Political Order and Political Decay by Francis Fukuyama Page B

1916 and the formation of an independent Irish Republic. Needless to say, Northern Ireland has not been an entirely happy member of the British family since then, and at this writing Scotland has scheduled a referendum on independence.
    Renan’s observation about historical amnesia echoes a similar thought of Niccolò Machiavelli. Writing about the beginnings of Rome in Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy , Machiavelli noted that the great city’s founding was based on a fratricide, the killing of Remus by Romulus. He makes a broader observation that all just enterprises originate in a crime. 12 So too with the founding of democracy in the United States. North America was not a land of “new settlement” as is sometimes asserted. It was a territory thinly occupied by indigenous tribal groups who had to be exterminated, moved, or driven off their lands into reservations to make way for the democratic institutions of the settlers. American national identity is based on principles of equality, individual rights, and democracy, but that identity could not take hold except at the expense of the country’s indigenous inhabitants. This didn’t make the outcome less democratic or just, but it also does not mean that the original crime was not a crime. Moreover, the question of whether America’s identity should give priority to political union based on the assertion of equality in the Declaration of Independence, or to the Constitution’s protection of the rights of states, could not be peacefully resolved through democratic processes. So while Germans and Greeks may have more vivid memories of the violence in their recent histories, Britons and Americans should not forget that their contemporary national identities are also the beneficiaries of bloody struggles in the distant past.

 
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    GOOD GOVERNMENT, BAD GOVERNMENT
    Why some developed-country governments are more effective than others; how political reform happens; why modernization is neither a sufficient nor a necessary condition for reform, yet helps; the role of outsiders in promoting reform
    It is time to draw some general conclusions about the process of state building and modernization of the public sector. The purpose of this part of the book has been to explain why some developed countries managed to enter the twenty-first century with reasonably effective and uncorrupt governments, while others continue to be plagued by clientelism, corruption, poor performance, and low levels of trust both in government and in society more broadly. Providing an explanation may give us some insight regarding strategies that contemporary developing countries might use to deal with problems of corruption and patronage today.
    All modern societies began with what Weber called patrimonial states, governments that were staffed with the friends and family of the ruler, or those of the elites who dominated the society. These states limited access to both political power and economic opportunity to individuals favored by the ruler; there was little effort to treat citizens impersonally, on the basis of universally applied rules. 1 Modern government—that is, a state bureaucracy that is impersonal and universal—develops only over time, and in many cases fails to develop at all.
    I’ve selected cases that vary in terms of the success or failure of this modernization process. Germany developed the core of a modern state by the early decades of the nineteenth century. Japan, as we will see in chapter 23, created a modern bureaucracy almost from scratch shortly after the country was opened up during the Meiji Restoration. Italy and Greece, by contrast, never developed strong modern states and continue clientelist practices today. Britain and the United States are intermediate cases: both had patronage-ridden bureaucracies in the first half of the nineteenth century, or in the case of the United States, full-blown clientelism. Britain reformed