Daron Acemoglu - The Narrow Corridor: States, Societies, and the Fate of Liberty

missing.

Amin, a physical therapist from Aleppo, remembered:

One of the other guys called his girlfriend and said “Sweetheart, I’m out of minutes on my phone. I’ll call you back on Amin’s phone.” After a while she called asking about him, and I told her he’d been killed. She cried and my friends said, “Why did you tell her that?” I said, “Because that’s what happened. It’s normal. He died.” … I’d open my phone and look at my contacts and only one or two were still alive. They told us, “If someone dies, don’t delete his number. Just change his name to Martyr.” … So I’d open my contact list and it was all Martyr, Martyr, Martyr.

The collapse of the Syrian state created a humanitarian disaster of enormous proportions. Out of a population of about 18 million before the war, as many as 500,000 Syrians are estimated to have lost their lives. Over 6 million have been internally displaced and 5 million have fled the country and are currently living as refugees.

The Gilgamesh Problem

The calamity unleashed by the collapse of the Syrian state is not surprising. Philosophers and social scientists have long maintained that you need a state to resolve conflicts, enforce laws, and contain violence. As Locke puts it:

Where there is no law there is no freedom.

Yet Syrians had started protesting to gain some freedoms from Assad’s autocratic regime. As Adam ruefully recalled:

Ironically, we went out in demonstrations to eradicate corruption and criminal behavior and evil and hurting people. And we’ve ended up with results that hurt many more people.

Syrians like Adam were grappling with a problem so endemic to human society that it is a theme of one of the oldest surviving pieces of written text, the 4,200-year-old Sumerian tablets that record the Epic of Gilgamesh. Gilgamesh was the king of Uruk, perhaps the world’s first city, situated on a now dried-up channel of the Euphrates River in the south of modern-day Iraq. The epic tells us that Gilgamesh created a remarkable city, flourishing with commerce and public services for its inhabitants:

See how its ramparts gleam like copper in the sun. Climb the stone staircase … walk on the wall of Uruk, follow its course around the city, inspect its mighty foundations, examine its brickwork, how masterfully it is built, observe the land it encloses … the glorious palaces and temples, the shops and marketplaces, the houses, the public squares.

But there was a hitch:

Who is like Gilgamesh? … The city is his possession, he struts through it, arrogant, his head raised high, trampling its citizens like a wild bull. He is king, he does whatever he wants, takes the son from his father and crushes him, takes the girl from her mother and uses her … no one dares to oppose him.

Gilgamesh was out of control. A bit like Assad in Syria. In despair the people “cried out to heaven” to Anu, the god of the sky and the chief deity in the Sumerian pantheon of gods. They pleaded:

Heavenly father, Gilgamesh … has exceeded all bounds. The people suffer from his tyranny … Is this how you want your king to rule? Should a shepherd savage his own flock?

Anu paid attention and asked Aruru, mother of creation, to

create a double for Gilgamesh, his second self, a man who equals his strength and courage, a man who equals his stormy heart. Create a new hero, let them balance each other perfectly, so that Uruk has peace.

Anu thus came up with a solution to what we’ll call the “Gilgamesh problem”—controlling the authority and the power of a state so that you get the good things and not the bad. Anu’s was the doppelgänger solution, similar to what people today call “checks and balances.” Gilgamesh’s double Enkidu would contain him. James Madison, one of the founding fathers of the U.S. system of government, would have sympathized. He would argue 4,000 years later that constitutions must be designed so that “ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

Gilgamesh’s first encounter with his double came when he was about to ravish a new bride. Enkidu blocked the doorway. They fought. Although Gilgamesh ultimately prevailed, his unrivaled, despotic power was gone. The seeds of liberty in Uruk?

Unfortunately not. Checks and balances parachuted from above don’t work in general, and they didn’t in Uruk. Soon Gilgamesh and Enkidu started to conspire. As the epic records it:

They embraced and kissed. They held hands like brothers. They walked side by side. They became true friends.

They subsequently colluded to kill the monster Humbaba, the guardian of the great cedar forest of Lebanon. When the gods sent the Bull of Heaven to punish them, they combined forces to kill it. The prospect for liberty vanished along with the checks and balances.

If not from a state hemmed in by doppelgängers and checks and balances, where does liberty come from? Not from Assad’s regime. Clearly not from the anarchy that followed the collapse of the Syrian state.

Our answer is simple: Liberty needs the state and the laws. But it is not given by the state or the elites controlling it. It is taken by regular people, by society. Society needs to control the state so that it protects and promotes people’s liberty rather than quashing it like Assad did in Syria before 2011. Liberty needs a mobilized society that participates in politics, protests when it’s necessary, and votes the government out of power when it can.

The Narrow Corridor to Liberty

Our argument in this book is that for liberty to emerge and flourish, both state and society must be strong. A strong state is needed to control violence, enforce laws, and provide public services that are critical for a life in which people are empowered to make and pursue their choices. A strong, mobilized society is needed to control and shackle the strong state. Doppelgänger solutions and checks and balances don’t solve the Gilgamesh problem because, without society’s vigilance, constitutions and guarantees are not worth much more than the parchment they are written on.

Squeezed between the fear and repression wrought by despotic states and the violence and lawlessness that emerge in their absence is a narrow corridor to liberty. It is in this corridor that the state and society balance each other out. This balance is not about a revolutionary moment. It’s a constant, day-in, day-out struggle between the two. This struggle brings benefits. In the corridor the state and society do not just compete, they also cooperate. This cooperation engenders greater capacity for the state to deliver the things that society wants and foments greater societal mobilization to monitor this capacity.

What makes this a corridor, not a door, is that achieving liberty is a process; you have to travel a long way in the corridor before violence is brought under control, laws are written and enforced, and the state starts providing services to its citizens. It is a process because the state and its elites must learn to live with the shackles society puts on them and different segments of society have to learn to work together despite their differences.

What makes this corridor narrow is that this is no easy feat. How can you contain a state that has a huge bureaucracy, a powerful military, and the freedom to decide what the law is? How can you ensure that as the state is called on to take on more responsibilities in a

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