cities lost hope that they would be able to contain the increasing dominance of the elites. In both cases, the people’s trust that the institutions could work for them and protect their interests collapsed, making it more attractive to turn to an authoritarian leader and a movement claiming to look after the people’s interests—if only they were brought to power and all of the constraints on their autocratic power were lifted.

From this perspective there are certain parallels between these events and what is going on around the world today. The fact that there have been very limited economic gains for many citizens of industrialized nations over the last three decades (as we discuss in greater detail in Chapter 15) even as technological change and globalization have enriched others, is all too real and is a significant source of discontent. That the political system has not been responsive to their plight is largely accurate as well. These legitimate concerns then became more explosive as it became clear that the West’s much-cherished institutions couldn’t deal with the economic fallout from the global financial crisis of 2008 and from the reality that politically powerful financial interests came to dominate and benefit from the responses to the crisis. The scene was set for a precipitous drop in people’s trust in institutions, paving the way for the rise of populist movements.

The ascendancy of populism in turn corrodes politics in the corridor. The Red Queen is more likely to get out of control when the competition between state and society (and between different segments of society) becomes more polarized, more zero-sum. The rhetoric of populist movements, painting everyone outside the movement as enemies and part of the scheming elites holding down the people, contributes to such polarization. As trust in institutions declines, it becomes harder for them to broker compromise.

Our analysis also highlights why, even if defined by important bottom-up elements and even if claiming to represent the people, populist movements will ultimately lead to despotism when they come to power. This is exactly for the same reasons we emphasized in our discussion of the rise of the Nazi regime—the populist claim that checks on their power will help the scheming elite, and their focus on taking control of the state makes it difficult for shackles on state power to remain effective after a populist takeover.

Does this mean that any political movement claiming to speak for the people and opposed to an all-powerful elite is populist and likely to destabilize life in the corridor? Certainly not. Movements committed to working with the institutions of the corridor, which are today almost always democratic institutions, can contribute to the flourishing of the Red Queen, rather than turning it into a destabilizing force. They can also significantly help the more disadvantaged members of society. Recall from Chapter 10 how the American civil rights movement, though it recognized the adversarial attitudes of many elites, attempted to use the courts and federal government to further its agenda, rather than rejecting them outright. The defining characteristic of populist movements that makes them contribute to a zero-sum Red Queen is their refusal to accept constraints and compromise, and it is this feature that makes them ultimately unlikely to redress imbalances in society. They are about creating new dominances, not ending them.

Who Likes Checks and Balances?

One telling set of examples illustrating the forces shaping modern-day populism and its implications comes from the experiences of several Latin American countries, including Peru, Venezuela, and Ecuador. Many of these countries hold regular elections and have some of the trappings of democratic institutions, even if they are far from having a Shackled Leviathan. Part of the reason why these nations were in the orbit of the Despotic Leviathan was that, elections or no elections, traditional elites, often rooted in the countryside and in large agricultural estates, managed to control politics. In the polarized environment this created, populist support often swung behind the dismantlement of checks and balances on presidents and suspension of democratic institutions for the same reasons that the people lent their support to autocrats in Italian communes.

Take Peru. In 1992 President Alberto Fujimori, keen on relaxing the democratic checks on the office of the president, issued Decree 25418, unconstitutionally suspending the legislature and launching new elections. The people should have been up in arms. But Fujimori presented his power grab as a reaction to traditional elites, both from the right in the guise of the political party started by Mario Vargas Llosa, and from the left in the shape of APRA (the American Popular Revolutionary Alliance). Elite dominance in Peru was, of course, not a fabrication, even if ending it wasn’t Fujimori’s primary motivation. All the same, his propaganda worked. His supporters gained a majority in the new legislature. They proceeded to rewrite the constitution, abolishing one of the two chambers of the legislature and bolstering presidential powers. These changes were endorsed by a plebiscite. Peru was now in the grips of Fujimori’s authoritarian dictatorship.

Hugo Chávez’s rise to power in Venezuela had similar roots. As soon as he came to power in 1998, Chávez organized a constitutional assembly that introduced a unicameral legislature and moved significant powers to the president. Seventy-two percent of the people who voted in a referendum supported the new constitution. As if this weren’t enough, in 2000 Chávez was given the right to rule by decree for a year without needing to get the legislature’s agreement. This power was renewed and extended to eighteen months in 2007. It was further extended in December 2010 for another eighteen months. How did Chávez pull this off? The same way as Fujimori did—he presented himself as a revolutionary looking after the interests of the Venezuelan people against the traditional elites who had long controlled politics and the economy in Venezuela. Like Fujimori, he was right about the elites’ control and scheming, and about the playing field being heavily tilted against Venezuela’s poor and indigenous communities, but his commitment to furthering people’s power and welfare was at best weak. The Venezuelan economy collapsed under Chávez and his successor, Nicolás Maduro, and Venezuelan institutions have been decimated. The opposition and regular Venezuelans are repressed, silenced, and now, increasingly, killed by security forces loyal to the regime. The country is on the brink of civil war as we are writing.

The situation in Ecuador, which brought President Rafael Correa to power, is similar. In 2007, Correa articulated his populist agenda perhaps even better than Fujimori and Chávez. He argued that despite his explicit aim to dismantle checks and balances and participatory institutions in Ecuador, he was the man of the people:

We said we were going to transform the fatherland in the citizen’s revolution, democratic, constitutional … but revolutionary, without getting entangled in the old structures, without falling into the hands of those with the traditional power, without accepting that the fatherland has particular owners. The fatherland is for everyone without lies with absolute transparency.

As Machiavelli foresaw, if desperate, “the common people … give their support to one man so as to be defended by his authority.” Correa was that man and on September 28, 2008, 64 percent of Ecuadorian voters ratified a new constitution with a unicameral legislature and increased the powers for president Correa. Correa no longer had to contend with an independent judiciary or central bank, and he had the power to suspend the legislature. He was also allowed to run for two more terms.

Back into the Corridor?

In May 1949, a short (or if you actually lived through it, a painfully long) sixteen years after the Nazis’ takeover in 1933, Germany adopted its new constitution, the Basic Law of the Federal Republic of Germany, which enshrined all sorts of checks on the powers of the state and elites and guaranteed the rights and freedoms of individuals. In August that year, the country held democratic elections for parliament, followed a month later by elections for president. Germany, or more correctly the part of it not under the Soviet yoke, was back in the corridor. It has never looked back.

Chile also quickly returned to the corridor, with a peaceful transition to democracy seventeen years after General Augusto Pinochet’s brutal coup. The landed and industrial elites’ power in Chile has not waned completely (far from it), but the country has developed a vibrant democracy and has experienced a resurgence of the power of society, which has led to a range of reforms reducing the elites’ privileges, reversing constitutional changes introduced by the military, and improving education and economic opportunities for the less well-off.

How was this possible? Both the Nazis and Pinochet’s dictatorship dismantled constraints on the power of the police and the army; imprisoned, exiled, or killed their adversaries; viciously repressed all societal organizations; and generally wreaked havoc. How come less than two decades later, they were back to balancing the powers of state and society?

However bloody and intent on subjugating society the German and Chilean dictatorships might have been, both countries started inside the corridor. Even after they spun out of the corridor, many of the factors that had made their societies active and mobilized remained in place. These factors included norms of societal mobilization and belief that elite and state institutions can be made accountable. They included memories of times when common people were organized and empowered, laws applied to everybody, and the Leviathan was shackled by society. They included, too, blueprints for building responsive and constrained bureaucratic institutions. Take Germany. Although elements of despotic control were important during the period of absolutism after 1648 and during Bismarck’s chancellorship, even in these periods Germany had institutional characteristics capable of shackling the Leviathan. For one, most of Germany, if not Prussia, had deep Carolingian roots. The state and representative institutions inherited from this history were never abolished completely, even in the midst of Prussian absolutism. They bounced back in the nineteenth century, particularly after the 1848 revolutions. These legacies were important in allowing the Social Democrats to become the largest party in the pre–World War I Reichstag. Though the Reichstag’s powers were restricted by the Kaiser and the Prussian elite dominated the upper house, these still provided the basis for an institutional architecture inside the corridor. These historical elements were reinforced and further developed by the Weimar Republic. As a result, even after almost two decades of moving away from the corridor, Germany was still close to it. Compare this to China, which has been in the orbit of the Despotic Leviathan for so long that the corridor is not even on the horizon and the country looks very unlikely to move within range anytime soon.

This perspective thus suggests that, disastrous though it is to have the Red Queen out of control, if the balance between state and society can be rebuilt before too long, moving back into the corridor is a possibility.

But this doesn’t imply that getting back into the corridor is easy or automatic. Had it not been for Germany’s complete defeat in World War II and the subsequent efforts by the Americans and (some of) the European powers to build democracy in Germany, we don’t know how things might have played out (in fact, we suspect, Germany wouldn’t be the democratic, peace-loving, freedom-respecting country it is today). The transition to democracy in Chile was also partly a response to international factors, which persuaded the generals to have a soft, controlled landing rather than risk mounting pressure. Without these external influences, the military dictatorship in Chile might have lasted much longer.

The history of the Italian communes shows us that there is nothing automatic about moving back into the corridor. And of course, the prospects for anything like a move into the corridor for Venezuela, which is experiencing not just a zero-sum conflict but the complete meltdown of institutions, are not good. So the rebound of Germany and Chile should not be read as a tale of predestined democracy or the inevitability of the Shackled Leviathan. Rather, they should be viewed as examples of successful, even if fortuitous, reconfigurations of the balance of power between state and society before it could entirely disappear.

Danger on the Horizon

A population failing to benefit from economic changes, feeling that the elites are getting the upper hand, and losing its trust in institutions. A struggle between different parties becoming increasingly polarized and zero-sum. Institutions failing to resolve and mediate conflicts. An economic crisis further destabilizing institutions and eviscerating trust in them. A strongman claiming to stand for the people against the elites, and asking for the institutional checks to be relaxed so that he can serve the people better. Sound familiar?

The problem is that this describes not just one but many countries. It could be Turkey, where the strongman is Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, pitting himself against Turkey’s secular elite and asking the conservative middle classes and rural voters to keep on supporting him as he peels away all institutional checks. It could be Hungary, where Viktor Orbán is doing the same, with an added dose of anti-immigrant rhetoric and action (even if the country is still constrained by the European Union’s institutions). It could be the Philippines, where the strongman is Rodrigo Duterte, running murder squads against real and suspected drug dealers and users as he demonizes his opponents. It could be Marine Le Pen, who came close to an upset victory in the French presidential elections of 2017 with her masterful reframing of the conflict of the twenty-first century not as between left and right but between globalists and patriots.

Or it could be Donald J. Trump.

But it couldn’t happen in the United States, could it? A country with a wonderful constitution that balances elite and non-elite power and creates layers of checks against overeager politicians. A political system that epitomizes the separation of powers. A society with a tradition of political mobilization and suspicion of autocrats. A cherished legal tradition, highly protective of the country’s democracy and individual freedoms. A history of successfully overcoming previous challenges from the legacy of slavery to the domination of robber barons to the widespread discrimination against African Americans. A nation firmly lodged in the corridor that has been empowered by the Red Queen so many times.

And then again, it couldn’t have happened in the Weimar Republic either, could it?

Chapter 14

INTO THE CORRIDOR

Black Man’s Burden

Awakening on Friday morning, June 20, 1913, the South African Native found himself, not actually a slave, but a pariah in the land of his birth.

So begins Sol Plaatje’s book Native Life in South Africa. Plaatje was a black journalist, writer, and political activist, one of the founders in 1912 of the South African Native National Congress (SANNC), a social movement that turned into the African National Congress (ANC) a decade later. The SANNC formed in reaction to the 1910 Union of South Africa, which brought together the former British colonies of the Cape and Natal with the Dutch-speaking Boer (Afrikaner) Republics of the Orange Free State and Transvaal after the conclusion of the Boer Wars. In the Cape, political rights were determined on the basis of wealth or property, not race. But the Boer Republics had a white-only franchise. The Union had been precipitated by the triumph of the British Empire in the Second Boer War which lasted from 1899 to 1902. During the war the British had criticized the Afrikaners’ harsh treatment of black Africans, creating hope that the postwar order might give black Africans more rights. So there was a window of opportunity for institutional change at war’s end. Yet the newly formed Union of South Africa ended up adopting the harshest common denominator. The more liberal franchise of the Cape was not extended elsewhere, and was gradually eroded. Representation was eventually denied to all blacks.

