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

complex world, it will remain tame and under control? How can you keep society working together rather than turning against itself, riven with divisions? How do you prevent all of this from flipping into a zero-sum contest? Not easy at all, and that’s why the corridor is narrow, and societies enter and depart from it with far-reaching consequences.

You can’t engineer any of this. Not that very many leaders, left to their own devices, would really try to engineer liberty. When the state and its elites are too powerful and society is meek, why would leaders grant people rights and liberty? And if they did, could you trust them to stick to their word?

You can see the origins of liberty in the history of women’s liberation from the days of Gilgamesh right down to our own. How did society move from a situation where, as the epic has it, “every girl’s hymen … belonged to him,” to one where women have rights (well, in some places anyway)? