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individualistic. A relevant finding is that groups of chimpanzees are also violent; males not only fight for control of their own group but also make a habit of raiding other groups. So how did human societies evolve from simple social groupings to more complex forms like modern-day states? Fukuyama weighs various theories and readily admits that he is unable to actually disprove or prove any of them. However he repeatedly comes back to Charles Tilly’s oft-repeated statement that “war made the state, and the state made war.” (Tilly 1975) This process is perhaps first clearly seen in early China where 468 wars took place during the appropriately named Warring States period. At the same time the number of states dropped from sixteen to one and the emperor remained. This brings us to the critical question of why China, having constructed an effective centralised bureaucratic state over a millennium before any European state, failed to develop democracy. Fukuyama spends much of the book extolling his primary hypothesis: in order to develop an accountable government, a country needs to have balance among various groups in society. In China the emperor was all-powerful. He was both the head of the state and a walking deity; there was no existing religious establishment with which he had to contend. In Europe, on the other hand, the Catholic Church provided a powerful check on power. No monarch in Europe could ever truly dismiss the clergy without the risk of jeopardising his hold on power. Along similar lines, India also developed an independent Brahmin caste that was able to provide a check on local rulers; as such, the subcontinent never really developed any strong monarchs like China did. Furthermore, religion in Europe and India differed in another crucial aspect. Where the Brahmins in the subcontinent were only loosely connected to one another, in Europe the Vatican gradually centralised its operations, to the point where monks could draft a universal code of law consistent with church dogma but also useful in the day-to-day proceedings of courts throughout Europe. While the presence of a strong unified religious authority did not make the development of democratic institutions inevitable, it does seem to have played a crucial role in setting the precedent for an effective system of checks and balances. As the book ends, Fukuyama tells readers that they should be cautious in trying to apply the lessons of previous states to their modern day counterparts. In particular he emphasises that while it took centuries for democratic and accountable governance to develop in Europe, there is no reason why the same process cannot happen more quickly in the contemporary world. While in past centuries information travelled no faster than the speed of a horse, when it travelled at all, today almost all of the world’s information is no further away
ASIAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS VOL. 5. NO. 2