Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

On November 30, 1939 the Soviet Union attacked Finland, claiming that Finnish artillery shells had landed in the Soviet Union and killed some Soviet soldiers. (Khrushchev later admitted that those shells had actually been fired by Soviet guns from inside the Soviet Union, under orders from a Soviet general who wanted to provoke war.)

The Soviet Union attacked Finland with “only” four of its armies, totaling 500,000 men, and keeping many other armies in reserve or for other military purposes. Finland defended itself with its entire army, consisting of nine divisions totaling only 120,000 men.

To the great surprise of the Soviet Union and of the rest of the world, Finland’s defenses held. The Soviets’ military plan of attacking Finland along the entire length of their shared border included attacks on the Mannerheim Line across the Karelian Isthmus, plus attempts to “cut Finland at the waist” by driving all the way across the middle of Finland at the country’s narrowest point. Against Soviet tanks attacking the Mannerheim Line, the Finns compensated for their deficiencies in anti-tank guns by inventing so-called “Molotov cocktails,” which were bottles filled with an explosive mixture of gasoline and other chemicals, sufficient to cripple a Soviet tank. Other Finnish soldiers waited in a foxhole for a tank to come by, then jammed a log into the tank’s tracks to bring it to a stop.

In order to make productive use of its entire population, Finland’s school system aims to educate everybody well, unlike the U.S. school system, which now educates some people well but more people poorly. Finland has egalitarian, high-quality public schools with few private schools. Astonishingly to rich Americans, even those few Finnish private schools receive the same level of funding from the government as do public schools, and are not permitted to increase their funding by charging tuition, collecting fees, or raising endowments! While American schoolteachers chronically suffer from inadequate salaries and enjoy only moderate social status, Finnish schoolteachers go through a very competitive selection process, are drawn from bright high school and university students, enjoy high status (even more than university teachers!), are well paid, all have advanced degrees, and have lots of autonomy in how they teach. As a result, Finnish students score at or near the top of world national rankings in literacy, math, and problem-solving abilities. Finland gets the best out of its women as well as out of its men: it was the second country in the world (after New Zealand) to extend the vote to women, and its president happened to be a woman at the time of one of my visits. Finland even gets the best out of its police: again astonishingly to Americans, Finnish police have to have a university degree, are trusted by 96% of Finns, and almost never use their guns.

Finland illustrates well our theme of selective change and building a fence (factor #3). In its eventual response (after September 1944) to the Soviet attack, Finland reversed its long-standing previous policy of trying to ignore and not deal with the Soviet Union. It adopted a new policy of economic involvement and frequent political discussions with the Soviet Union. But those changes were highly selective, because Finland remained unoccupied, politically self-governing, and a socially liberal democracy. That coexistence of two seemingly contrasting identities, one changed and the other unchanged, has puzzled and angered many non-Finns, who coined the scornful term “Finlandization” and implied that Finland could and should have done something different.

While Japan and Britain look at a glance similar in area and isolation, Japan is actually five times farther from the continent (110 versus 22 miles), and 50% larger in area and much more fertile. Hence Japan’s population today is more than double Britain’s, and its production of land-grown food and timber and in-shore seafood is higher. Until modern industry required importation of oil and metals, Japan was largely self-sufficient in essential resources and had little need for foreign trade—unlike Britain. That’s the geographic background to the isolation that characterized most of Japanese history, and that merely increased after 1639.

emperor’s 1890 Rescript on Education: “Japan… is a small country. Since there are now those that swallow countries with impunity, we must consider the whole world our enemy… thus any true Japanese must have a sense of public duty, by which he values his life lightly as dust, advances spiritedly, and is ready to sacrifice himself for the sake of the nation.… The purpose of the Rescript is to strengthen the basis of the nation by cultivating the virtues of filiality and fraternal love, loyalty and sincerity, and to prepare for any emergency by nurturing the spirit of collective patriotism.… If we do not unite the people, fortifications and warships will not suffice. If we do unite them, then even a million formidable foes will be unable to harm us.”

The goal of Meiji leaders was emphatically not to “Westernize” Japan, in the sense of converting it into a European society far from Europe—unlike Australia’s British colonists, whose goal was indeed to convert Australia into a British society far from Britain (Chapter 7). Instead, the Meiji goal was to adopt many Western features, but to modify them to suit Japanese circumstances, and to retain much of traditional Japan.

Japan’s 1904–1905 war against Russia enabled Meiji Japan for the first time to test itself against a Western power; both Japan’s navy and its army defeated the Russians (Plates 3.7, 3.8). That was a milestone in world history: the defeat of a major European power by an Asian power in an all-out war.

In short, Japan’s military expansion in the Meiji Era was consistently successful, because it was guided at every step by honest, realistic, cautious, informed self-appraisal of the relative strengths of Japan and its targets, and by a correct assessment of what was realistically possible for Japan.

Thus, part—not all, but part—of the reason for Japan initiating World War Two against such hopeless odds was that young army leaders of the 1930’s lacked the knowledge base and historical experience necessary for honest, realistic, cautious self-appraisal. The result was disastrous for Japan.

Chileans identify with Europe and with the U.S., rather than with Latin America. For instance, my visit to Chile was under a University of Chile / University of California exchange program. That program had been founded not just to recognize the geographic fact that Chile and California occupy similar positions in the Mediterranean zones on the west coasts of their respective continents—but also to acknowledge that Chile and California are similar in their social atmosphere and political stability. My Chilean friends summed it up by the sentence “We Chileans know how to govern ourselves.”

Most of all for my fellow Americans, Chile raises a frightening question to keep in mind as you read this chapter. The U.S. shares with Chile a strong democratic tradition. The yielding of that tradition to a dictatorship seemed utterly inconceivable to Chileans in 1967, just as it seems inconceivable to many Americans today. But it did happen in Chile, and the warning signs there were visible in retrospect. Could it also happen to the U.S.?

In the 1970 elections Allende received the largest share of the popular vote (36%), but only barely, because the much larger percentage (64%) of the electorate opposed to him was split between a right-wing coalition (35%, only 1.4% lower than Allende’s share!) and a center coalition (28%). Since Allende had obtained only a plurality rather than a majority of votes, his election required confirmation by Congress, which did confirm him in return for a series of constitutional amendments guaranteeing freedom of the press and other freedoms.

what policies did Allende adopt upon becoming president? Even though he knew that his candidacy had been supported by only 36% of Chilean voters and had been opposed by the Chilean armed forces and the U.S. government, he rejected moderation, caution, and compromise, and instead pursued policies guaranteed to be anathema to those opposing forces. His first measure, with the unanimous support of Chile’s Congress, was to nationalize the U.S.-owned copper companies without paying compensation; that’s a recipe for making powerful international enemies. (Allende’s pretext for not paying compensation was to label company profits already earned above a certain rate of return as “excess profits,” to be counted against compensation and cancelling out the compensation owed.) He nationalized other big international businesses. He horrified the Chilean armed forces by bringing large numbers of Cubans into Chile, by carrying a personal machine gun given to him by Fidel Castro, and by inviting Castro to Chile for a visit that stretched out to five weeks. He froze prices (even of small consumer items like shoe-laces), replaced free-market elements of Chile’s economy with socialist-style state planning, granted big wage increases, greatly increased government spending, and printed paper money to cover the resulting government deficits. He extended President Frei’s agrarian reform by expropriating large estates and turning them over to peasant cooperatives. While that agrarian reform and o...

An economist friend summed up for me Allende’s fall as follows: “Allende fell because his economic policies depended on populist measures that had failed again and again in other countries. They produced short-term benefits, at the cost of mortgaging Chile’s future and creating runaway inflation.” Many Chileans admired Allende and viewed him almost as a saint. But saintly virtues don’t necessarily translate themselves into political success.

The barbaric deeds that happened in Chile after September 11, 1973 cannot be understood without recognizing the role of Pinochet. Like Hitler in the Germany of the 1930’s and 1940’s, Pinochet, while part of a broader context, was a leader who imposed his stamp on the course of history. He was even more of an enigma than was Allende.

By 1976, Pinochet’s government had arrested 130,000 Chileans, or 1% of Chile’s population.

The main change introduced by Concertación into the military government’s economic policies was to increase government spending on social programs and to reform labor laws. The result has been that, since the 1990 change of government, the Chilean economy has grown at an impressive rate, and that Chile leads the rest of Latin America economically. Average incomes in Chile were only 19% of U.S. averages in 1975; that proportion had risen to 44% by the year 2000, while average incomes in the rest of Latin America were dropping over that same time. Inflation rates in Chile are low, the rule of law is strong, private property rights are well protected, and the pervasive corruption with which I had to deal during my 1967 visit has decreased. A consequence (and also a partial cause) of this improved economic climate was a doubling of foreign investment that took place quickly in Chile during the first seven years of the return of democracy.

It is painful for any country to acknowledge and atone for evil deeds that its officials committed against its own citizens or against citizens of other countries. It’s painful because nothing can undo the past, and often many of the perpetrators are still alive, unrepentant, powerful, and widely supported. Acknowledgment and atonement have been especially difficult for Chile, because Pinochet was supported by such a large minority of Chilean voters even in the 1989 uncoerced plebiscite, because Pinochet remained commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and because the democratic government had good reason to fear another military coup if it proceeded against military perpetrators.

But even Chilean rightists were shocked by a U.S. Senate subcommittee’s revelation that Pinochet had stashed $30 million in 125 secret U.S. bank accounts. While rightists had been prepared to tolerate torturing and killing, they were disillusioned to learn that Pinochet, whom they had considered different from and better than other dishonest Latin American dictators, stole and hid money.

Chile, again like Indonesia in 1965 and Germany in 1933 but unlike Meiji Japan or post–World War Two Australia, illustrates the role of one exceptional leader: in the case of Pinochet, a leader who was exceptionally evil (in my view). Chilean friends tell me that Chile’s growing polarization in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s made it likely that the resolution of that polarization would be violent. Even before the coup of September 11, 1973, violence had been increasing for six years. What surprised Chileans, such as my friends at the December 1973 dinner party who expected the military government to remain in power for less than two years, was the duration of the violence. It wasn’t just a quick spasm of killings for a few days or weeks after the coup; Chileans continued to be tortured and killed for many years, and Pinochet continued to hold on to power for almost 17 years.

Indonesia is the world’s fourth most populous country, with about 260 million inhabitants, exceeded only by China, India, and the United States. It’s also the world’s most populous country with a predominantly Muslim population, home to more inhabitants than even Pakistan, Bangladesh, or Iran.

Indonesia is a new country that didn’t become independent until 1945, and that didn’t even become unified as a colony until around 1910.

Geographically, Indonesia is the most splintered country in the world, with thousands of inhabited islands scattered over an expanse of 3,400 miles from west to east. For most of the last 2,000 years, there were indigenous states on some Indonesian islands.

As president, Sukarno blamed Indonesia’s poverty on Dutch imperialism and capitalism, abrogated Indonesia’s inherited debts, nationalized Dutch properties, and turned over the management of most of them to the army. He developed a state-centered economy that the army, the civil bureaucracy, and Sukarno himself could milk for their benefit. Not surprisingly, Indonesian private enterprise and foreign aid both declined. Both the U.S. and the British governments became alarmed and sought to destabilize Sukarno’s position, just as the U.S. had tried to destabilize Allende in Chile. Sukarno responded by telling the U.S. to “go to hell with your aid”; then in 1965 he expelled the American Peace Corps and withdrew from the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. Inflation soared, and Indonesia’s currency (the rupiah) lost 90% of its value during 1965.

Sukarno became convinced that he was uniquely capable of divining and interpreting the wishes (including the unconscious wishes) of the Indonesian people, and of serving as their prophet. After the 1955 Bandung conference of Asian and African states, Sukarno extended his goals to the world stage and began to view it as his personal responsibility to have Indonesia play a leading role in Third World anti-colonial politics at a time when Indonesia’s own internal problems were so pressing (Plate 5.2). In 1963 he let himself be declared president-for-life.

contrast to Sukarno, Suharto did not pursue Third World anti-colonial politics and had no territorial ambitions outside the Indonesian archipelago. He concentrated instead on Indonesian domestic problems. In particular, Suharto ended Sukarno’s armed “confrontation” with Malaysia over Borneo, rejoined the United Nations, abandoned Sukarno’s ideologically motivated alignment with Communist China, and aligned Indonesia instead with the West for economic and strategic reasons.

In 1999, the year after Suharto’s fall, Indonesia carried out its first relatively free elections in more than 40 years. Since then, Indonesia has had a series of elections with voter turnouts far higher than voter turnouts in the U.S.: turnouts of 70%–90%, whereas voter turnouts in the U.S. barely reach 60% even for presidential elections. In 2014 Indonesia’s latest presidential election was won by an anti-establishment civilian, the former mayor of Jakarta, Joko Widodo, whose defeated opponent was an army general. Corruption has decreased, and sometimes it gets punished.

