Francis Fukuyama "The Origins of Political Order"

1 Watch the video  and put the words into the gaps in the text.

Thank you, it’s really a great honor to be here and to have this wonderful (1)___ and I’m very grateful that you’re all here for politics in prose.  One of the really nice things about being able to speak about a new book is to go to real brick and mortar (2)____ and to realize that there are still people that really like real books and come out for events like this because of the intellectual (3)____ and interest. So thank you all for coming. So I’m going to get straight into it. I wrote this book for a number of reasons. Samuel Huntington, a political (4)___, was my teacher when I was a graduate student at Harvard.  He wrote a very important book in 1968 called “Political (5)___ in Changing Societies” which I think rereading it now in light of the Arab spring actually is probably one of the best guides to what is going on in the Middle East at the present moment. But it’s a book that needed to be (6)____, and I thought of a project of, you know, doing a revision of this book. Among other things that open on the very first page it says: “The Soviet Union and the United States are equally developed political orders” and that didn’t seem quite right after the fall of the Berlin (7)___. But the other, you know, major issue is the one that was just referred to,  I’ve been thinking about nation building, failed states, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, here are all of these (8)____ challenges that we’ve faced and we have this illusion which I would call ‘the problem of getting to ‘Denmark’ and “Denmark” is in quotation marks ‘cause Denmark is actually not a real country, it’s this mythical place that has low (9)___, democracy, stable government, good services delivered very efficiently, and so forth. We have this vision of ‘Denmark’ in the back of our heads, and then we go to a place like Afghanistan and we say: “Well, how we’re going to get Afghanistan to look like Denmark?” And it doesn’t work very well. And part of the reason I began to realize was that we don’t (10)____ how Denmark got to be Denmark. I actually have had a Visiting Professorship in Aarhus University in Denmark, so I’ve been going to Denmark for the last few years. And I’ll tell you that most Danes actually have no idea how Denmark got to be Denmark. And so it struck me as a political scientist that there ought to be a basic book you can go to say where political (11)___ come from. I didn’t see one, and so I decided to write and so that’s why we get this book that I’ve produced. So I also did not want to write a book on the (12)____ of politics that holds this traditional Eurocentric or Anglocentric story not because I am opposed to England or the West, but I think it’s a distortion. And it’s one that’s been, you know, it’s taught still in a lot of the discourse that really begins with Karl Marx that sees England as the model for modernization. “England’s present is everybody’s future”, - this is something actually that Karl Marx said. And what do you realize, when you actually learn something about the history of England, is that it is a very peculiar country in a number of ways that I will explain to you. And to expect other countries to replicate the England’s (13)____ path, I think, is highly unrealistic. And in fact, in my view, it was China, not that China, it did not establish the first state, that happened in a lot of places: in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, in the valley of Mexico. But in my view the Chinese (14)____ the first modern state, modern meaning, not based on hiring your cousins and your friends to (15)____ the government, but based on (16)___ examinations, a rational (17)____, centralized administration. And they did this in the third century BC. And it’s a historical (18)____ that I think a lot of people have not adequately recognized. And  so instead of starting with England or, you know, Greece and Rome and then going for the Magna Carta and the rise of democracy in England it seemed to me it made more sense to start with China. China created the first modern state, why are other societies different from China? So that’s the basic background. Now there are three important baskets of political (19)___ that we need to think about. The first is a state itself. The state is all about power, the state is the ability to concentrate power in a hierarchy and to use it to (20)___ rules over a particular territory, right.  In the developing world, and this again is why I think we sometimes take politics for granted. We assume that things will happen like, you know, long time I lived in Fairfax County for twenty years and the potholes always get filled every spring. Why do those potholes get filled there but not in Papua New Guinea? Well, it turns out there’s a hidden social (21)____ that provides these services and it does it pretty efficiently, at least in a rich county like Fairfax, not in the only district. But, you know, it’s interesting, you know, why those differences happen and I think that all of the anti-government activists of which there are many in especially in our society don’t understand that if you want a country that doesn’t have a strong (22)____ that is able to enforce rules we are to move to Somalia or Afghanistan or, you know, any less-developed country that actually cannot enforce rules on its own territory.  In Somalia if you want to own not just an assault rifle but an RPJ or a shoulder- fired anti-aircraft weapon you are free to do it. But it’s not a very happy (23)____ because it doesn’t have institutions. Now that’s the state.       Second is the rule of law. The rule of law is all about community rules of (24)___ that are regarded as superior to the will of whoever happens to be running the government whether that is a President, a Prime Minister, a  king, (25)___, whatever. The executive in the society doesn’t feel that he or she can just make up the (26)____ on the fly whatever they want, but they actually have to implement a law that someone else makes, all right. So that’s the second set of important institutions.       And then the third is institutions of accountability.  Today we associate those with (27)___, with elections, but that’s not the only form of accountability. In any of them when accountability institutions were first put into place in 17th century England the king was accountable to Parliament that only represented ten percent of the English (28)____, richest ten percent. And so you can have accountability without having democracy. And I believe as in China you can also have moral accountability that is to say a government can feel obligated to take the interest of its citizens into account even in the absence of election. So the question is: “Where do these come from: the state is all about the concentration of (29)____, the rule of law and accountability are by all means limiting power?” And the miracle of modern politics is that you get the President of the United States, who is the most powerful individual in human history, who can nuke the rest of the world if he wants to, but he doesn’t because it’s all (30)____ by law and by accountable political institutions.  It’s a kind of miracle of modern politics, right. So I’m going to tell you if you a few stories from the book in each of these baskets. Let’s begin with the state. The state, in some sense, in my view, is a big (31)____ against the family. Human nature tells you a couple of things, there’s a universal (32)____. And there are a couple of biological principles that govern human sociability. We sometimes get this incorrect notion from Thomas Hobbes that before the rise of the state you had just people clubbing each other over the head, you know, in anomic (33)___ of all against all.  But that was actually never true, human (34)____ never went through that period. They were always social and they’re social because they’re born with certain characteristics that allow them to (35)____.  So one of them is a principal called ‘kin selection or inclusive fitness’ by the biologists which simply means you’re going to be altruistic to people in proportion to the number of genes you share with them. In other words nepotism, you’re going to favor relatives. The second principal is reciprocal altruism:  you scratch my back - I’ll (36)____ yours, on a face- to- face basis.  No human child growing up anywhere has to be taught these (37)____, these are inbuilt forms of sociability. They are the default ways that we relate to each other, (38)____ and family. And in the absence of a modern institution that forces you to hire somebody with qualifications rather than your cousin or your brother-in-law, that’s the way you’re going to do it, that’s the kind of normal politics that will insert itself. And so in a sense the, you know, states and roles in the societies that were organized tribally meaning the people were in large kin groups, they all believe that their descended from a common (39)____, that they’re basically third and fourth and fifth cousins. And how do you get from a state that is based on kinship as a form of social organization to one that’s based on (40)____, in which it’s not a matter of who you are related it’s the fact that I am a citizen of the state of France or Japan, or whatever?  And so that’s why there’s a struggle, constant struggle against especially this biological urge to protect your (41)___. Now how did this happen in China? It unfortunately happened as a result of century’s long military conflict. There’s a famous political (42)____ Charles Chile who was famous for arguing in the case of Europe that the state makes war and war makes the state, that it’s really military (43)____ that drove people out of tribal societies into these more organized hierarchical units. And if you look at Chinese history, that is exactly the story that unfolds.
	bookstores
	challenge
	audience
	run
	understand
	scientist
	origins
	civil service
	institutions
	bureaucracy
	established
	foreign policy
	modernization
	corruption
	updated
	wall
	Order
	achievement
	structure
	society
	government
	enforce
	institutions
monarch
rules
justice
population
limited
democracy
power
scratch
friends
struggle
mechanisms
human nature
war
ancestor
societies
cooperate
children
competition
scientist
citizenship

