[0:04]So, uh, thank you very much. It's a real pleasure to be uh, invited to speak at this Gem conference. There are a lot of people around the room that are old friends, and uh, it's really terrific to uh, to see all of them. So, I am going to present a framework for thinking about development. I've always thought that uh, development was one of the most complex phenomena precisely because it has so many different dimensions that interact in very complex ways. And I'm going to present uh, my way of thinking about how these economic, social, and political uh, factors uh, interact. Uh, and I'm not going to leave you with a comfortable conclusion, because I think that this is really meant to explain in a way the complexity of how the development process uh, actually unfolds. So, let me, let me begin. So, this is the framework that I laid out in my two political order books, in which I basically talk about six boxes on this chart, which I think are six dimensions of development. Now, you can subdivide some of them or you can collapse some of them, uh, but these are the ones that I, um, uh, think about. So, economic growth is what economists deal with, it's uh, increases in in per capita output uh, over time. Social mobilization has to do with the development of social groups and new kinds of social uh, relations when a social group becomes conscious of itself. For example, classic one was Karl Marx saying that the uh, origins of capitalism produced two social classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, that really did not exist in feudal uh, in feudal times. So that's an example of social mobilization. And then, uh, I'm a political scientist, so I get to have three boxes for politics, uh, because I think they're actually quite separate. So, the first box is the state. The state is about power. Uh, Max Weber's famous definition of the state was a legitimate monopoly of force over territory. I think that's actually a good uh, definition. States are about accumulating and using power to enforce laws, to protect the community, to maintain domestic order. The rule of law, as uh, Ricardo uh, indicated, pushes in the opposite direction. You can have something that's sometimes referred to as rule by law, which is where the ruler simply gives commands that people have to obey. That's not the rule of law. The rule of law exists when the ruler himself or herself is under the law, and therefore has to follow the same rules that other people do. And so, the state pushes in one direction, towards the accumulation and use of power, and the rule of law pushes in the opposite direction. It's a, it's a limitation uh, on power so that the ruler can't do whatever he or she wants. And the final box has to do with democratic accountability. These are simply procedural rules to try to ensure that what the ruler does reflects as much of the whole population's wishes and not simply of the elite that happens to be running the government. And so, in effect, you've got one institution, the state, that pushes towards the accumulation of power, and two institutions, the rule of law and democratic accountability that are constraints on power. And what's difficult about getting to a modern state, uh, that is to say, a modern liberal democracy, is that you have to find a balance. If you have a strong state without constraint, basically you've got China today, you know, very powerful modern state, uh, but no rule of law and no democratic accountability. At the other end of the scale, you've got Syria or Libya or some stateless, you know, uh, territory that doesn't have a state at all. That's obvious problem. Uh, but that's not the case in most developing countries. Most developing countries may have, you know, some degree of law, some degree of democratic accountability, but uh, but very weak states. And so, the issue is really not to have a weak state uh, that can't do anything, but a strong state that is up operating under those constraints. Now, those arrows are various empirical correlations between uh, these boxes. Oh, and by the way, I'm sorry, a couple more definitions. So, there's the legitimacy box in the middle. Uh, this is a box that I think a lot of economists don't think a lot about, but I think it's actually very important. In fact, Deirdre McCloskey has written this very nice set of books arguing that the whole of modern economic growth cannot be understood apart from the kind of ideological changes that took place in Europe uh, in the 17th, 18th centuries. And I'm going to talk about that at at some length in terms of uh, how states consolidate and how national identity consolidates. And I think that that is a separate dimension. The thing about these six boxes is that development can occur in any one of them separately for reasons that have to do simply with things going on in that box. So, you can have the state getting more powerful, you can have the rule of law getting more powerful, you can have social mobilization occurring. It may or may not be connected to things going on in some of the other boxes, but in some cases they, uh, they are connected. Now, you have this thing called modernization theory that was very popular, really, up until about the 1960s. And I would say the, the, the bottom line of modernization theory was the following, that it said that development is a single uh, as a single process and that all six of these boxes were mutually supporting. That all