Like Chile but unlike Finland, Indonesia illustrates the breakdown of political compromise that produced the log jam and secessionist movements of the early 1950’s, leading to Sukarno’s installation of “guided democracy,” then to the Indonesian Communist Party calling for arming the workers and peasants, which led in turn to the army responding by committing mass murder. Also like Chile but unlike Finland, Indonesia illustrates the role played by unusual leaders. In the case of Indonesia, those were Sukarno, blessed by charisma and cursed by overconfidence in that charisma; and Suharto, blessed by patience, caution, and political skills, and cursed by his policy of murderous cruelty, by his blindness to the corruption of his own family, and by his lack of faith in his own countrymen. Finally, as for reconciliation after killings provoked by the breakdown of political compromise, Indonesia stands at the opposite extreme from Finland, with Chile intermediate: rapid reconciliation in Finland after the Finnish Civil War; much open discussion and trials of perpetrators in Chile, but incomplete reconciliation; and very limited discussion or reconciliation, and no trials, in Indonesia. Factors responsible for Indonesia’s lack of trials include the country’s weak democratic traditions; the fact that post-Pinochet Chile’s motto “a fatherland for all Chileans” found less echo in post-Suharto Indonesia; and, most of all, that Indonesia remained a military dictatorship for 33 years af...

Today, Germany is a liberal democracy. Its economy is the fourth largest in the world, and is one of the world’s leading export economies. Germany is the most powerful country in Europe west of Russia. It established its own stable currency (the Deutsche Mark); then it played a leading role in establishing a common European currency (the euro), and in establishing the European Union that now joins it peacefully with the countries that it had so recently attacked. Germany has largely dealt with its Nazi past. German society is much less authoritarian than it once was.

British Australia’s White Australia policy was directed not just at non-white potential immigrants from overseas. It was directed also at the non-white original Australians into whose lands white British settlers were immigrating, whose right to those lands was denied, and who (many white settlers hoped) would die out quickly.

Australians debating the federal constitution argued about many matters but were unanimous about excluding all non-white races from Australia.

The undermining of the White Australia policy that produced the Asian immigrants and Asian restaurants awaiting me in Brisbane in 2008 resulted from five considerations: military protection, political developments in Asia, shifts of Australian trade, the immigrants themselves, and British policy.

Within a decade or two, it is likely that Asians will constitute over 15% of Australia’s population and its legislators, and over 50% of the students in top Australian universities. Sooner or later, Australia will elect an Asian as its prime minister. (At the moment that I write this sentence, a Vietnamese immigrant is already governor of South Australia.) As those changes unfold, won’t it appear incongruous for Australia to retain the Queen of Britain as its head of state, to retain her portrait on its currency, and to retain an Australian flag based on the British flag?

Japan today has the world’s third-largest economy, only recently overtaken by China’s. Japan accounts for about 8% of global economic output, almost half that of the world’s largest economy (the U.S.’s), and more than double that of the United Kingdom, another famously productive country.

and because it has high average individual productivity. While Japan’s large domestic debt attracts much attention (more about that below), nevertheless Japan is the world’s leading creditor nation. It has the world’s second-highest foreign exchange reserves, and it rivals China as the biggest holder of U.S. debt.

Every year, the World Economic Forum reports for the world’s nations a number called the Global Competitiveness Index, which integrates a dozen sets of numbers influencing a country’s economic productivity. Japan for many years has consistently ranked among the world’s top 10 countries with respect to this index; Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong are the only three economies outside Western Europe and the U.S. to rate in that top 10.

The only two countries whose economies exceed Japan’s are the U.S. and China, but they devote a large fraction of their budgets to military expenditures. Japan saves itself those costs, thanks to a clause of the U.S.-imposed 1947 constitution (now endorsed by a large fraction of Japanese people themselves) that reduced Japan’s armed forces to a bare minimum.

Literacy and attained educational levels in Japan are close to the highest in the world. Enrollment of Japanese children in both kindergarten and secondary school is almost universal, although neither is compulsory. Student testing in nations around the world shows that Japanese students rank fourth highest in math and science functional literacy, ahead of all European countries and the U.S. Japan is second only to Canada in the percentage of its adults—nearly 50%—who go on to higher education beyond high school.