The lack of political power had dire consequences. It allowed for the passage of the Native Land Act in 1913, which paved the way for blacks, or “natives,” in Plaatje’s words, to become “pariahs” in their own country. Plaatje used another striking phrase, “black man’s burden,” when he observed:

“The black man’s burden” includes the faithful performance of all the unskilled and least paying labour in South Africa, the payment of direct taxation to the various Municipalities … to develop and beautify the white quarters of the towns while the black quarters remain unattended … [and] taxes … for the maintenance of Government Schools from which native children are excluded.

But that’s not how whites saw it. During the debate in the parliament of the Union of South Africa on the law, Mr. van der Werwe, member from Vredefort in the Orange Free State, noted approvingly that the “native would only be tolerated among the whites as a laborer,” while Mr. Keyter from nearby Ficksburg argued that the Free State “had always treated the coloured people with the greatest consideration and the utmost justice” and the Native Land Act was a “just law” that “told the colored people plainly that the Orange Free State was a white man’s country, and that they intended to keep it so.” At this point the record of the proceedings reports “hear, hear” as members voiced their support for Mr. Keyter’s interpretation of justice. To ensure the Free State remained white, the native was “not going to be able to buy land there or to hire land there, and that if he wanted to be there he must be in service.” In support of the law another member, Mr. Grobler, chimed in arguing that “it was impossible to delay the solution of the Native problem.” Plaatje remarks in a note reproduced in his book, “By a ‘solution to the Native Problem,’ ‘Free’ State farmers generally mean the reestablishment of slavery.”

Plaatje traveled the country witnessing the implementation of the act and how it forced black landowners and tenants off their lands in 87 percent of South Africa, the portion that made up the “white man’s country.” The experience of Kgobadi, a black farmer who had previously been making an income of 100 pounds a year, is typical. On June 30, 1913, he was given a letter ordering him to “betake himself from the farm of the undersigned by sunset of the same day, failing which his stock would be seized and impounded, and himself handed over the authorities for trespassing on the farm.” He was offered a position paying 30 shillings a month to avoid eviction. So the white farmer could use “the services of himself, his wife and his oxen” at a fraction of what he had earned. Kgobadi refused and was evicted, left to wander the roads with his family and dying stock, nowhere to go except to take another desultory offer or somehow find a way to one of the designated black “homelands,” the areas to which the white government had confined Africans to live.

Why did the majority of whites want to disposses black Africans? Taking their land and stock was one reason. But they also wanted to secure an abundant supply of cheap black labor for white-operated farms and mines, if necessary by coercion, and preventing them from earning a living in agriculture was an essential step in this process. The Holloway Commission of 1932 acknowledged the situation at the beginning of the century, describing it thus:

In the past difficulty was experienced in obtaining a sufficient supply of labour for the industries of the country … Not accustomed to anything more than his simple wants of tribal life [the black native] had really no incentive for work for more. The European Governments, wanting labour for their industries, decided to bring pressure to bear on the Native to force him to come out to work, and did this by imposing taxation.

Convened in 1909, just before the founding of the Union of South Africa, the Select Committee of Native Affairs of the Cape Colony underscored this intention in its deliberations, which include the following passage:

A. H. B. Stanford, Chief Magistrate of Transkei: [Population pressure and competition for land are acute] and we are getting to the end of our tether in some parts …

W. P. Schreiner, member of Select Committee: Of course, the natural economic result would be … that the surplus population would turn to handiwork and labor throughout South Africa; they would go abroad, so to speak?

Stanford: They will have to develop other avocations besides agriculture.

Schreiner: And make their living by honest toil somewhere?

Stanford: That seems to me to be the only solution.

Schreiner: And a very good solution too, is it not?

But this “very good solution” could only be implemented if the majority of the population were completely disenfranchised so that they could not object. That’s what the Union of South Africa proceeded to do. The political disenfranchisement was followed by various legislations, like the Native Land Act, that forcefully created a low-wage labor force for white-owned businesses. Other measures included the “color bar” banning black South Africans from pretty much all skilled and professional occupations. Almost all educational expenditure was directed to whites as well, while, as Plaatje noted, blacks had to pay the taxes. Practically landless, stuck on the homelands, without education and without an opportunity to work in anything other than agriculture or mining, black labor was going to be abundant, easy to coerce, and cheap for white farmers and mine owners. The repression and overt discrimination against blacks only deepened as the National Party, dominated by Afrikaner interests, gained power and from 1948 onward institutionalized and extended what came to be known as apartheid.

South Africa was outside the corridor with the type of extractive institutions common to Despotic Leviathans. How can such a society move into the corridor? A serious challenge or an existential crisis is typically necessary for a change in the path of such a nation. But even such circumstances are not sufficient for a transition into the corridor. In this chapter we highlight three critical factors affecting whether and how a nation can make such a transition. These are the ability to form coalitions that support such a transition; the location of the current balance of power between state and society relative to the corridor; and the shape of the corridor, which affects how these two factors play out.

The Rainbow Coalition

In 1994 the apartheid regime collapsed and South Africa peacefully transitioned to democracy and moved into the corridor. This historic change was spearheaded by a massive mobilization of black South Africans, undeterred by systemic repression and led by the ANC. It was also founded on a new coalition, between the ANC, the black middle classes, and the white industrialists.

Agricultural and mining elites were the main beneficiaries of the political and economic arrangements keeping black wages low. White workers also benefited handsomely because arrangements such as the color bar and the desolate conditions of the educational system for blacks meant that whites could receive high wages in skilled and semiskilled occupations, anywhere between 5.5 and 11 times as much as blacks, who were practically barred from competing against them. The apartheid regime was never as good a deal for industrialists, however. While the color bar benefited white farmers, mine owners, and workers, it increased labor costs for industrialists, who could not employ the very cheap black labor in anything other than the most menial, unskilled occupations. Industrialists were also less worried than mine owners and farmers about their assets’ being expropriated if the black majority gained political power, because taking over and operating a modern factory is much harder than grabbing farms or mines. There were social differences between elites of Afrikaner and British descent too. Apartheid as a social philosophy was a creation of Afrikaners, while industrialists were often English-speaking and less wedded to apartheid. Hence, they were the weak link in the apartheid coalition and a good target for a new coalition that could bring down the regime.

Coalitions seldom form by themselves. They need to be cemented by relationships, guarantees, and trust. It was no different for the coalition underpinning the transition to democracy in South Africa. A key instrument in forging a relationship between industrialists and ANC leaders (and black middle classes) was the program of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE). Although the notion was formulated in the government’s 1994 Reconstruction and Development Programme, it was in fact the private sector that initiated the first wave of BEE projects. These involved the transfer of equity from a white company to a black person or black-run company. As early as 1993 the financial services company Sanlam sold 10 percent of its stake in Metropolitan Life to a black-owned consortium led by Nthato Motlana, a former secretary of the ANC’s Youth League and onetime doctor to the ANC’s leader and future president Nelson Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. After 1994 the number of such BEE deals began to grow rapidly, reaching 281 by 1998. By this time some estimates suggest that as much as 10 percent of the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE) was owned by black businesses. The problem was that the black people who wanted to buy shares often could not afford to. Solution: the companies lent them the money to buy their own shares at massive discounts, usually 15 to 40 percent below market value.

In 1997 the ANC government appointed a BEE commission headed by Cyril Ramaphosa (who later became post-apartheid South Africa’s fourth president). Beginning with the report of the BEE commission in 2001, the government moved to institutionalize asset transfers and also to greatly broaden the nature of BEE to encompass “elements of human resource development, employment equity, enterprise development, preferential procurement, as well as investment, ownership and control of enterprises and economic assets.” The commission included a series of specific objectives that the South African economy should achieve within ten years. Among the most important goals were transferring at least 30 percent of productive land to blacks and collective organizations, increasing the black equity participation in the economy to 25 percent, and achieving 25 percent black ownership of JSE-listed shares. In addition, the commission specified a target of 40 percent of black nonexecutive and executive directors in JSE-listed companies, 50 percent of government procurements directed to black-owned companies, 30 percent of private sector procurements for black-owned companies, and 40 percent of black executives in the private sector. Guidelines also specified that 50 percent of the borrowers from public financial institutions should be black-owned companies, 30 percent of contracts and concessions made by the government should involve black companies, and 40 percent of government incentives to the private sector should go to black-owned companies.

The wake of the BEE commission’s report also brought a series of industry charters in anticipation of forthcoming legislation. The first of these, the mining charter issued at the start of 2002, caused a huge stir. When a draft version of the charter committing the industry to 51 percent black ownership within ten years was leaked to the press, share prices on the JSE plummeted. The next six months saw a capital outflow of 1.5 billion rand (about US$250 million). The subsequent negotiations led to a charter wherein companies in the sector would be 15 percent black-owned in five years and 26 percent black-owned in ten years. The mining industry also agreed to raise 100 billion rand to finance these transfers. The culmination of the BEE process was the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act, signed into law by President Mbeki in January 2004. The act empowered the minister of trade and industry to issue codes of good practice with respect to BEE and enforce them. In essence, if a company wants to bid for a government contract or renew a license, it has to prove that it is BEE compliant. This gives the government huge leverage in some sectors, such as mining.

The South African social scientist Moeletsi Mbeki, brother of President Thabo Mbeki, described BEE as an unholy alliance:

The South African political elite is being encouraged to pursue BEE by elements of the super rich who seek political favors from the state in order to (1) Externalize their assets by moving the primary listing of their corporations from the Johannesburg Stock Exchange to the London Stock Exchange, (2) get the first bite of government contracts, and (3) buy seats at the high table of economic policy decisionmaking.

Unholy or not, this alliance was essential to secure South Africa’s move into the corridor. It not only initiated close relationships between industrialists and segments of society previously left out of political power, it also provided guarantees to businesses that ANC leadership and the black middle classes, who now had a stake in the economy, would be much less interested in expropriating white-owned assets and wealth. The interim constitution adopted in 1993 reassured white South Africans by enshrining a bill of rights as well as various other checks that made it harder for the ANC to repress the white minority. Also important was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, set up in 1995, which granted a broad amnesty to those guilty of crimes, including human rights abuses, in return for truthful testimonies and evidence that the acts were politically motivated. This was a signal that the re-empowered black majority under the ANC’s leadership would not seek revenge against whites.

But relationships and guarantees are not enough unless there is trust between the partners in the coalition, and here symbolic gestures of compromise matter greatly. This is where Nelson Mandela’s inspiring leadership played a critical role. One episode epitomizing Mandela’s efforts took place on June 24, 1995, on the day of the first Rugby World Cup final in South Africa. The country’s national team, the Springboks, was allowed to compete for the first time, after the end of the international boycott against the apartheid regime, and was facing the odds-on favorite, the New Zealand All Blacks. The Springbok rugby team was closely identified with apartheid, and its jersey was an Afrikaner symbol, much hated by the black population. How would the president of the new, post-apartheid South Africa perform his duties as head of state on this day? Brilliantly, as it turned out. Nelson Mandela added to his year-long efforts to remove the bitterness and distrust between the black majority and the white minority by turning up wearing the Springbok jersey with the number 6 of the captain, François Pienaar. The 63,000-strong audience, about 62,000 of them white, and mostly Afrikaners, were stunned. The Springboks, perhaps galvanized by Mandela’s magnanimous gesture, beat the All Blacks against all odds with a drop goal in extra time. Pienaar, when asked what it felt like to have the strong support of 63,000 people, replied, “We didn’t have the support of 63,000 South Africans today. We had the support of 42 million.” When handing the cup to Pienaar (as shown in the photography section), Mandela told him:

Thank you very much for what you have done for our country.

Pienaar replied, without missing a beat,

Mr. President, it’s nothing compared to what you have done for our country.