good things go together. So, if you have economic growth, you're going to have social modernization, you're going to have changes in attitudes. You're going to have democracy and all of these things will uh, mutually interact. Now, before you dismiss this theory, there are countries in which something like this actually did unfold. And this is simply a diagram of South Korea. So, in 1954, South Korea had a lower per capita GDP than the then Belgian Congo. People thought it had very poor development prospects. It had, however, a coherent state, that state could oversee a period of rapid economic growth. Uh, the economic growth led by the 1980s to a transition from an agrarian to an urban industrial society, social mobilization happened. You had all sorts of new groups like labor unions, students, NGOs that were pushing then for the democracy box, and in 1987 South Korea made that transition to democracy. The democracy strengthened rule of law. We saw that in the public protests a couple of years ago that brought uh, President Park Geun-hye down for corruption charges because civil society was mobilized to protect the rule of law uh, in South Korea and all of that reinforced the legitimacy of the system itself. And so, that's kind of modernization theory working on all six cylinders where uh, in fact, these boxes are uh, mutually supportive. However, unfortunately, several of the boxes actually contain contradictions, you know, mutual contradictions. And this is just a list of four of them, all right? Uh, let's begin with the first one, social mobilization uh, and political stability. This is the one that my mentor Samuel Huntington wrote about way back in 1967 uh, in his book Political Order in Changing Societies, where he said, if you get too much rapid social mobilization that outruns the pace of political participation uh, expanding, then you're going to get instability. Uh, I think that's essentially what was going on in Tunisia and Egypt prior to the 2011 uh, uprisings known as the Arab uh, spring, where you have a lot of people going to university. A lot of new middle-class people, they don't have jobs and they don't have political opportunity and that actually does not is not conducive to stability. I mean, that was uh, that was Huntington's argument. Um, so this uh, is in a way the diagram that he was focusing on. The the dotted lines are negative forms of causality, where social mobilization actually weakens the state. Uh, it weakens the rule of law. It may produce democracy, but you don't have a happy outcome because these different boxes are not uh, mutually uh, supportive. Now, another contradiction, which is kind of obvious one, is between a strong state and a rule of law. So, obviously, states, you know, pursuing terrorists can be too strong. They can violate uh, people's human rights. They can act, you know, they can do extrajudicial killings. That's what's going on under uh, Duterte in the Philippines. I would point out, however, that states can in in with respect to the rule of law can actually be both under constrained as in the Philippines, but they can also be over constrained. I'll give you a little example from my home state in California. All 40 million of us residents of California have the right to sue any given infrastructure project done in the state. We can sue anonymously for any reason that we want. And as a result of this rather broad understanding of standing, who has the right to sue, infrastructure projects don't get built. Because it's just too damn difficult because of the the litigation. Uh, and I would say there's other democracies, uh, I would say India is probably one of the foremost ones that I would say just has too damn much law. I mean, there's uh, you know, it's too easy to block things using the court system which has got a, you know, the Supreme Court's got a backlog of 60,000 cases, so on and so forth, all right? So, the relationship between strong state and rule of law can be very problematic. Democracy and good governance. This is very depressing in a way to me, because I really like democracy. I think liberal democracy is a great thing. Uh, there is a theory out there that says that democracy will automatically lead to good governance because if you have enough transparency and accountability, uh, then people are going to want to demand clean government. If they see that officials are corrupt, they're going to vote them out of office. It's a nice theory, but I think empirically uh, it really has worked in some cases and in many other cases has not worked. And I think there are actually cases in which the expansion of the franchise, more political participation, in other words, more democracy is actually reduced the quality of government. The case that I would cite is actually again the United States, uh, which opened up the franchise in the 1820s to all white males. It previously had been restricted to only white males with property. All of a sudden, you had millions of uh, people that have the right to vote uh, in in the election of 1828. They elect a populist named Andrew Jackson and he begins a 100-year period in American history known as the spoils system or the patronage system, in which every politician basically uses their ability to distribute jobs in the government and sometimes outright bribes as a way of motivating people to go to the polls. And I would argue that in uh, relatively poor, low education level