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Politics Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalisation of Democracy FRANCIS FUKUYAMA Profile, $49.99

On the eve of the collapse of the Soviet empire, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama pronounced the global victory of the idea of American-style "liberal democracy". Nearly three decades later, things look grim for his "end of history" thesis, though close readers of his new book will surely conclude that although his thinking has since become guarded by qualification, and by convolution, his old story of American triumph hasn't fundamentally changed.

Political Order and Political Decay is the second volume of Fukuyama's investigation of the origins, evolution and decay of political institutions. Its lengthy argument can be summarised in a single sentence: without the prior establishment of a well-armed and functional territorial state, and without an independent judiciary responsible for overseeing the rule of law that robust state power then makes possible, modern liberal democracy cannot happen. No state, no rule of law, no democracy is the complex algorithm that structures the book, in support of his view that liberal democracy centred on free elections remains the world's No. 1 political preference.

Political order and Political Decay by Francis Fukuyama Photo: Jason Steger

Fukuyama admits of specific troubles in the house of democracy, but they are seen as remediable (how they're to be fixed, he doesn't say). The bigger historical picture is different, and the future bright. His unaltered conviction is that liberal democracy has the winds of long-term evolutionary trends in its sails. Long term is important to Fukuyama, above all because the modern territorial state has become the indispensable kingpin of political order. If there is no state, there can be no rule of law, or liberal democracy.

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Fukuyama's point can be read as a backdoor critique of the farcical American-led failure to build functioning states in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. It's also a sobering reminder that liberal democracy can't be built by liberal democratic means. It requires the establishment of political order through the state, followed by the imposition of legal restraints on state power. Only then can free elections take root and flourish among people living inside territorial states.

Fukuyama reminds his readers that liberal democracy is the offspring of the modern territorial state. The end result proved advantageous in several ways: it reduced civil wars; legalised and legitimated social divisions; enabled the growth of civil society, and facilitated the grand-scale enfranchisement of peoples for whose welfare it provided. And in international affairs, fixed state boundaries provided room for manoeuvre for any given liberal democracy.

Liberal democracy in state form has certainly had downsides. In the violent business of state building, peoples who lacked the capacity to become a modern state were typically left behind, as "stateless people" and "asylum seekers"; or they became the raw material of colonisation, or victims of forcible removal and outright annihilation.

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Francis Fukuyama sticks to his guns on liberal democracy