Doorways into the Corridor

We have seen the role of the ANC-backed coalition in South Africa’s transition into the corridor. The second critical factor is the position of a country relative to the corridor.

The only way of achieving durable liberty is to move into the corridor and forge the balance necessary for building a Shackled Leviathan. True liberty can flourish neither without a state nor under the yoke of a Despotic Leviathan. But there is no universal way of building a Shackled Leviathan, and no single doorway into the corridor. Every country’s prospects are molded by its unique history, the types of coalitions and compromises that are possible, and the exact balance of power between state and society. For instance, feasible paths into the corridor are very different starting with an Absent, Despotic, or Paper Leviathan. Figure 6 illustrates this point.

Nations with a Despotic Leviathan can most easily enter the corridor by strengthening their societies (or fostering new ways of checking and weakening the power of their states), as the arrow labeled Path 1 in the figure indicates. This was the situation in South Africa, dominated by a powerful white economic elite and one of the most effective state institutions on the continent. So the problem in South Africa was one of mobilizing society and its ability to contest power, which the ANC and the black labor movement achieved.

This is not the problem confronting a society starting with an Absent Leviathan; strengthening society further and weakening the state would backfire. Instead, Path 2 in the figure traces one possible way of entering the corridor in this case, with an increase in the state’s power.

Finally, countries and peoples near the very bottom left, which include many Paper Leviathans and those like the Tiv that have very limited state capacity and no institutionalized ways for society to exercise power, face an even taller order. They cannot enter the corridor by increasing the power of either the state or society separately, since there is no corridor nearby. To enter the corridor they must simultaneously increase the capacity of their states and societies as in Path 3. One way to do this, as we’ll discuss below, is by exploiting the mobilization effect introduced in Chapter 11—by allowing society to get stronger in response to growing state capacity, and vice versa.

Figure 6. Doorways into the Corridor

We now discuss how these different paths work, what types of coalitions and compromises are necessary to support a move into the corridor, and how doorways to the corridor close when such coalitions cannot be formed.

Building on the Iron Cage

South Africa is an example of Path 1, where the main conflict was between society, represented by the black majority of the country, and the white elite controlling state institutions. The composition of the elite and the nature of their power can be very different in other Despotic Leviathans, with major implications for the type of coalition that needs to be constructed along Path 1. In early-twentieth-century Japan, as in many other societies, the most powerful elements in the elite were high-level bureaucrats and military officers, even if big business was a willing fellow traveler. Japan had taken a turn toward greater despotism, building its own version of the “iron cage” during the early twentieth century, based on the growing clout of the military, whose upper echelons were staunchly opposed to any move away from elite-dominated politics. The control of the military, together with the emperor and the bureaucratic cadres around him, over politics centering on the philosophy of kokutai, the “Japanese national essence,” elevated these groups over society. This dominance deepened during the war years following the Japanese invasion of Manchuria. But things had to change after Japan’s decisive defeat in World War II, after the United States dropped the atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Would there be a Japanese doorway into the corridor with the military-bureaucratic complex relinquishing its dominance?

There was a lot of uncertainty about this as General Douglas MacArthur, the supreme commander for the Allied powers, landed at the Atsugi Naval Air Base on August 30, 1945. MacArthur was optimistic that he could somehow transform Japan into a pro-U.S. democracy. By the time he arrived, MacArthur and his advisers had formed a vision of how to reform Japanese institutions and politics. In 1944 MacArthur’s right-hand man and military secretary, Brigadier General Bonner F. Fellers, had written a document titled “Answer to Japan,” which anticipated that

only through complete military disaster and the resultant chaos can the Japanese people be disillusioned from their fanatical indoctrination that they are the superior people, destined to be the overlords of Asia… .

To the masses will come the realization that the gangster militarists have betrayed their sacred Emperor. They have led the Son of Heaven, Divine Ruler of the Empire, to the very precipice of destruction. Those who deceive the Emperor cannot exist in Japan. When this moment of realization arrives, the conservative, tolerant element of Japan which has long been driven underground possibly may come into its own.

An independent Japanese army responsible only to the Emperor is a permanent menace to peace.

So there was a need not just for Japan’s complete defeat but also its total demilitarization. This is what the United States proceeded to implement. MacArthur personally convened a team of Americans to draft a constitution for Japan. Its Article 9 disbanded the Japanese military, declaring:

War, as a sovereign right of the nation, and threat of use of force, is forever renounced as a means of settling disputes with other nations.

The maintenance of land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be authorized. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

The next target was kokutai, viewed as the fountainhead of Japan’s international aggression. But MacArthur and Fellers had decided that the Japanese could not govern themselves and needed an emperor. So they refrained from accusing Emperor Hirohito of war crimes. Nor did they attempt to dethrone him, instead simply demanding that the emperor renounce his claims to divinity. The emperor accepted. In his New Year’s statement, issued on January 1, 1946, he included the following passage:

The ties between me and my people have always been formed by mutual trust and affection. They do not depend upon mere legends or myths. Nor are they predicated on the false conception that the Emperor is divine, and that the Japanese are superior to other races and destined to rule the world.

Again rooted in the belief articulated in Fellers’s “Answer to Japan” that the Japanese needed strong leaders, the United States was willing to work with high-ranking members of the military and the bureaucracy, including those who had leading roles in the Japanese war cabinet.

The career of Nobusuke Kishi, who more than anybody else was the architect of the postwar Japanese political system, is telling. Kishi rose as a bright bureaucrat with strong political views in the interwar years; he praised top-down economic management, including Taylorist methods of worker control, and maintained that the political and economic policies of Nazi Germany were the best path for Japan. He later allied himself even more strongly with high-ranking members of the military, calling for a “total war” to increase Japan’s dominance in the region. Kishi’s rise to prominence came with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the installation of the puppet regime of Manchukuo. The Manchukuo regime intended to ruthlessly exploit Manchuria’s resources and jump-start a military-led industrialization there, and Kishi became its architect. He was involved in expropriating from private shareholders of the largest corporation in Asia at the time, the South Manchuria Railway, transferring their shares to the military occupying the area. In 1935, he was appointed deputy minister of industrial development of Manchukuo and organized its stateled economy, which heavily relied on the systematic coercion and exploitation of Chinese labor.

His star rose even higher in 1940 when he was appointed a minister in the Japanese government and allied himself with General, later Prime Minister, Hideki Tojo. He supported the war against Britain and the United States, and was one of the architects of the slave labor program to man Japanese factories and mines with Korean and Chinese workers during the war. After the Japanese defeat, he was arrested as a Class A war criminal, and spent three years in prison, but unlike Tojo and other fellow leaders of the Japanese war effort, he was not tried in the war crimes tribunal. (Tojo and several others were tried, convicted, and hanged.)

Kishi was released on Christmas Eve 1948 and jumped back into politics right away. He repeatedly undermined from the right the postwar prime minister of Japan, Shigeru Yoshida, himself no liberal. In part to get the upper hand over Yoshida, he formed the Liberal Democratic Party in 1955, which has since dominated Japanese politics. Kishi himself served as prime minister twice between 1957 and 1960. Many of his handpicked protégés, including Hayato Ikeda, played leading roles in Japanese politics and the economy, in particular in the industrial policies of Japan formulated in the Ministry of International Trade and Industry. Ikeda, for example, became the key architect of postwar Japanese industrialization and prime minister after Kishi. Kishi’s influence on Japanese politics is felt not just through the continued dominance of the Liberal Democratic Party. His grandson Shinzo Abe is Japan’s current prime minister.

Kishi, sometimes called “America’s favorite war criminal,” epitomizes the strategy that MacArthur and Fellers came up with to influence the path of Japanese institutions: co-opt the old bureaucratic elite. It worked. They firmed up a coalition consisting of the more liberal-minded parts of Japanese society and many of the captains of the older despotic Japanese state that acquiesced to a greater role for society and democratic politics (and to a more limited role for the military-bureaucratic complex). At times, this coalition undercut the power of trade unions and left-wing parties, but it did manage to move Japan into the corridor and keep it there for the next seventy years.

In the Japanese experience we see another path to a coalition, this time built on the same iron cage that supported the previous despotic regime, which nonetheless allows for greater societal mobilization in politics and makes a move into the corridor possible. Though in many cases morally ambiguous, this process helps create a balance and keeps the transition process sufficiently gradual to prevent it from spinning out of control. But of course it’s neither easy to ensure (could it have happened in Japan without its complete defeat in the war?) nor a guarantee that a Shackled Leviathan will emerge, as we discuss next.

Black Turk, White Turk

In the early 2000s, Turkey had its own window of opportunity for moving into the corridor. It too started with a Despotic Leviathan dominated by the military and the bureaucracy. Turkey benefited from both the economy’s strong rebound from its financial crisis in 2000–2001 following a series of major economic reforms and the impetus for political reform from the European Union (EU) accession process. For a while it looked like Turkey might be moving into the corridor. But the coalitions and compromises necessary for such a transition did not materialize.

The Republic of Turkey, though founded by repudiating much of the institutional inheritance of the Ottoman Empire, shows a lot of continuities from the earlier era. The roots of the Republic are in the reform efforts that began in the nineteenth century, first with sweeping fiscal and political reforms promulgated in the Rose Garden Edict of 1839 and later by the “Young Turks” and the powerful organization of (mostly) junior military officers, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP). These reform movements, especially CUP, did not intend to fundamentally change the direction of the despotic Ottoman Leviathan. Their aim was to build up the capacity of the state in order to stop its decline. The reforms and the modernization that they brought were distinctly top-down. For example, when CUP officers catapulted to power in 1908 at the head of a parliament, now sharing power with the Ottoman monarch Sultan Abdülhamit II, they combined their modernization drive with robust repression against protesters, trade unions, and the nascent civil society that had emerged after 1839. Six years later CUP engineered the Ottoman Empire’s entry into World War I via a secret treaty with Germany that two of their leaders negotiated the day after Russia’s declaration of war against Germany.

The Turkish Republic, founded in 1923 after the victory of the forces led by Mustafa Kemal, later named Atatürk, “Father of Turks,” followed CUP’s playbook in many ways (and its leaders, including Atatürk, were former CUP members). The path was open for efforts to further reforms and state building, but always of the despotic sort, led by members of the military and the bureaucracy (business owners and others were only added as peripheral elements to the coalition). The seat of power was now Atatürk’s Republican People’s Party, known by its Turkish abbreviation, CHP. The CHP modernized the economy and society, but also built unchecked power and economic riches for its leaders and their allies. Even though some reforms it implemented, such as liberating and empowering women, modernizing the bureaucracy, and encouraging industrialization, were crucial steps in both building state capacity and introducing a modicum of liberty for many segments of society that had enjoyed none before, they were not meant to move Turkey into the corridor. Many of the reforms, including the Latin alphabet, the Western dress code, and the restructuring of religious institutions, were imposed forcefully on society without any consultation, and those resisting the reforms, for example insisting on wearing the fez rather than Western-style hats, were prosecuted and in some cases executed.

Although in the decades that followed, the CHP’s monopoly of power, initially institutionalized by Atatürk in the one-party system, collapsed, the military and the bureaucracy remained disproportionately powerful. When the military perceived its grip loosening or society mobilizing, it intervened via coups in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997. The military and civilian governments, though often secular, were quite willing to use religion for societal control too, and did move in and out of coalitions with religious groups. In the aftermath of the 1980 military coup, the military junta and the subsequent center-right governments strengthened the role of religion in daily life and in schools as a counterweight to left-wing forces.

Emboldened by these social changes, the more conservative, religious, and poorer segments living in provincial cities or in less-well-off neighborhoods of major cities such as Istanbul started to feel disempowered and demanded greater recognition from the military and bureaucratic elites, whom they viewed as westernized and unrepresentative of their concerns. This situation formed the background for the rise of the Justice and Development Party, known by its Turkish abbreviation, AKP, led by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The AKP was next in a string of religious, conservative parties gaining popularity. It came to power in the elections of 2002 with a plurality (though far from a majority) of the vote. At the time of the party’s victory at the polls, Erdoğan was barred from taking part in politics because, while mayor of Istanbul, he had recited a religious poem. He captured, and to some degree exploited, the mood among the party’s base by stating in a rally:

In this country there is a segregation of Black Turks and White Turks. Your brother Tayyip belongs to the Black Turks.