2 Vocabulary focus. Sudy the words and  word combinations, practise their translation, spelling. Check your knowledge in the test. Play vocabulary game and set your own vocabulary game record.

3 Mark the following statements as True or False.

1.     The book “Political Order in Changing Society” can be a guide to what is going on in Africa and Latin America.

2.     People want to create the state with low corruption, democracy and stable government but it doesn’t work in all countries.

3.     Danes have the recipe of ‘getting to Denmark’, they teach it at universities to all citizens.

4.     Traditionally political scientists are Eurocentric and Anglocentric when they write about the origins of the state.

5.     China was the first to establish state.

6.     Chinese state was modern because it was not based on hiring your cousins and your friends to run the government, but was based on civil service examinations.

7.     There are four important baskets of political institutions that political scientists think about.

8.     Many people take politics for granted and believe that the services their state gives to them are the same all over the world, e.g. potholes are filled every spring in Fairfax County and in Papua New Guinea.

9.     If people want a country that doesn’t have a strong government that is able to enforce rules, they soon find themselves in a less-developed country.

10. In Somalia you can own any weapon you want but it doesn’t make people happy.

11. In a country ruled by law presidents, kings and prime ministers cannot make the laws they want when they want to.

12. In a country ruled by law presidents, prime ministers, kings implement laws that were created by other politicians.

13. In 17^th century England we can find examples of democracy and accountability.

14. In China moral accountability existed.

15. Accountability is not always connected with elections.

16. State is a struggle against the family because rulers and kings want their friends and cousins to rule too.

17. In human history people never were in the state of war against all other people, human beings had special mechanisms that helped them to cooperate.

18. People tend to like their relatives more that other people in the group.

19. In tribal societies all people believe that they are relatives and have common ancestor.

20. Tribal societies are based on citizenship but modern state is based on kinship.

4 Answer the Questions.

1.     Why do scientists need to update and revise books like “Political Order in Changing Society”? What important events took place in history since the book was written?

2.     What does the speaker mean when he mentions ‘the problem of getting to Denmark? Why is Denmark a model country for some people?

3.     Why was Chinese state different from other states?

4.     What countries are traditionally seen as models of modernization? Why are those countries seen as models of modernization? Is it still relevant today?

5.     What is state? Does the speaker support a weak or a strong government?

6.     What can people living in a country with weak government have? Will their society be happy?

7.     What is the rule of law? How does the rule of law influence kings, monarchs, presidents and prime ministers?

8.     What is accountability? What forms or types of accountability can political scientists name?

9.     What is human sociability? Why is it important in political science?

10. How did political scientists of the past (e.g. Thomas Hobbes) see human nature? Were they right?

11. What types of altruism are important for political science? How does each type influence development of the state?

12. How was modern form of state developed in China? What influenced its development?