democracies, uh, opening up democracy is actually going to have this effect. And this is really the problem with patronage and and weak state capacity uh, in many places in Mexico, in Brazil, in India, uh, Indonesia, uh, and so forth. And again, this is not an argument for authoritarian government, but I'm just pointing out that there is a tension there, right? There's a tension between Democratic in fact just in South Africa and it seems to me that's exactly what's been going on in South Africa. You actually had a very high-quality modern uh, government that only applied to white people, and then you open it up to the whole of the society and the quality of government uh, goes down. Uh, for, I think, very understandable reasons. The last issue that I want to focus on, however, is this question of, um, democracy and national identity. Because I think that, again, this is an intangible form of state building that I think is really critical and unfortunately, in our world today, it's becoming kind of the central issue that's determining a lot of global uh, politics, all right?
[15:19]So, um, sorry. And this, uh, is the ideas or legitimacy box, which I think is really critical to state formation, is critical to social mobilization. It's critical to the rule of law and it's obviously critical to democracy. If you don't have the right ideas supporting what goes on in these boxes, they're not going to uh, evolve into strong uh, institutions. But I'm going to focus on the one that leads from ideas and legitimacy to uh, to the state, all right? So the question here, what's wrong with this country, right? This is Syria. Syria has had a devastating civil war that is still not resolved. It's led to the deaths of, you know, close to half a million people. Half the population has been uh, turned into IDPs. A million of them showed up on Europe's doorstep back in uh, 2015. Now, there's a lot of proximate causes to why this civil war has been so uh, violent and and and and so neuralgic and and so difficult to solve. But I think one of the underlying factors is the fact that the country Syria had no national identity. There wasn't an uh, an idea of something called Syria to which the different stakeholders in that country felt greater loyalty then they did to their particular sect or ethnic group or region or, in some cases, tribe. In particular, the Alawites felt like a beleaguered minority that was sitting on top of a kind of social volcano, and if they didn't use the utmost, you know, level of violence to protect their position, they all themselves would get uh, killed, and then this leads to everybody feeling the same way. Since they perpetrated a great deal of violence, and the result is the one that you see. Uh, there are many countries in the Middle East that are now suffering from exactly this absence of any sense of state identity. You know, and you've had several of them, uh, Libya, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia. All of these countries, I think, have the same basic underlying problem, that some of them were colonial creations, some of them were patched together out of different ethnic groups or sects, but there is not an overriding uh, sense of national identity that allows people to sacrifice the short-term interest of their narrow identity group in favor of something like national interest. If I had to point to one factor that differentiates East Asia from this part of the world, it's the fact that in most East Asian countries, or at least in China, Korea, Japan, these issues were solved way before they tried to modernize, that is to say, they were all coherent uh, nation states, ethnically coherent nation states, before the European colonialists ever got there. And they had centralized governments. It was a Chinese tradition of centralized bureaucracy, so having a strong state was always uh, in the cards for them, and that's why once the economic conditions changed in the 20th century such that they had the ability to take advantage of technology and markets and all the things that Ricardo was talking about, they just went to town because they did not have to solve this national, this underlying national identity problem in the way that so many other countries in other parts of the uh, uh, developing world have. Uh, and this is a problem, you know, that continues in the developed world. Uh, and so these national identity problems have really not been settled. Uh, this is a particularly difficult one, uh, that's actually dragging Spain backwards, both, I think, the economic threat, I think, will appear. The political threat is really, uh, you know, there, uh, there right now. Uh, and one of the things that I find particularly difficult about this question is that democratic theory doesn't actually give us a normative way of assessing the claim of a place like Catalonia as to what makes it a legitimate claim, uh, you know, when one democratic entity is trying to break off from another democratic entity. Who's right and who's wrong in this kind of a situation, but obviously, there are many other places in Europe that, you know, potentially are going to uh, suffer from these kinds of claims. Now, question then is, where does national identity come from? All right? National identity, as I said, is something intangible. It's basically the stories that people in a society tell about themselves. It's the stories that they, you know, transmit to their children about