The “white Turks” were the Turkish elite, representing the military and bureaucratic cadres and the westernized big business allied with them, pitted against society. Though exaggerated and more than a little self-serving, this quote captured the perceived competition between bureaucratic and military elites and a significant portion of society. The rise of the AKP could thus have been an opportunity for power to shift away from the military and the bureaucracy, as it did in Japan after World War II, toward less represented, poorer segments of society. In the first few years of the 2000s, a move into the corridor looked possible as civil society flourished and Turkish democracy deepened with a series of political and economic reforms.

Then it all capsized. Several things that needed to go right for such a move into the corridor all went wrong. In Japan, U.S. tutelage and the repudiation of the old militarist regime made it easier for members of the powerful political elite to willingly join the new coalition and support a move into the corridor. Not so in Turkey. Though some of the liberal and leftist intelligentsia initially supported the AKP and its reforms, the military and bureaucratic establishment was hostile, so much so that in April 2007 the military threatened a coup against the AKP with a memorandum on its website, and the powerful Constitutional Court filed papers to close the party (the trigger was that the wife of the AKP’s candidate for president wore a headscarf!). This almost exactly paralleled what happened to the previous religious party in power in 1997, when it was forced to resign by a military memorandum and then closed by the Constitutional Court. Though the AKP survived, this event was a watershed in the increasingly polarized, zero-sum relations between the party and the military-bureaucratic establishment.

Another important factor was the ambition of the AKP itself. In Japan, society was badly organized and far from mobilized in the years following World War II. The main threat that the business community and conservative elites feared was from the left of the political spectrum, but this was easily controlled by consolidating the right under the auspices of the Liberal Democratic Party. In Turkey, the AKP was already powerful enough to win the election in 2002 and kept getting stronger. The collapse of two other center-right parties, implicated in the mismanagement and endemic corruption of the 1990s, suddenly made the AKP dominant at the polls, granting it much greater political power than even its founders could have dreamed of. So the cards swiftly became stacked against a balance of power in Turkey.

The shepherding role that General MacArthur and American forces played in Japan was at first partially filled by the EU accession process, motivating reforms to improve human and civil rights, including Kurdish rights, and constitutional reforms to rein in the overweening power of the military in civilian affairs. Initially, the prodding of the EU was greatly welcomed by the AKP leadership because it was pushing for reduced military tutelage in politics and was arguably one of the reasons why the 2007 military memorandum failed to bring down the government. But the EU accession process soon slowed down and then totally collapsed, removing a powerful anchor tying the AKP to the process of institutional reform.

Turkey went from one phase of despotic state control to another. After 2007, the AKP hardened its stance and began to take complete control of different levers of power in the country. Critical in this process was the alliance between the AKP leadership and the clandestine organization of the Muslim cleric Fethullah Gülen, which had taken root in Turkey’s security forces, bureaucracy, judiciary, and educational system. Early on, the AKP, suspicious of bureaucrats with secularist sympathies, wanted to appoint people more in line with its own conservative preferences and priorities, but did not have access to cadres with enough expertise. It turned to the Gülen movement, which, thanks to its organization in many high schools and universities, had more qualified members. With the Gülen movement thus empowered, its covert expansion in state institutions intensified. After 2007, the AKP and Gülenists started a systematic purge of people they viewed as hostile to the party, employing sham trials based on manufactured evidence. During this time, the government started cracking down on various critical media outlets and independent societal organizations that had began to flourish thanks to the greater freedoms of the 2000s.

By 2011, Turkey topped the list of countries locking up journalists. In May 2013, protests erupted in Gezi Park, near Istanbul’s Taksim Square, first in reaction to plans to build a new shopping mall in one of the few remaining green areas of the metropolis. Soon the protests came to focus on issues of freedom of belief, expression, and the media, the erosion of secularism in Turkish society, and corruption. They quickly spread to all major cities. The government’s response was to crack down on protesters. The peace process that the AKP had initiated with Kurdish insurgents in the southeast of the country was reversed and freedoms were further curbed. In the meantime, Erdoğan and Gülen, erstwhile allies when sidelining secularists and leftists, turned against each other, probably as part of a power struggle. This process culminated in an unsuccessful coup attempt in July 2016 that appears to have been masterminded by officers in the military secretly aligned with Gülen. After this failed coup attempt, Erdoğan and his allies declared martial law and started purging Gülenists from the security forces, judiciary, and bureaucracy. More than 130,000 people have been fired from the public sector and more than 50,000 have been arrested, in many cases with only circumstantial evidence. In several cases, campaigners for Kurdish rights, critics of the government, and leftists, including some who spent their careers exposing the Gülen movement’s machinations, have been arrested as Gülenists. Limits on the media and free speech hardened during this process. Erdoğan proceeded to introduce an executive presidency with few checks. This narrowly became law through a 2017 referendum under martial law while no mainstream media outlets could campaign against the constitutional change. Turkey still tops the list of countries jailing the highest number of journalists, but now also holds in jail several elected politicians, including the co-heads of the pro-Kurdish party in parliament.

Turkey missed its opportunity to move into the corridor.

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Turkey’s missed opportunity is telling about what we should expect from China, another celebrated example of despotic state control led by a bureaucratic elite in the form of its Communist Party. Our discussion of Japan underscores the importance of forming a coalition including elements of this bureaucratic elite in order to secure a move into the corridor. In the Chinese case, the strong imbalance between state and society is not the only factor making such a transition very difficult; the absence of any group within the Chinese Communist elite willing to join a coalition moving away from the Despotic Leviathan further stacks the cards against it. In fact, the unity of the Communist Party makes it unlikely for individuals who join such a coalition to remain powerful, as Zhao Ziyang, the general secretary of the Communist Party in 1989, discovered when he lent his support to the Tiananmen Square protests. He was swiftly stripped of power and put under house arrest, where he remained until his death, and witnessed his entire public record being expunged. Starting under the yoke of a Despotic Leviathan, coalitions to move into the corridor are not easy to build.

The situation is different under Absent and Paper Leviathans. Because the state is weak, it cannot completely clamp down on society’s developing new organizations and capabilities, even if this is no simple matter under a weak state doing its best to avoid the mobilization effect. Conversely, the mobilization effect also creates room for such Leviathans to gain capacity, even as society is getting stronger and more assertive. So the path to the corridor is not completely closed.

What’s more, society and various civil organizations, including local governments, can sometimes build both state capacity and societal mobilization at the local level. This is potentially transformative for citizens because many of the public services and law enforcement functions under the auspices of an Absent or Paper Leviathan are dependent on what’s being done at the local level (since not much is provided by the national government). Local societal engagement may also be less threatening to national political elites, and might create a window of opportunity for an improvised balance of power between state and society. In addition, there may be room for local experimentation, meaning the possibility of trying different approaches to increasing state capacity and improving the quality of public services. But even more important than this type of experimentation that is sometimes emphasized in public discussions may be political experimentation, which would involve attempts to build new coalitions in support of expanding state capacity while at the same time involving society at the local level. Successful local political experiments may even provide blueprints for subsequent national changes. We next illustrate these dynamics with two successful episodes of local state building, one approximating Path 2 and the other Path 3 in Figure 6.

A Viagra Spring

We saw in Chapter 1 how Robert Kaplan epitomized his bleak predictions for the coming anarchy around the world with the complete breakdown of law and order in Lagos. Wole Soyinka’s journey in 1994 seemed to confirm Kaplan’s worst fears. But a mere twenty years later Lagos looks completely different. It took Path 2 toward the corridor, even if it still has a long way to go. How?

The 1990s were a tough time for autocrats in Africa. With the Cold War over, to hang on to power you had to reinvent yourself as a democrat (or at least as a faux democrat), hold elections, wear a suit, and not be quite so obvious about repressing your opponents. Nigerian military dictator General Sani Abacha, whom we encountered in Chapter 1, died on June 7, 1998, possibly of an overdose of Viagra consumed in anticipation of a sexual liaison with two Indian prostitutes. Soon his wife was attempting to flee the country. When stopped at Kano International Airport, she was found to have slightly exceeded her baggage allowance; she had checked in thirty-eight suitcases, all of which turned out to be packed with cash. The Nigerian military decided they didn’t have it in them anymore. In 1999 they gave up power and Olusegun Obasanjo was democratically elected president. It was a Viagra spring.

Back in Lagos there was an election too, and a man called Bola Ahmed Tinubu was elected governor of Lagos state. On assuming office, he did something unexpected: instead of appointing political allies to important positions, he gave the jobs to qualified people. A respected law professor became the attorney general, while a Citibank executive was given the job of commissioner for economic planning and budget. Lagos faced a lot of problems, not just the mounting piles of trash. For one thing it was broke, and its meager share of resources from the national oil money were unreliably distributed by the federal government. Tinubu inherited a tax authority with 1,400 personnel, but only thirteen who were professional accountants and six who were chartered tax practitioners. Most of the others were political appointees. Even if Nigerians prefer cassava or yam to gnocchi, the hiring process was similar to how “gnocchi” swarmed into Argentina’s bureaucracy. In 1976, during a previous military government in Nigeria, a new constitution had to be drafted. The drafting committee had to grapple with how to define “power.” In the end it decided that power was

the opportunity to acquire riches and prestige, to be in a position to hand out benefits in the form of jobs, contracts, gifts of money etc. to relations and political allies.

In other words, even the drafting committee of the Nigerian Constitution attested that power is all about the ability to create gnocchi!

Tinubu had a different idea of what to do in Lagos. He wanted to deal with the trash and many of the other problems of the city, but he faced a classic catch-22. He couldn’t do anything without tax revenues, and the nature of the state he had inherited made it impossible to collect taxes. His solution was to introduce electronic tax payment. People had to pay taxes electronically rather than in cash to tax collectors. He thought this would reduce the scope for corruption. Then he put a private company in charge of the tax payment system. In exchange for developing a database of potential taxpayers and collecting the taxes, they got to keep a share. This outsourcing strategy was used in other fields too. In 2001 the state hired private auditors to audit companies in exchange for a commission on liabilities. It also encouraged citizens to pay their taxes (as shown by the banner depicted in the photography section).

The result was an increase in much-needed tax revenues. With these in hand, Tinubu and his chief of staff, Babatunde Raji Fashola, who became governor after him, began to rebuild the bureaucracy. In 2003 they started a semiautonomous revenue agency, Lagos State Internal Revenue Service (LIRS), that hired competent, well-trained people. State tax revenues, mostly from personal income taxes, rocketed from around US$190 million in 1999, raised from just 500,000 taxpayers, to US$1.2 billion in 2011, levied on nearly 4 million taxpayers.

The expansion of the fiscal resource base began to fund all sorts of things, one of which was an effort to register all residents through the Lagos State Residents Registration Agency. Another was a sustained attack on the trash, with thousands of new trash collectors. The number of refuse transport vehicles went from 63 in 2005 to 763 in 2009 and then to over 1,000 in 2012. Lagos became a clean city. It also became a lot safer, especially under Fashola when the area boys, who had been terrorizing and robbing the city’s inhabitants, were largely eliminated. Every aspect of society became better regulated. Motorcycle taxis, which were involved in almost half of all traffic accidents, were banned from large parts of the city and Lagos state. In 1999 there were 529 fatal motor traffic accidents and 1,543 serious ones. By 2012, despite a significant increase in the number of vehicles in the city, these had fallen to 116 and 240, respectively. New infrastructure sprang up everywhere, including a light railway to ease commuting. In 1999 there were no new streetlights installed. Maybe there wasn’t much point when there was no electricity to operate them. By 2012 the city had electricity and 1,217 new lights.

Improved public services and lower crime had dramatic effects on economic livelihoods. Between 2004 and 2010, the fraction of the population in poverty fell from 57 percent to 23 percent (at the same time poverty levels increased in almost half of Nigeria’s 36 states).

