Balance of Power: States, Societies, and the Narrow Corridor to Liberty

by Daron Acemoğlu

Like the silkworm that spins and then, in turn Finds its end amidst the threads itself has spun.

This law has been seen to be so significant in the history of Hawaii that it was incorporated into the 1978 State Constitution, Article IX, Section 10, of which reads: Public safety. The law of the splintered paddle, mamala-hoe kanawai, decreed by Kamehameha I—Let every elderly person, woman and child lie by the

roadside in safety—shall be a unique and living symbol of the State’s concern for public safety. The State shall have the power to provide for the safety of the people from crimes against persons and property.

his most solemn determination never to molest or disturb the weakest vessel that comes to Kealakekua, or where he himself is, on the contrary to do everything he can to make their stay among them comfortable.

Shevardnadze combined what we might call this “low corruption” with an equally labyrinthine system of “high corruption.” High-ranking elites, members of the parliament, and senior civil servants were sucked into similar schemes. They were also given a stake in Shevardnadze’s regime because he shared with them the incomes that flowed into his government, mostly from international donors.

Shevardnadze’s family got in on the action too. While most of the population suffered repeated power cuts, two commercial firms owned by the president’s family sold government-produced electricity on the side for a healthy profit of around $30 million a year. There were many regulations of imports and exports, so smuggling was very profitable and happened on a huge scale. In 2003 a parliamentary commission calculated that 90 percent of flour, 40 percent of gasoline, and 40 percent of cigarettes consumed in the country were smuggled.

As we have seen, despotism means silencing and sidelining society’s participation in political, social, and economic decisions, which in turn enables the exercise of despotic power. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the despot will be secure in his position, however, because others may be tempted by the political and economic benefits of controlling a powerful, unrestrained state.

The Caliphate shows how it can unleash huge economic potential because of the order it imposes and the productivity-enhancing investments it undertakes or encourages. This is despotic growth at its best. But it is inherently fragile and limited. It is fragile because, as Khaldun anticipated, the Despotic Leviathan will be continually tempted to extract more revenues from society, monopolize more of the valuable resources, and act in more wanton ways.

Other examples of politicians whose names include the word “shit” are the brothers Gregorio and Guglielmo Cacainarca, whose family name means “shit in a box.” Similarly, the name of the consul Arderico Cagainosa, who held office between 1140 and 1144, is translated as “shit in your pants.” Other names of prominent political families include Cacainbasilica, “shit in the church”; Cacarana, “shit a frog”; Cagalenti, or “shit slowly”; and even Cagatosici, which means “toxic shit.” Get too powerful or misbehave, and you risked getting a surname featuring Caca. A few other features of the fresco are noteworthy. At the foot of the ruler, a little to the right, are two kneeling noblemen in armor. They signify the authority of the commune over the aristocracy who too are bound by Justice. Behind them are a group of soldiers carrying lances that may represent the special force that the Nine recruited in 1302 to police the Sienese countryside. This all sounds very much like liberty from fear (because of Peace), violence (because of Justice), and dominance (because the state and the elite are constrained by laws and popular mandates). At the bottom of the wall are painted words that say as much: Wherever this holy virtue [Justice] rules, She induces to unity many souls; And these, gathered for such a purpose A common good (ben comun) for their master undertake; Who, in order to govern his state, chooses Never to keep his eyes turned From the splendor of the faces Of the virtues which ...

By 1830 continental Latin America was free from Spanish colonialism and Spain retained only the islands of Cuba, parts of Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico. Yet Bolívar was disillusioned.

He wrote: I have ruled for twenty years, and I have derived from these only a few sure conclusions: (1) America is ungovernable, for us; (2) Those who serve the revolution plow the sea; (3) The only thing one can do in America is emigrate; (4) This country will fall inevitably into the hands of the unrestrained multitudes and then into the hands of tyrants so insignificant they will almost be imperceptible, of all colors and races; (5) Once we’ve been eaten alive by every crime and extinguished by ferocity, the Europeans won’t even bother to conquer us; (6) If it were possible for any part of the world to revert to primitive chaos, it would be America in her last hour.

Why was he so pessimistic? Why did he think that trying to govern “America,” by which he meant Latin America, was like “plowing the sea,” an impossible task? There were several reasons. Perhaps the most important was that Latin American society ha...

Latin Americans, making them adopt the famous motto of the colonial era, Obedezco pero no cumplo (I obey but I do not comply); I recognize your right to issue laws and orders but I maintain my right to ignore them. Even more important, it meant a great degree of hierarchy, dominance, and inequality, as indigenous people and black slaves were systematically exploited. Hierarchy, dominance, and inequality are still on display today. Their origins can be seen by returning to the road between Pasto and Mocoa, which ran through the Sibundoy Valley.

These two factors left a society with enormous inequality and hierarchy, but without an effective state. That meant no state institutions or legal apparatus to control the “Caribs of the Orinoco, the plainsmen of the Apure, the fishermen of Maracaibo, the boatmen of the Magdalena, the bandits of Patia, the ungovernable Pastusos, the Guajibos of Casanare.” Creole elites stuck with what they knew.

As one of them, the social anthropologist George Dalton, later put it: The economic backwardness of Liberia is not attributable to the lack of resources or to domination by foreign financial or political interests. The underlying difficulty is rather that the traditional Americo-Liberian rulers, who fear losing political control to the tribal people, have not allowed those changes to take place which are necessary to develop the national society and economy.

The Consequences of Paper Leviathans The type of state discussed in this chapter, and of many countries of the postcolonial world, is very different from the Despotic, Absent, and Shackled Leviathans we have discussed so far. This Paper Leviathan has some of the worst characteristics of both the Absent and Despotic Leviathans. To the extent that it has any powers, it is despotic, repressive, and arbitrary. It is fundamentally unchecked by society, which it continually tries to keep weak, disorganized, and discombobulated. It provides its citizens little protection from Warre, and doesn’t try to free them from the cage of norms (and may in fact get to use the cage for its own purposes). This is all because the Paper Leviathan doesn’t care about the welfare of its citizens and certainly not about their liberty. But it is also because it lacks the capacity to do much, except perhaps enriching the political elites in charge.

But what happens when women are abused by their guardians or husbands? One ranking of gender parity by the World Economic Forum puts Saudi Arabia 141 out of 149 countries (the United Arab Emirates, despite its gender equality awards we saw in the Preface, ranks only a little above Saudi Arabia, 121). This ranking combines many things; one is labor force participation, which stands at just 22 percent in Saudi Arabia compared to 56 percent in the United States.

In the 1990s when the Grand Ulama was asked to make a ruling about the appropriateness of a woman’s delaying marriage to finish her university education, it issued a fatwa decreeing that for a woman to progress through university education, which is something we have no need for, is an issue that needs examination. What I see [to be correct] is that if a woman finishes elementary school and is able to read and write, and so she is able to benefit by reading the Book of God, its commentaries, and Prophetic hadith, that is sufficient for her. When asked about women’s employment, it ruled:

God Almighty . . . commended women to remain

As recently as 1996 the Grand Ulama issued a fatwa that categorically stated that women were not allowed to drive according to Sharia law. There is no doubt that such [driving] is not allowed. Women driving lead to many evils and negative consequences. Included among these is her mixing with men without her being on her guard. It also leads to the evil sins due to which such an action is forbidden.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.