Political Theory

By Francis Fukuyama

In the first volume, I suggested that contemporary developing countries and the international community seeking to help them face the problem of “getting to Denmark”.

By this, I mean less the actual country Denmark than an imagined society that is prosperous, democratic, secure and well governed, and experiences low levels of corruption.

‘Denmark’ would have all three sets of political institutions in perfect balance: a competent state, strong rule of law and democratic accountability. The international community would like to turn Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya and Haiti into idealised places like ‘Denmark’, but it doesn’t have the idea of how to bring this about.

As I argued earlier, part of the problem is that we don’t understand how Denmark itself came to be Denmark and, therefore, don’t comprehend the complexity and difficulty of political development. Of Denmark’s various positive qualities, the least studied and most poorly understood is how its political system made the transition from a patrimonial to a modern state.

In the former, rulers are supported by networks of friends and family who receive material benefits in return for loyalty; in the latter, officials are supposed to be servants or custodians of a broader public interest and are legally prohibited from using their offices for private gain.… Modern liberal democracies are no less subject to political decay than other types of regimes.

From “Political Order and Political Decay”