So Tinubu transformed Lagos by expanding the capacity of the local state. But this would not have been possible without society’s cooperation. Tinubu’s mother was the head of the Lagos market traders’ association. After she died in 2013, she was replaced by Tinubu’s daughter. Since Lagos had a massive informal sector, the market traders association was a valuable political resource. It was also a huge political constraint because its opposition could have sunk the entire project. Cooperation and contestation with the association is evident in tax policy. The traders were one of the key potential revenue bases, but they were very hard to monitor. Lagos state negotiated tax rates with the association, which then took on the job of providing information on which traders used which markets and recording who had paid. In exchange the state promised public services and security for the markets. Organizations of informal bus drivers, artisans, and others entered into similar agreements. The formal sector has also been active in making demands within the institutional structure. In 2000 the Manufacturers Association and the Eko Hotel sued the Tinubu government over the introduction of a sales tax, and in 2003 the government had to cut the rate of property taxes due to opposition. More broadly, the contestation of power by society meant that Tinubu and Fashola had to refashion a social contract based on the notion that if people paid taxes and obeyed the rules and regulations, they could expect the state to perform. This contract was cemented by many channels of information, complaints, and accountability. Fashola even gave out his personal telephone number, encouraging people to send him SMS messages. Lagos solved the Gilgamesh problem and enabled greater state capacity, not via some complex institutional architecture, but through an active society monitoring the state.

Lagos shows why Robert Kaplan’s prediction of coming anarchy isn’t right everywhere. Obviously it is not heading toward a digital dictatorship. History hasn’t ended in Lagos either. All the same, the city shows that even starting from desperate situations a move toward the corridor is possible. The Roman soldier and scholar Pliny the Elder remarked, “There is always something new out of Africa.” He was right. Today there is much local experimentation out of Africa, for people are finding a way to improve their crumbling state capacity and liberty. A huge mass of people still live in poverty in Lagos, and compared to those of us residing in the United States, their lives are short. However, they are a lot less short than they were in 1999 and there are far fewer poor people. Life for most of them is also quite a bit less brutish and nasty than it was in 1999. Governors Tinubu and Fashola started to build a Lagos-style local Shackled Leviathan, with many of the benefits we would expect.

Taking the Orangutan out of the Tuxedo

Lagos had a hard time in the 1980s and 1990s, and so did Bogotá, the capital of Colombia. We already saw the interlocking mechanisms that sustain the Colombian Paper Leviathan in Chapter 11. Virgilio Barco, who was mayor of Bogotá in the 1960s and became Colombia’s president in 1986, bemoaned that “of that booming city that I governed, today all that is left is an urbanized anarchy, tremendous chaos, immense disorder, a colossal mess.” Barco had become mayor during Colombia’s “National Front” agreement, which divided power for sixteen years between the Liberal and Conservative parties. There were elections, but the results were decided in advance. Parties even took turns at the presidency. In many ways Barco epitomized the “organutan in the tuxedo.” In the words of another former president, Alberto Lleras, “In Bogotá he was a technocrat, but in Cúcuta he was a manzanillo.” Manzanillo is another word Google doesn’t translate. An apt translation would be a person who hands out wine at the bullfight. Free wine wins votes, all part of what the orangutan does. Barco had studied at MIT and knew how to wear a tuxedo. But out in the provinces, in Cúcuta, he knew how to be a manzanillo.

In the 1980s, as Marxist guerrillas and drug cartels flourished, Colombia gained a reputation as the world’s kidnapping and homicide capital. Political elites became a little edgy and society mobilized and got involved in politics. A little democracy came out of this process, and in 1988 mayors were popularly elected for the first time. Bogotanos chose Andrés Pastrana, a traditional politician from the Conservative Party, later Colombia’s president. But the elections didn’t immediately solve Bogotá’s mess, because all the vested interests benefiting from the mess remained powerful. The abuse of state employment and contracts was particularly common in Bogotá’s legislative council. The council had joint executive authority with the mayor, so councillors could directly hand out contracts to their friends and supporters. Councillors even sat on the boards of publicly owned companies, which meant more gnocchi and more corruption. The deplorable state of the bureaucracy and its attitude toward the public wasn’t much different from the one in Argentina. In Bogotá, the main administrative building was known colloquially as “the humiliator.”

In 1989 and 1990 things in Colombia got even worse. Three presidential candidates were assassinated. The incoming president, César Gaviria, under pressure to do something, backed a far more radical reconfiguration of Colombian institutions by promoting a constitutional convention. Almost a third of the convention was made up of members of the demobilized guerrilla group M-19. The new constitution, which was adopted in 1991, had several innovations, but one was particularly important for Bogotá. One of the delegates, Jaime Castro, persuaded the convention to include a clause that required the next mayor of Bogotá, soon to be Castro himself, to draft a law restructuring the city’s administration. Critically, once written, the law could be implemented by presidential decree, without the city legislature having a veto over it. Castro was elected in 1992 and the new law turned the mayor into the supreme executive officer of the city. Councillors couldn’t hand out jobs and contracts anymore, and they couldn’t sit on the boards of public companies. They were weakened by a decentralization of the city’s administration to twenty “localities” with elected “local mayors.” Castro thus managed to circumvent the traditional political machines. The law also closed tax loopholes. The immediate effect was to turn Bogotá’s finances around. Tax revenues increased by 77 percent between 1993 and 1994.

Castro worked from the top, but his reforms generated the mobilization effect and a version of Path 3 in Figure 6 as society reacted and organized. A complete political outsider, Antanas Mockus, was elected mayor in 1994. Mockus was a mathematics and philosophy professor from the National University of Colombia. He reached the critical realization that it was possible to simultaneously build state capacity and get society involved in politics—the mobilization effect again! This meant changing how people thought about the rules, the law, and the state so that they could get involved and push for greater state capacity and its deployment in a way that would be useful for them. Liliana Caballero, his chief of staff, described their philosophy as

to not have the citizens go around the state asking for a favor, asking for their rights, but rather the administration going around the citizen that should be at the center.

Mockus’s focus on changing people’s attitude led to many creative measures. He wore a superman outfit and called himself “Supercitizen” (as we show in the photography section). He pinned a toad made of fabric on his lapel to encourage people to be sapos, or toads. A common expression in Colombia is No sea sapo, don’t be a toad. This powerful norm means “Mind your own business, if you see something wrong happening, stay out of it.” Mockus instead said it was people’s duty as citizens to be sapos. He hired first 20 and then an additional 400 mime artists to walk the streets of Bogotá and make fun of people who crossed the street on a red light, threw litter on the floor, or broke the rules. He handed out 350,000 thumbs-up and thumbs-down cards for people to approve or disapprove others’ behavior on the street. Traffic fatalities fell from 1,300 to 600 a year during his time in office. He used all sorts of strategies to help people recover public spaces. One of his initiatives was “Night for Women,” in which he asked men to stay home for four hours so that only women were on the street, watched over by 1,500 women police officers. It was a huge success in empowering women.

In all of this, Mockus’s idea was to harness the mobilization effect—mobilize society to make the state work better, deliver more, deliver right. The average time required to pay a bill declined from an hour and a half to five minutes. The “humiliator” was no more. When there were too many gnocchi to deal with, Mockus privatized public companies. However, when he privatized the electricity company, he kept 49 percent of the shares for the city. When a private company returned it to profitability, the city started acquiring resources to spend on public services. Tax revenues tripled during his administration. Between 1993 and 2003 the fraction of households with piped drinking water rose from 79 to 100 percent. The proportion with access to sewage went from 71 to 95 percent. Not surprisingly, Bogotanos were most worried about violence. That also fell. People started reclaiming the streets, and the homicide rate went down from 80 per 100,000 to 22 per 100,000 by the time Mockus’s tenure was over.

Mockus still had to fight against the councillors who wanted jobs and contracts, but he had a strategy. He later recalled that if someone started asking for special favors, he would look at the person “as if he had vomited … I used just body language [as if] I was wondering how to collect back his vomit from the carpet.” When a senator wrote to him on his personal letterhead asking for favors, Mockus penned a reply: “Senator, someone has been using your personal letterhead.”

There is still a long way to go in Bogotá; as we saw in Chapter 11, all the benefits that Castro and Mockus created didn’t stop Samuel Moreno from looting the city (in part because society’s mobilization in Bogotá was only partial and because Moreno was able to exploit the trust in local institutions that Mockus had built). But Mockus experimented with something new and managed to forge a coalition directly with the citizens, ushering in a potent mobilization effect. He called this Cultura Ciudadana, “civic culture,” a strategy for prying the orangutan out of the tuxedo. As in Lagos it started at the local level.

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We have now seen how the different doorways into the corridor depend on the initial balance of power between state and society. Starting with a Despotic Leviathan, we need an increase in society’s power (and loosening of the grip of the economic elite or the military-bureaucratic complex). Starting with the Absent Leviathan, we need the capacity of the state to increase. Starting with a Paper Leviathan or a situation where the corridor is absent, we need the state and society to simultaneously increase their powers.

We have stressed that regardless of where doorways are located, it is not easy to move into the corridor. It requires a broad coalition, often a new coalition, to support such a move, and it necessitates a balance of power within that coalition, lest one group sideline the others to establish its own despotic control. It depends on compromise so that the contests for power do not become completely polarized and zero-sum. It depends too on the shape of the corridor, in particular, on how wide or narrow it is. We next discuss factors affecting the shape of the corridor and what these imply for the future of Shackled Leviathans and democracy.

The Shape of the Corridor

In South Africa, just as important as Nelson Mandela’s charismatic and farsighted leadership was the fact that economic conditions and thus the shape of the corridor were very different in the 1990s from how they were at the beginning of the century. In the previous chapter, we saw how the width of the corridor affects the likelihood that a country in the corridor will stay there. It’s no different for a country trying to move into the corridor. Comparing the two panels of Figure 5 from the previous chapter underscores how the same increase in society’s power (say, because the ANC has improved the organization of the black majority) may fall short of moving a country into the corridor when the corridor is narrow (in Panel A), but take it right into the corridor when it is wider (in Panel B). South Africa’s corridor was wider in the 1990s, improving its prospects for a transition into it.

Many factors impact the shape of the corridor. One that is related to our discussion of powerful landed interests in the previous chapter is labor coercion. Coercive labor relations impact the width of the corridor because they affect how the political power of the state and elites can be used; because they alter the benefits of this type of despotic power; and also because they influence how society is organized. Let us take each one of these three interrelated effects in turn.

First, labor coercion, whether it takes the form of slavery or serfdom or economic coercion via redistribution of land, regulations, or employer threats as in South Africa, creates a deeper hierarchy in society where the elites doing the coercing are significantly empowered at the expense of the coerced. This hierarchy means that, for any given configuration of the powers of state and society, securing an enduring balance between them is harder. As a result, the same combination of the powers of state and society that is safely in the corridor without labor coercion may be outside when labor is coerced and the might of the state is targeted at repressing and forcing the majority into low-wage economic activities. The consequence is a narrower corridor.

Second, economic activities that rely on labor coercion encourage the elites to act in unison and use the power of the state to defend and cement the existing economic system at all cost. If their dominance over society can be increased, this will allow them to intensify labor coercion as they did in South Africa after 1910. This too corresponds to a narrower corridor in our framework—starting from the same configuration of power of state and society, the presence of labor coercion weighs the scales in favor of the despotic dominance of the state and the elites, and thus makes it harder to support a Shackled Leviathan.

While these two mechanisms strengthen the reach of despotism, a third channel alters how society organizes and contests power. Labor coercion erodes society’s ability to organize and solve its collective action problems. Coercion erodes both because it prevents collective action and because it blocks organizations such as trade unions from formulating effective political and economic demands. With a poorly organized society, despotism becomes harder to resist and the corridor narrows on the other, Absent Leviathan, side as well. Recall that entry into the corridor starting with a weak or absent state crucially depends on society’s ability to institutionalize its power so that it can organize and continue to exert control over the state and elites after the process of state building begins. But under the yoke of labor coercion, such institutionalization becomes harder because different segments of society are not able to organize and act collectively. As a result, just as in our discussion of the Tiv in Chapter 1, the slippery slope is more acutely felt, and it becomes harder to get the process of state building off the ground and the corridor becomes narrower on both sides, making it harder for polities to move into it and stay in it once they are there.

