BY RAYZA OBLITAS
Rayza Oblitas is a first-year student in the international development program at SAIS.
The SAIS Development Roundtable and the SNF AGORA Institute hosted James Robinson and Professor Yascha Mounk for a discussion of Robinson’s new book, coauthored with Daron Acemoglu, The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty. Mr. Robinson is a political scientist and economist as well as the co-author of the international bestseller, Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty. He is a University Professor and serves as Institute Director for the Pearson Institute for the Study and Resolution of Global Conflicts at the University of Chicago. Focused on Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, his research examines the underlying relationship between poverty, institutions of a society and political conflicts.
The Narrow Corridor discusses how political liberty is a result of a balanced interaction between society and the state. Drawing from both history and current events, the authors show that the path to liberty is a “narrow corridor” kept open only by this constant and fundamental interaction between state and society.
After the talk, SAIS Perspectives sat down with Mr. Robinson for an interview about his new book.
Perspectives: In your new book, you discuss how "liberty originates from a balance of power between the state and society." What can countries in which society cannot hold the government accountable, where civic participation and citizen demand for public goods is lacking, do? How can countries in this situation move towards the narrow corridor?
JR: This is a difficult situation because you are talking about, what we describe in the book as, a despotic leviathan where the state dominates society and society does not control the state because elites are controlling state power. It is a matter of people organizing collectively to demand their rights and greater accountability like the people of Hong Kong are trying to do now. You can see this pattern in the history of most countries that live in the shackled leviathan, countries that have both strong states and society, and the history of democracy in Western Europe where people organized and collectively demanded public goods. However, getting to a shackled leviathan is not an easy process.
The emphasis of the book is very much on the idea that the history of the world is a history of divergence and not convergence between countries. Of course, the world changes and some forces impact the world in a way that we have not seen in the past - for example, with globalization and technology. But what we see is a path of divergence in the history of the world, so I do not think we automatically expect countries to move towards the corridor. People have to organize to make it happen.
Perspectives: What about the role of elites? Is the best alternative to avoid having elites?
JR: Well probably having elites in inevitable. Most historical examples of successful transitions deal with elites by keeping them happy. For example, Britain tried to appease the elites while still maintaining trust within the broader society. One of my favorite examples of this is in British history is after the Glorious Revolution, when for the first time the government decides it is going to create a proper tax system with an excise tax. Who paid this excise tax? Poor people did. There was also a land tax, if you look at the land tax receipts compared to excise tax receipts, the latter was more significant. In more recent history, President Aristide of Haiti tried to challenge elites, but he lasted nine months in power. I think it is best for government to try and work with elites, but trying to do that in a credible way is difficult.
Perspectives: What forces cause countries within the narrow corridor to move out of it? Do you think that in the long-term countries within the narrow corridor tend toward stability or do they experience cyclical periods of unrest which push them out and then pull them back into the narrow corridor?
JR: We try to emphasize that the path towards the narrow corridor is a social process which is full of conflict. You cannot solve this like some grand engineering problem and configure society in an Utopian way. Instead, there is an endless struggle over how to do things and whose interests the government should serve. There are also challenges which institutions may not be adept at dealing with. If we talk about globalization or the enormous increase in inequality that you see in the world in the last 30 years, these are both challenges that institutions may not know how to cope with. People can then get disillusioned with the institutions and start looking around for different types of solutions.
For example, Germany is in the corridor and if you look at its history, you will see it has this kind of interaction between state and society. However, when Germany jumps out of the corridor, it has consequences for people's welfare. What I find very significant is that after the collapse of the Nazi state, there was still some consensus in German society about how to rebuild things and how to go back into the corridor in a way that is difficult to imagine happening in Yemen or Colombia where society participation is not strong.
Perspectives: In your book, Why Nations Fail, you discuss the importance of creating more inclusive political systems and fostering free speech to promote development. How can we move forward and foster growth in countries with weak institutions? What, if any, development aide systems have you seen that are effective in nurturing more open governments and institutions?
JR: I think what you have to do is try to build better institutions and I am not very convinced that foreign aid can achieve that. My view is that foreign aid does good things; it provides medicines and builds schools. This is good as it contributes to the welfare of people in poor countries. But I do not think foreign aid is equipped to deal with institutional problems.
For example, President Aristide would not have been elected in Haiti in 1990 if the international community did not support him. On the one hand you can say that this was a success for the international community, but there was not a sustained commitment and the international community lost interest soon thereafter. There was a coup nine months later against President Aristide. You can find a few examples where the international community has helped institutional change, but the Haitian example is interesting because it shows that foreign intervention is like a drop in the ocean because it did not address institutional change at all.
Perspectives: What about multilateral organizations; do you think they play a role?
JR: The European Union (EU) had an extremely positive effect on institutions in Eastern Europe – Poland, Hungary, Rumania - during the transition to integration. There were huge financial incentives for these countries to integrate and the EU specified institutional changes for them to join the union. However, looking at what is happening with the EU now, the integration effort has not panned out very well. Everyone massively underestimated how difficult it is to change institutions in Greece and Hungary.
Perspectives: Latin America can be described as a paper leviathan region where society does not hold the government accountable and the state is not strong. Do you think Latin America can move towards the narrow corridor?
JR: I am not a Latin American optimistic, but if you want to be optimistic, there is something specific about this paper leviathan. In at odd sense, there is more of a balance between states and societies in Latin American than there is in a despotic case or an absent case. In Colombia or Argentina, for example, the state is not powerful, unlike the North Korean or Chinese state, but the society is not like the one in Yemen either. Therefore, in an odd way, this might create possibilities for these countries because neither society nor the state dominates the other.
For example, look what Antanas Mockus, former mayor of Bogotá did in the city. He got both the state and society working as he used many different tools to try to get people to act collectively. He started enforcing rules and demanding public goods, but he also got the state functioning. To do that, you need a strategy for dealing with the political forces that underpin the status quo. However, even for Mockus this was difficult to do. What worked in Bogotá with him, or in Medellín with its former mayor Sergio Fajardo, is not necessarily scalable.
Perspectives: In your book, you talked about how important it is to have "freedom from dominance, fear, and extreme insecurity." How can you apply this idea to the issue of gender inequality and the reduced participation for women in politics?
JR: Women's empowerment is an essential aspect of liberty . There is a fantastic paper from my colleague, Chang-Tai Hsieh at the Chicago Business School. He tried to calculate the proportion of growth in national income in the US since 1960 which is attributable to lower rates of discrimination against women and black people. [1] If you look at professional jobs in the 1960’s, like doctors and lawyers, 94% of them were white men. Nowadays, 38% of doctors are women and African Americans. Women and African Americans were discriminated against historically and the economy was not able to take advantage of their talents. The article by my colleague finds that between one-fifth and two-fifths of growth in aggregate market output per person can be explained by the reduce exploitation of black workers and women in the United States. The first picture in our new book is of Emily Davison, an English suffragette who was killed for protesting for women's rights. Addressing this issue now is a matter of women's participation- women organizing collectively and demanding their rights.
[1] Hsieh, C. T., Hurst, E., Jones, C. I., & Klenow, P. J. (2019). The allocation of talent and us economic growth. Econometrica, 87 (5), 1439-1474. https://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/chang-tai.hsieh/research/HHJK.pdf
SAIS Perspectives is grateful to James Robinson for taking the time to speak with us, and to the International Development program for organizing the Development Roundtable. To read about other Development Roundtable events, click here.
PHOTO CREDIT: SAIS Development Roundtable and SNF AGORA Institute.