where did we come from, what do we have in common, uh, what makes us members of the same community, what allows us to uh, trust one another, all right? And this is a story that is told both, I think, from the bottom up and from the top down. So, the bottom-up part of it is cultural. It it's basically, um, you know, it's poets and filmmakers and novelists and other people, musicians, that actually create uh, a common sense of belonging. I mean, that's why music is so powerful actually in uh, many national traditions because it it attaches itself to a kind of deep level uh, of emotion. Uh, there's a, there's a famous account of the Philippine, Filipino novelist Rizal, who in the 19th century wrote the Philippines' first novel. Philippines is 11,000 islands scattered all over the Pacific. Everybody living on one of those islands had no idea that they had anything in common with any of the other, you know, residents of any of the other 11,000 islands until Rizal wrote a book about what it means to grow up on one particular island of Luzon. And then, all of a sudden, people could say, oh, yeah, that's an experience that's familiar to me, and that creates a common sense of uh, of identity. So, that's the bottom-up part of it. But there's also a top-down, uh, part. Uh, so this, uh, again, I've got a couple of chapters on this in my political order book. So, this is, you know, there there are two pair-wise comparisons, Kenya and Tanzania on the one hand, and Nigeria and, um, Indonesia on the other. Now, in in many respects, the two comparison countries are very similar. Kenya and and and Tanzania, uh, obviously, uh, it's less obvious in the case of Nigeria and Indonesia. But they're both oil-producing countries, they're both highly diverse, uh, religiously, uh, and ethnically, all right? And their early rulers faced this question of national identity, and what I argue is that, uh, in the case of Tanzania and Indonesia, those early rulers invested in nation building, strictly speaking, not state building, but building this kind of national consciousness. In a way that the rulers of Kenya and Nigeria never did. And that has led to consequences that persist up to the present. Uh, the projects, you know, by Nyerere in in Tanzania really revolved around language, uh, to make Swahili, you know, the national language of a linguistically very diverse uh, country. Uh, in Indonesia, it was the promotion, actually, again, of a single language, Bahasa Indonesia, uh, that replaced Javanese and and, uh, Sulawesian, all of the other languages spoken on the different, uh, islands. Uh, and then the production of a kind of, you know, if if you read it as an outsider, it doesn't seem like it's very serious, but Pancasila ideology that then gets taught to schoolchildren, uh, all across the Indonesian archipelago. And I would argue that, you know, the Tanzanian government made lots of mistakes in economic policy and politically, but in this respect, that early investment really paid off because they have not suffered from the kind of ethnic, uh, looting and and and predation that exists in contemporary Kenya. In Kenya, you know, right now, elections are all about the major ethnic groups trying to jockey for power. One of them gets, uh, gets control of the presidency, and their ethnic group basically loots the government for the period that it's in power, and then it's replaced by another ethnic group that does the same thing. Again, there's no larger sense of being Kenyan, and I think that, you know, for all their problems, Tanzania does not have, uh, you know, this same problem.
[27:35]So, this is, uh, an issue, unfortunately, that is dominating world politics now because this identity issue is one that is coming to the fore. Not just in poor countries like the ones here, but in rich ones as well, including the United States, I'm sorry to say, uh, where we are living in de facto highly diverse countries in which you have to come up with a national story that is not rooted in religion or ethnicity or race. That's the only way we can live with one another. Uh, and there are a lot of political entrepreneurs that are working in the opposite direction, uh, that want to emphasize, you know, different, um, smaller identities that are pretty good for mobilizing people, because people can get very angry over some of these identity issues. But are trying to drag a lot of countries back into, you know, I think, an earlier period when, uh, identity, you know, was not creedal and and and, uh, you know, was not based on, uh, based on ideas. Something like that is going on in India today, where you actually had a national identity since independence that was built around certain liberal principles in a highly, highly ethnically and religiously, uh, diverse society. Uh, and now, you know, it's being put on a, you know, on a Hindu nationalist basis, which, you know, is fine if you're a Hindu nationalist, but not so great if you're a Muslim or somebody that's not part of that, uh, that community. So, like I said, I have no formulas for how to solve any of these problems. I just think that what I'm trying to do is indicate that these these six dimensions of development interact with each other in these highly complex ways, and you really need to think about the specific linkages between, uh, the different boxes if you're going to make progress, uh, in any of them, particularly in the, uh, in the political order box.