We see all of these factors in South Africa’s early and recent history. The coercion of black labor was particularly widespread in South African agriculture and mining, which had become vitally important after the discovery of gold in Transvaal in 1886. The desire of white farmers and mine owners to have access to, and coercively employ, cheap black labor was a critical factor in their embrace of institutional changes completely disenfranchising blacks, expropriating their lands, and establishing the repressive apartheid regime. Any attempt during the early history of the Union of South Africa to expand the land allocated to blacks or ease the color bar was strenuously resisted by white farmers and mine owners intent on benefiting from cheap black labor, whatever the social consequences and human toll. In part as a result of coercive employment relations in agriculture and mining, blacks lacked the organization to resist these despotic institutional changes, even if uprisings erupted from time to time.

The situation in the 1980s and 1990s was rather different. By the 1990s, though gold and diamonds still played an important role, South Africa had an industrial economy. Many industrialists were happy to see the end of the color bar, and they also believed that their assets would be secure under a more representative, democratic regime, especially if they could bring powerful black leaders to their side (which Black Economic Empowerment managed to do). South Africa in the 1990s was very different from the country that labor coercion had created during the early history of the Union. And of course, the toll that international sanctions imposed on the apartheid regime was an additional inducement to South African business to shed its overtly repressive and discriminatory institutions. Industrialists were now ready to splinter from the apartheid coalition, which is what the ANC managed to achieve.

Equally important for the widening of the South African corridor were the more assertive and organized demands of its black citizens, many of whom were now employed in manufacturing and had organized into trade unions. Even before black unions were formally recognized, they played a vital role in conjunction with the ANC in organizing black workers and formulating economic and political demands. After the Soweto uprising in 1976, which was a response to the imposition of Afrikaans language education in schools, black trade unions were formally recognized and began exerting pressure on the apartheid regime.

The impact of labor coercion on the shape of the corridor helps us understand not just the South African experience, but also the divergent trajectories of Costa Rica and Guatemala discussed in Chapter 9. The absence of coercion in smallholder coffee production in Costa Rica, compared to the heavy labor coercion in large coffee fincas in Guatemala, likely widened Costa Rica’s corridor and facilitated the subsequent evolution of its Shackled Leviathan, while making it even less likely for Guatemala to later move to its narrowed corridor.

Labor coercion and its implications for the shape of the corridor also explain the different trajectories of South Africa and Zimbabwe, formerly Rhodesia, another exploitative white-minority regime. There are many parallels between Rhodesia and South Africa, not least the massive misallocation of land for the benefit of the white minority and how blacks were forced to supply their unskilled labor to white-owned farms and mines for a pittance. Both countries had powerful armed organizations trying to undermine their repressive regimes and hard-liners on the regime side unwilling to compromise. But South Africa had the industrialists as well as the mine owners and farmers, whereas Rhodesia for the most part had only mines and farms. There were few cracks in Rhodesia’s white minority, and the end of the regime came only after a protracted and violent struggle. When the regime finally collapsed, there was little to sustain the balance of power necessary to create a movement into the corridor. The Rhodesian regime headed by one of the leaders of the independence struggle, Robert Mugabe, and his cronies in the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU PF) became despotic, unchecked, and unbalanced. The consequences, predictably, were disastrous for the people and economy of the newly formed country of Zimbabwe.

In Zimbabwe, there was no Mandela and no BEE to cement the coalition that enabled what Archbishop Desmond Tutu dubbed the “rainbow nation.” This was partly because Zimbabwe, with its narrower corridor, did not possess the economic foundations of the rainbow nation.

Shackled Leviathans are just much harder to create in some conditions. When the conditions for their emergence are ripe, then the type of coalition forged by Mandela’s leadership and of the BEE becomes critical. This was clearly recognized by South African industrialists. The executive director of the South African Petroleum Association, a white business group, pointed out:

To avoid following Zimbabwe down the slippery slope to economic ruin, all South Africans and business people in particular, must take black economic empowerment seriously.

And so they did.

A Different World?

Although the end of history is not near and all nations will not converge to the same type of state-society relations, the last four decades have witnessed some notable changes in political institutions around the world. Take one reasonably well-measured aspect of institutions, whether a country has an electoral democracy where candidates are free to compete and campaign and citizens are free to vote. By one measure, the number of countries that are electoral democracies has increased from a handful at the end of the nineteenth century, to 40 in the 1970s, to 120 in 2010 (even if the 2010s have not been a good decade for democracy). Although electoral democracies are not necessarily in the corridor (as our discussion of India and Latin America underscores) and many nations that historically entered the corridor, such as many in Europe during the Middle Ages, were far from being democratic, there is an elective affinity between democratic regimes and Shackled Leviathans. So this trend signals the presence of many more countries entering or attempting to enter the corridor. Why?

Our framework suggests that changes in the shape of the corridor are a major factor. In commenting on Stanley Engerman and Robert Fogel’s influential book Time on the Cross, about American slavery, often called by nineteenth-century American historians the “peculiar institution,” the famous historian of the ancient world Moses Finley quipped:

In the context of universal history, free labor, wage labor is the peculiar institution.

From the massive slave economies of ancient Egypt to serfdom in Europe, to modern slavery in the New World and various types of forced labor in other colonies, including those in Africa, labor coercion has played a fundamental role in most civilizations. Coercive practices directed at workers were not uncommon in the early stages of industrialization, and disappeared in Britain only after the 1889 repeal of various Masters and Servants Acts. But large-scale labor coercion has gradually withered away in most economies over the last half century except in a few dystopian corners of the world, such as North Korea and, until recently, Uzbekistan and Nepal. A major driver of this trend, as in South Africa, has been the expansion of industry, where labor coercion has always been less widespread than in agriculture and mining. This is largely because, as we have already emphasized, manufacturing makes coercion less profitable and feasible, both because the more complex production structure reduces the returns from relying on coercion and because the greater opportunities for workers to organize collectively in factories make coercion more costly to maintain. (Another cause of the decline of labor coercion is the Red Queen effect, once society enters the corridor; we saw, for example, in Chapter 6 that coercive feudal labor relations disappeared, albeit slowly, as several European nations moved along in the corridor.) The result is a wider corridor, creating greater room for transitions into the corridor, democracy, and liberty.

The decline of labor coercion is not the only factor transforming the corridor. Another important economic trend, but with more complex, multifaceted implications for liberty, is globalization.

The Corridor Globalization Makes

The economic logic of globalization leads to specialization. As international connections deepen, some countries will increase their manufacturing output and exports, while others will specialize in agriculture and mining. What does that imply about the shape of the corridor?

For countries specializing in agriculture, the corridor may get narrower. Even if landowners in the twenty-first century are not overtly repressive, agriculture will be less favorable toward societal mobilization for the reasons we have already discussed. Workers will be less well organized and thus less capable of contesting power in a heavily agricultural economy. Collective action may be harder to organize in agriculture for other reasons too. For example, coordinating civil society organizations, protests, and even political parties is easier in urban areas.

Conversely, specialization in manufacturing, as well as services and high-tech activities, will make the corridor wider and improve the prospects for a Shackled Leviathan. One case that illustrates this possibility is South Korea. The country started as a market-friendly but increasingly autocratic regime under the presidency of Syngman Rhee after its separation from North Korea along the 38th parallel in 1948. The existential threat from the Communist North and U.S. support led to a series of reforms, particularly radical land redistribution, and subsequently to a powerful drive toward industrialization. The focus on industrialization intensified after General Park Chung-hee came to power, initially in a coup in 1961 and subsequently in elections until 1972, when he declared martial law. International trade and manufacturing exports played a pivotal role in South Korea’s economic development during this period. Growth was driven mainly by government planning in cooperation with large industrial conglomerates called chaebol, which include some famous names like Samsung and Hyundai, and there were also significant investments in education, partly to meet the demands of Korean industry. But this development took place in a context where, in spite of systematic repression, the civil society that had flourished in the 1950s was still active and trade unions had already become organized in the course of the industrialization process. These changes prepared the grounds for mass protests against the military regime in the 1970s. Opposition culminated in the withdrawal of the military regime, and democratic elections in 1987. The loss of support that the military government suffered both at home and abroad when it violently cracked down on student protesters and trade unions was critical for this transition. The whole process was encouraged because repression is much more disruptive and costly in an industrializing economy than one relying on agriculture or natural resources. Thus, in the South Korean case, specialization in manufacturing, brought about by economic globalization, made the corridor wider and drove the country into it.

Critically, however, the effects of economic specialization depend on the existing balance between state and society. This is evident when we compare South Korea to China, which has experienced even more rapid industrialization fueled by globalization. Nevertheless, given its much weaker society and more despotic government, these changes have not generated any durable movement toward the corridor. Even if the corridor becomes wider, countries too far from it will not easily move into it.

So we see that economic globalization is a mixed bag. Some countries will tend to specialize in natural resources or agricultural products where various coercive practices are still feasible and social mobilization is harder; this will tend to make the corridor narrower. Counteracting this, globalization will also induce other countries to specialize in manufacturing, in services, and even in some cases in high-tech activities, which can facilitate a movement into the corridor. Globalization and the economic and social changes it brings can also facilitate the exchange of ideas, sometimes fueling further social mobilization and new aspirations. When it comes to the effects of economic globalization, the devil is in the details too.

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Economic globalization is not the only factor changing the patterns of specialization. Most countries move people out of agriculture into manufacturing and services once they manage to achieve some degree of economic growth (partly because demand for manufacturing and services expands more rapidly than demand for agricultural produce as consumers become richer). In addition, new and more efficient technologies introduced in more-developed economies spread to the rest of the world and generate another boost to manufacturing. These secular trends, even if slow and uneven across countries, tend to shift the balance away from agricultural production and natural resources and help widen the corridor, with or without globalization.

The shape of the corridor doesn’t just depend on economic factors. International relations also impact the corridor and the prospects for liberty. But like globalization, they have mixed effects, on the one hand pushing toward a wider corridor, and on the other, helping despots. We end this chapter with a discussion of these international factors.

We Are All Hobbesians Now

King Leopold II of Belgium emerged as the real winner from the Berlin Conference of 1884, where the African continent was partitioned among European powers. Leopold convinced the participants in the conference, and other heads of state including U.S. president Chester Arthur, that he was going to control the huge area of the Congo basin under the auspices of the independent “Congo Free State” for humanitarian and philanthropic work. In reality this state was anything but free, and certainly had nothing to do with humanitarian objectives. Leopold ran the state as his personal property and ruthlessly exploited its resources, mainly natural rubber, which was in great demand before synthetic rubber started replacing it in the 1930s. Leopold’s private army, the Force Publique, imposed demanding rubber quotas on coerced native workers, and enforced these quotas with savage violence, including whippings, burning of villages, mutilation of the arms of workers who failed to realize their quotas, and mass killings. Estimates put the loss of population during Leopold’s rule as high as 10 million out of a base population of 20 million.

Out of this huge human tragedy came the beginnings of the international human rights movement, which built on the abolitionist movement’s earlier campaign to end slavery. In the early 1890s an American journalist traveling in the Congo, George Washington Williams, was the first to expose the extreme ill treatment of the population in the Congo, even if the international response to these revelations was tepid. In 1899 Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, based on his experience as a captain on a steamer on the river Congo, was published and began to draw international attention to the atrocities in the colony. Two other pioneers of the international human rights movement, Edmund Morel and Roger Casement, adopted the plight of the Congo Free State’s population as their cause, founding the Congo Reform Association with the explicit aim of ending Leopold’s control over the Congo.

Morel came to understand the depth of human tragedy and exploitation wrought by King Leopold’s regime while working as a clerk at the Liverpool shipping firm Elder Dempster, shipping goods to and from the Congo Free State. His revelations on the abuses in the Congo led to a resolution in the British House of Commons to investigate these allegations, which was carried out by the then British consul, Irishman Roger Casement (who was later executed by the British authorities because of his involvement in the Irish struggle for independence). Casement discovered much of what we know about the situation in the colony. His diary gives a sense of the atrocities he observed. The entries between June 5 and September 9 read:

June 5: The country a desert, no natives left.