Low and dropping birth rates prevail throughout the First World. But Japan has nearly the world’s lowest birth rate: 7 births per year per 1,000 people, compared to 13 in the U.S., 19 averaged over the whole world, and more than 40 in some African countries.

Japan’s low and still declining birth and marriage rates are directly responsible for two remaining big problems widely recognized in Japan: the declining population, and the aging population.

No one, in the 5,400-year history of centralized government on all of the continents, has figured out how to ensure that the policies implemented with enviable speed by dictatorships consist predominantly of good policies. Just think of the horribly self-destructive policies that China also implemented quickly, and whose consequences were unparalleled in any large First World democracy. Those self-destructive policies included China precipitating the large-scale famine of 1958–1962 that killed tens of millions of people, suspending its system of education, sending its teachers out into the fields to work alongside peasants, and creating later the world’s worst air pollution. If air pollution in the U.S. became even half as bad as it now often is in many large Chinese cities, American voters would complain and throw out the government then in power at the next election. Think also of the even more self-destructive policies implemented in the 1930’s without broad-based decision-making by dictatorial governments in Germany and Japan, which launched those countries into wars that killed millions of their own citizens (not to mention more than 20 million citizens of other countries). That’s why Winston Churchill quipped, in response to someone expounding to him the usual complaints about democracy’s disadvantages, that democracy is indeed the worst form of government, except for all of the alternative forms that at one time or another have been tried.

The first, and also in my opinion the most ominous, of the fundamental problems now threatening American democracy is our accelerating deterioration of political compromise.

As one disillusioned friend wrote me after retiring from a long career in politics, “Of all the issues that we face, I think that the skew of money in our political system and our personal lives has been by far the most damaging. Politicians and political outcomes have been purchased on a grander scale than ever before… the scramble for political money saps time and money and enthusiasm… political schedules bend to money, political discourse worsens, and politicians do not know each other as they fly back and forth to their districts.”

the decline of what is termed “social capital.” As defined by political scientist Robert Putnam in his book Bowling Alone, “… social capital refers to connections among individuals—social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them. In that sense social capital is closely related to what some have called ‘civic virtue.’” It’s the trust, friendships, group affiliations, helping, and expectation of being helped built up by actively participating in and being a member of all sorts of groups, ranging from book clubs, bowling clubs, bridge clubs, church groups, community organizations, and parent-teacher associations to political organizations, professional societies, rotary clubs, town meetings, unions, veterans associations, and others. Participation in such group activities fosters generalized reciprocity: i.e., doing things for and with other people, trusting them, and counting on them and on other members of the group to do things for you. But Americans have been decreasingly involved in such face-to-face groups, while becoming increasingly involved in on-line groups in which you never meet, see, or hear the other person.

On the other hand, factors making a bad outcome more likely in the U.S. than in Chile include far more private gun ownership in the U.S., far more individual violence today and in the past, and more history of violence directed against groups (against African Americans, Native Americans, and some immigrant groups). I agree that the steps to a military dictatorship in the U.S. would be different from the steps that were taken in Chile in 1973. The U.S. is very unlikely to suffer a take-over by our military acting independently. I instead foresee one political party in power in the U.S. government or in state governments increasingly manipulating voter registration, stacking the courts with sympathetic judges, using those courts to challenge election outcomes, and then invoking “law enforcement” and using the police, the National Guard, the army reserve, or the army itself to suppress political opposition.

There is no way that China or Mexico can destroy the U.S. Only we Americans can destroy ourselves.

All three measures yield the same conclusion: among affluent democracies (so-called OECD nations), the U.S. ranks at the bottom in voter turnout. To set the context, average turnouts of registered voters in elections in other democratic countries are 93% in Australia, where voting is compulsory by law; 89% in Belgium; and 58%–80% in most other European and East Asian democracies. Since Indonesia resumed free democratic elections after 1999, Indonesian voter turnout has fluctuated between 86% and 90%, while Italian turnout since 1948 has ranged up to 93%. For comparison, U.S. turnout of eligible voters for our national elections averages only 60% for years of presidential elections, and 40% for years of midterm congressional elections. The highest turnout ever recorded in modern American history, for the 2008 presidential election, was only 62%, far below even the lowest recent turnout in Italy or in Indonesia.

In many democracies, eligible citizens don’t have to do anything to “register” to vote: the government does it for them by generating a list of people automatically registered, from government lists of drivers’ licenses, taxpayers, residents, or other such databases.