July 25: I walked into villages and saw the nearest one—population dreadfully decreased—only 93 people left out of many hundreds.

July 26: Poor frail folk … —dust to dust ashes to ashes—where then are the kindly heart, the pitiful thought—together vanished.

August 6: Took copious notes from natives … They are cruelly flogged for being late with their baskets.

August 13: A. came to say 5 people from Bikoro side with hands cut off had come as far as Myanga intending to show me.

August 22: Bolongo quite dead. I remember it well in 1887, Nov, full of people then; now 14 adults all told. I should say people wretched, complained bitterly of rubber tax … 6:30 passed deserted side of Bokuta … Mouzede says the people were all taken away by force to Mampoko. Poor unhappy souls.

August 29: Bongandanga … saw rubber “Market,” nothing but guns—about 20 armed men … The popln 242 men with rubber all guarded like convicts. To call this “trade” is the height of lying.

August 30: 16 men women and children tied up from a village Mboye close to the town. Infamous. The men were put in the prison, children let go at my intervention. Infamous. Infamous, shameful system.

September 2: Saw 16 women seized by Peeters’s sentries and taken off to Prison.

September 9: 11:10 passed Bolongo again. The poor people put off in canoe to implore my help.

The Casement Report was published in 1904 and vividly documented the staggering abuses in the Congo based on eyewitness accounts. It was particularly detailed on the mutilations Leopold’s men exacted on natives for missing their rubber quotas. For example:

Two cases (of mutilation) came to my actual notice while I was in the Lake District. One, a young man, both of whose hands had been beaten off with the butt ends of rifles against a tree; the other a young lad of 11 or 12 years of age, whose right hand was cut off at the wrist … In both these cases the Government soldiers had been accompanied by white officers whose names were given to me. Of six natives (one a girl, three little boys, one youth, and one old woman) who had been mutilated in this way during the rubber régime, all except one were dead at the date of my visit.

The overall verdict of the report was damning:

By the mid-1890s the Congo Basin and its products became a source of great wealth to Leopold who used his riches to beautify his Belgian capital Brussels while using his agents in Africa to establish a brutal exploitative regime for the extraction of rubber in the interior forest regions of the Free State.

The report transformed international public opinion, and thanks to it, the Congo Reform Association’s cause started receiving support from celebrities on both sides of the Atlantic, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington, and Bertrand Russell as well as Joseph Conrad. It eventually led to the end of Leopold’s rule over the colony.

The international human rights movement matured and gained greater international influence after World War II. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which we’ll discuss in the next chapter, was pivotal. An equally important step was the United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide in 1948, and not just because it took on the notorious genocides of the first half of the century. In contrast to earlier treatments and declarations such as the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 and the Geneva Convention dating back to 1864, which recognized states as sovereigns and sought to regulate their interrelations and the treatment of combatants and civilians during wartime, this convention enshrined the notion that states were not free to treat their citizens however they wanted. The convention stated:

Persons committing genocide or any of the other acts enumerated in article III shall be punished, whether they are constitutionally responsible rulers, public officials or private individuals.

The message was clear. Leviathan or no Leviathan, atrocities against people would not be allowed. At first this was just a statement of intent, without real teeth. But the international pressure and scrutiny on sovereign states intensified with the activities of several organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, which are working to expose and prevent violations of human and civil rights within countries, and the International Criminal Court, founded in 2002, which has jurisdiction to prosecute individuals and even heads of state for genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.

Of course, the effects of these conventions and organizations shouldn’t be exaggerated, and there are scores of instances in the post–World War II era of human rights abuses and even genocides, including in Cambodia in the 1970s, Rwanda in 1994, and Sudan in the 2000s. Nevertheless, the international human rights movement has had two fundamental effects on state-society relations around the world. It has made extreme oppression much more visible, increasing the cost to states and elites of repressing society; and it has provided a common set of criteria and common language for societal organizations to rally around in countering despotism. The roles of both of these influences can be seen in many of the “color revolutions,” where mobilization was partly triggered by the clear documentation of systematic human and civil rights abuses by dictatorial regimes. In terms of our framework, this international reaction makes the corridor wider at the expense of the Despotic Leviathan—the same power of the state that would have otherwise led to despotic dynamics can now be contained with the help of international human rights groups and the societal mobilization that they help generate.

The international human rights movement also expands the corridor on the other side, in particular by encouraging state capacity to be organized and used against discrimination and abuses directed toward disadvantaged subgroups. One example comes from the role that Amnesty International has played in campaigns against domestic violence and female genital mutilation. In 2012 the United Nations finally passed a resolution against female genital mutilation, and Amnesty International’s campaign was crucial in this process. The resulting expansion of the use of state capacity to protect the discriminated against corresponds to the widening of the corridor on the side of the Absent Leviathan.

With these forces in play, one might think that international relations have become a powerful force toward a wider corridor, facilitating the rise of Shackled Leviathans. The reality, however, is more nuanced. A more pervasive facet of international relations renders the corridor narrower and bolsters Despotic and Paper Leviathans.

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In October 2017, the World Health Organization (WHO) appointed Zimbabwe’s then president Robert Mugabe its “goodwill ambassador” for noncommunicable diseases, declaring that he could use this position “to influence his peers in his region.” (President Mugabe is depicted addressing the UN in our photography section.) What influence? This goodwill ambassador is the same Robert Mugabe who repressed his population, massacred thousands of civilians in Matabeleland, expropriated and redistributed land to himself, his family, and his party supporters, oversaw a huge collapse of an otherwise productive economy, and regularly stole elections. But perhaps Zimbabwe has done well in terms of health and healthcare? Not so. The general health of Zimbabweans has been declining together with the country’s economic fortunes. As much as 8 percent of the population might be infected by HIV, and life expectancy has fallen, perhaps to as low as fifty-nine years at birth for men. The shattering of the country’s healthcare system contributed to a massive cholera epidemic in 2008–2009, with estimates of the consequences of the disease running up to 4,000 deaths from 100,000 cases. The best testament to the state of Zimbabwe’s healthcare system is that before being deposed, Mugabe kept flying to Singapore for medical care rather than trusting his health to Zimbabwe’s doctors. The cost of his health tourism in 2016 was estimated at $53 million, one-sixth of the country’s entire healthcare budget.

The appointment doesn’t make sense until you look at the broader international state system. International organizations, including the United Nations, which at times has played an important role in the international human rights movement, exist to work with heads of state of sovereign nations. Their charter is to be Hobbesian—if a state exists, it represents its country and deserves international respectability. This implies recognizing presidents, prime ministers, military dictators, and kings even as they are engaged in robust repression against their populations, including human and civil rights abuses. It’s not only international respectability but financial resources that flow to whoever represents the state in a given territory. These financial resources can amount to as much as 40 percent of the government’s budget for some African countries, such as Somalia. There are good reasons for this international state system. Not recognizing states as legitimate partners would make international cooperation much harder and potentially destabilize regimes. In one sense, the international state system has worked well. It has, for example, prevented wars in Africa and Latin America, despite ripe conditions for border disputes and conflicts.

But from the vantage point of our conceptual framework, an unintended consequence of this international system that enshrines the most suspect part of Hobbes’s theory—that the sovereign is always legitimate and might does make right—is to narrow the corridor. International legitimacy translates into domestic legitimacy, and provides a cover for repressing and suppressing dissent at home. It provides access to resources and cements hierarchy with the current elites on top. This tilting of the balance in favor of the state has pernicious effects for state-society relations. For one, it makes it much harder for society to counteract the despotic power of the state. It also makes it harder for society to institutionalize its power. We already saw these effects in Chapter 11—the international state system props up Paper Leviathans. Even though Paper Leviathans’ roots can be seen in colonial rule, their continued existence relies on the international state system that treats them as true, respectable Leviathans. But Paper Leviathans are too concerned with the mobilization effect and the reaction of society to be able to build any type of state capacity, and in the process they undermine any prospect for institutionalizing society’s power. The consequence is a potent force pushing in the opposite direction to the international human rights movement and making the corridor narrower.

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So with all of these forces, and many others we haven’t discussed, at play, should we expect the corridor to become wider and prospects for liberty to improve in the coming decades? The answer is unclear, but we are optimists and even in the current juncture, when support for autocrats is soaring in many countries and some in the corridor are looking shakier than ever, we see grounds for thinking that the corridor is getting a little wider for most. But the main message from Chapter 1 remains—there is no natural tendency for all nations to move toward a uniform set of state institutions and state-society relations. Despotic, Paper, and Absent Leviathans are no less robust than the Shackled kind. Another message from this chapter is no less important. Regardless of the shape of the corridor, countries failing to form new, broad coalitions and support compromise will fail to get a toehold in the corridor.

Chapter 15

LIVING WITH THE LEVIATHAN

Hayek’s Mistake

In the middle of World War II, the director of the London School of Economics (LSE), William Beveridge, led a team of civil servants to produce a government report titled Social Insurance and Allied Services. This document, now known as the Beveridge Report, became the foundation of the expansion of the welfare state in the UK. Its key recommendations included a significant expansion of National Insurance, the program that provides unemployment benefits, sick pay, and pensions, creating universal free healthcare in the guise of the National Health Service and implementing a minimum wage. The report was hugely popular among the British public. The postwar Labour minister of national insurance, James Griffiths, wrote in his memoirs, “In one of the darkest hours of the war [the report] fell like manna from heaven.”

Some of the report’s recommendations were implemented during the war, with an expansion of infant, child, and maternity services, a program providing fuel and subsidized milk to mothers and families with children under the age of five, and free school meals for children. In 1945, the Labour Party swept to power based on its promise to implement the Beveridge Report, and proceeded to enact a number of iconic legislations making the report’s plans a reality. These included the Family Allowances Act of 1945, the National Insurance Act of 1946, the National Assistance Act of 1948, and the National Health Service Act of 1946.

A brilliant émigré from Vienna, then teaching at the LSE, was alarmed. Friedrich von Hayek’s main concern was the rise of the totalitarian state, and he saw Nazism, from which he had fled several years earlier, as one extreme form of this totalitarian state. Hayek was particularly concerned about “socialist” state planning and administrative regulation of the economy morphing into a type of totalitarianism. He first expressed his ideas about the dangers of growing state administration in the economy in a memo written to William Beveridge. This memo grew into a magazine article, and then into a book, The Road to Serfdom, that has since become one of the most influential works of social science of the twentieth century. Hayek was not against all government intervention or social insurance. He wrote, “Probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rough rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez faire,” and added “there can be no doubt that some minimum of food, shelter, and clothing, sufficient to preserve health and the capacity to work, can be assured to everybody.” But he was worried about the state playing a defining role in influencing wages and the allocation of resources. This, he thought, might be the direction that many countries were moving toward, partly because of the influence of socialist ideas, and his book was meant to be a corrective. In the foreword to the 1956 U.S. edition, Hayek, having seen the Labour government’s policies, wrote:

That hodgepodge of ill-assembled and often inconsistent ideals which under the name of the Welfare State has largely replaced socialism as the goal of the reformers needs very careful sorting-out if its results are not to be very similar to those of full-fledged socialism. This is not to say that some of its aims are not both practicable and laudable. But there are many ways in which we can work toward the same goal, and in the present state of opinion there is some danger that our impatience for quick results may lead us to choose instruments which, though perhaps more efficient for achieving the particular ends, are not compatible with the preservation of a free society.

He continued:

Of course, six years of socialist government in England have not produced anything resembling a totalitarian state. But those who argue that this has disproved the thesis of The Road to Serfdom have really missed one of its main points: that the most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people. This is necessarily a slow affair, a process which extends not over a few years but perhaps over one or two generations. The important point is that the political ideals of the people and its attitude toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political institutions under which it lives. This means, among other things, that even a strong tradition of political liberty is no safeguard if the danger is precisely that new institutions and policies will gradually undermine and destroy that spirit.

Hayek’s “psychological change” here is similar to what we have called the dominance of the state over society. Viewed from this perspective, Hayek’s concern was that the increased power of the British state would emasculate society and pave the road to despotism. As Hayek himself argued elsewhere and even in the quote above, some of the goals may be “practicable and laudable.” But that wasn’t enough, because the character of state-society relations might be endangered by this increased power of the state. That’s what he was afraid of. In fact, the defense Hayek envisaged against this potential problem is in line with our thesis. He wrote: “The consequences can of course be averted if that spirit reasserts itself in time and the people not only throw out the party which has been leading them further and further in the dangerous direction but also recognize the nature of the danger and resolutely change their course.”

In other words, Hayek recognized that the only way to prevent the Despotic Leviathan from emerging is for society to reassert itself against the state’s power and dominance. So far so good. But Hayek’s astute analysis misses a vital force—the Red Queen effect. The only option of society against expanding state capacity is not to rein it back completely. It can alternatively increase its own capacity, its own checks over the state. That is what happened in Britain and in most of Europe in the decades following World War II. And as we saw in Chapter 10, some of these dynamics played out in the United States as well.

In fact, a lot of human progress depends on the state’s role and capacity advancing to meet new challenges while society also becomes more powerful and vigilant. Nipping greater state capacity in the bud would preclude such human progress. It is particularly important for the state to expand its remit during moments of economic or social crisis. In Britain the Beveridge report was a response to such a crisis.

So Hayek’s mistake was twofold. First, he did not foresee the power of the Red Queen and recognize that it could keep the Shackled Leviathan inside the corridor. Second, perhaps unsurprisingly, he did not see what is now much more evident—the need for the state to play a role in redistribution, creating a social safety net and regulating the increasingly complex economy that had already emerged in the first half of the twentieth century.

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Staying in the corridor is not automatic, especially in the face of new challenges. We saw in Chapter 13 how countries fall out of the corridor when the Red Queen turns zero-sum. Hayek was concerned about an even more basic challenge to liberty—the increasing power of the administrative state ushering in a new type of “serfdom.” But the Red Queen effect, provided that it doesn’t turn zero-sum, can also be a powerful force helping a society stay in the corridor while developing new capabilities and institutional arrangements for keeping in check an expanding state. There is perhaps no better example than the founding of the Swedish welfare state in the midst of the Great Depression to illustrate how the Red Queen can play this role and how her mobilization often necessitates new coalitions.

The Cow Trade

The Great Depression created a crisis for state and society everywhere in the West. The economic crisis begot a political crisis, but one that played out very differently in different countries. While Germany succumbed to Nazism and swiftly left the corridor, and the United States scrambled to deal with these problems within its own constraints, Sweden embarked upon what has become an iconic example of the simultaneous expansion of the state’s and society’s capacities powered by the Red Queen effect. In the interwar years Sweden introduced universal male suffrage, a more competitive electoral landscape emerged, and new coalitions not only kept Sweden inside the corridor but significantly increased the state’s capacity to regulate the labor market and influence the distribution of income. Several factors prepared the ground for these changes.

The Swedish economy was largely rural at the turn of the century, with as much as half of the population still working in agriculture. Sweden had a long history of parliamentary representation, including for peasants, as we saw in Chapter 6, and by the nineteenth century the landed aristocracy had lost much of its wealth and power. Nevertheless, the extent of the franchise was limited and its second, aristocratic chamber still exercised considerable influence over politics. Universal male suffrage was introduced in 1909 for the Second Chamber and in 1918 for all elections, and the power of the monarchy was curtailed in 1918, paving the way for parliamentary democracy with competitive elections. The Swedish Workers Party (SAP) played a defining role in these institutional changes.

In contrast to many other European socialist parties, the SAP had shed its Marxist roots quite thoroughly before it started contesting power. One of the architects of this transformation was its influential early-twentieth-century leader Hjalmar Branting. While other socialist parties on the continent were holding out for a revolution led by the proletariat and undermining their electoral prospects with bitter ideological quarrels, Branting was busy looking for coalition partners to turn the SAP into a veritable electoral force. He argued in 1886, “In a backward land like Sweden we cannot close our eyes to the fact that the middle class increasingly plays a very important role. The working class needs the help it can get from this direction just like the middle class for its part needs the workers behind it …”

This quest was helped by the fact that a major objective of the SAP at the beginning of the century was to secure universal male suffrage for both chambers of parliament, which meant a program committed to a strategy of empowering all those who did not have representation, including farmers and peasants.

When the Great Depression hit, Sweden was not spared. As in many other countries, the government tried to defend the value of its currency, the krona, and the resulting policies led to deflation and a deeper crisis as unemployment soared. Even though Sweden partially reversed course and abandoned the gold standard after the British devalued in 1931, conditions did not improve. It was in this context that the SAP’s search for coalition partners began transforming Swedish politics. The SAP at this point turned from the middle class to farmers and peasants as coalition partners. It was an uphill struggle. The SAP was allied with trade unions, whose main priorities were to preserve unemployment compensation, maintain high wage levels, and create jobs in the industrial sector using public works and government spending. They stood against any policy that would increase food prices for workers. Farmers, on the other hand, were opposed to high wages for workers and instead sought price supports via marketing boards and other methods to prop up agricultural prices.

But this did not stop the SAP’s quest. In advance of the 1932 elections, its leader, Per Albin Hansson, presented the SAP as the “people’s home,” open to all Swedes. He explained that its

most important task [is] working with all energy to help all groups suffering from unprovoked effects of the economic crisis … The party does not aim to support and help [one] working class at the expense of the others. It does not differentiate in its work for the future between the industrial working class and the agricultural class or between workers of the hand and workers of the brain.

The leaders of the SAP presented this strategy as a response to the dire conditions created by the economic crisis, and the party’s main selling point for the electorate was its willingness to experiment with activism to counter the adverse effects of the Depression. Its manifesto in the 1932 election made this clear, stating that the country was engulfed by

a crisis developing which claims victims in all sectors of society … [the party] strives for measures for lasting improvement of the situation [and] devotes its efforts towards inducing the state to bring effective help to the innocent victims of the crisis.

It worked. The party massively increased its vote share compared to the 1928 election, capturing 41.7 percent of the total vote, an historic success, even if not enough for a majority. It was at this point that Hansson’s efforts to court farmers bore fruit and the SAP arranged the “cow trade,” entering into an alliance with the Agrarian Party to form a government. The SAP accepted protectionist measures to increase agricultural prices, and in return received a mandate to implement a crisis package aimed at increasing government spending and wages in the industrial sector.

This package was initially opposed by powerful banking interests such as the Wallenbergs and the largest and most assertive segment of the business community, which was producing for the export market and was thus concerned about higher labor costs eroding its competitiveness. But this changed after the 1936 election, which witnessed the electorate lining up behind the SAP in greater numbers. This broad support led to a meeting between representatives of business interests, trade unions, and farmers as well as the government, in the small resort town of Saltsjöbaden in 1938. The meeting resulted in an expansion of the “social democratic” coalition to include businesses, which acquiesced to the new government programs, the welfare state, and the resulting high wages in return for more cooperative labor relations and reduced strike activity.

This model was further developed after World War II. The social consensus came to form around the idea that the Swedish state should support both equity and growth. Out of this consensus emerged the corporatist model, wherein the state provided generous benefits to workers while also encouraging moderation in wage setting and facilitating greater fluidity in the labor market via active labor market policies (for example, helping workers find jobs by retraining them). In line with the agreement at Saltsjöbaden, this strategy benefited businesses as well. A bulwark of the system was the Rehn-Meidner model of centralized wage setting in which a social bargain would fix industry-level wages for all firms. This not only created a more equal distribution of earnings among workers via “wage compression” (all workers doing the same job being paid the same amount) but also implied that the more productive firms would not have to pay higher wages. This was a huge profit opportunity for high-productivity firms that would pay the same wage as the rest of the industry. By the same logic, the system encouraged firms to invest, innovate, and reorganize to increase their productivity, since they could get to keep all of the increase in productivity as additional profits.

Meanwhile, the Swedish welfare state continued to expand and develop. Sweden not only established more generous social benefits, but also provided them at similar levels to all citizens following the universal template of the Beveridge Report. Generous unemployment benefits and health insurance were followed by pioneering maternity and child benefits and an egalitarian high-quality education system, which came out of an effort to “democratize the Swedish school system.” These programs enabled the country to be at the forefront of reducing poverty, a huge achievement during the Great Depression when sky-high poverty rates not only created an environment of fear and uncertainty but also threatened the democratic political system, as in Germany.

From the viewpoint of our framework, the crucial point isn’t just the major expansion of the role and capacity of the Swedish state, but the way this took place together with a deepening of democracy and societal control; society’s capacity increased at the same time as the state’s. There were several facets to this process. First, a primary concern with any expansion in the role of the state is the possibility of “elite capture,” turning state involvement into a tool for a few businesses or some narrow interests to benefit at society’s expense. The fact that this was all happening under the leadership of the SAP and the pivotal role that trade unions came to play as partners in this process and in monitoring and administrating the system was a major obstacle to this type of hijacking of state institutions. The universal nature of the Swedish welfare programs precluded the possibility that these could become tools of patronage in the hands of the elite, and further helped create social cohesion and a sense of ownership in the population, contributing to society’s mobilization to support them.

Second, a major danger related to Hayek’s worries was that the greater role of the state in the economy could come at the expense of business in general, for example, with nationalizations and expropriation of capital. Sweden contained this possibility by engaging the business community in the social democratic coalition after Saltsjöbaden. It is telling in this context that the SAP had consistently refused to partner with Communists and stayed away from nationalization or overt expropriation of profits or capital. At times, trade unions attempted to push for policies that would further increase wages, but the SAP typically resisted them. One exception, which affirms the extent of societal control, was the reaction against a movement in the trade unions and the SAP in the 1970s to change the terms of the Rehn-Meidner model of centralized wage setting by creating “wage-earner funds” to claw back the “excess profits” accruing to high-productivity firms still paying industry-level wages. As it became clear that the implementation of these funds threatened the very coalition that undergirded Swedish social democracy, opposition to them grew. This forced the SAP to back down and ultimately lose power for the first time in 1976.

Third, the expansion of the state coincided with a deepening of democracy. As the major parties in Sweden all came to accept the basic tenets of social democracy, the electorate started having a choice between different parties that would implement versions of the social democratic approach, and also if necessary pull back from more extreme policies such as the wage-earner funds proposed by the trade unions and the SAP in the 1970s.

Finally, the Swedish bureaucracy and judiciary developed in tandem with these changes, especially in the course of administering and overseeing these programs together with the trade unions. In the process, they gained the competence to implement the social programs and restrain abuses of the system.

In sum, the new necessities and conditions of crisis created by the economic downturn were met by the Swedish state expanding both its role and its capacity. In contrast to Hayek’s fears, this did not pave the way to totalitarianism. On the contrary, because state expansion was carried out by a coalition of workers, farmers, and business interests and because the Red Queen effect triggered societal mobilization to keep the state in check, Swedish democracy, far from weakening, got stronger in the process.

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Though the details of the Swedish experience are unique, its broad outlines parallel what transpired in several other countries. Denmark and Norway built similar welfare states, even if the way in which their coalitions came together differed. Germany too developed a welfare state supported by a high level of state capacity and societal controls after World War II.

Equally interesting is the American experience. FDR confronted the same economic and social upheaval that the SAP encountered but also had to grapple with a society that was sharply divided along racial and regional lines and more suspicious of government action. Nevertheless, his early policy initiatives, which included the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) in 1933 and the founding of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, went in the same direction and expanded the capacity of the state to bolster the safety net and help the economy recover. This program sought to bring both workers and farmers on board as well. Title I of NIRA, for example, had a very similar remit to the industrial policies that the SAP adopted, while support for farmers in the form of higher prices was at the center of the administration’s agricultural policies. In both cases, FDR’s initial plans involved administrative controls and implementation, just as in Sweden. The U.S. conditions were different from those in Sweden, however; the NIRA faced fierce opposition from businesses and courts, and many of its provisions had to be abandoned or were implemented differently. But even if FDR’s plans were partly watered down and fell into line with the U.S. public-private partnership model, they achieved some of the same objectives as Sweden’s cow trade, and in the process fundamentally transformed the regulation and administration of the U.S. economy.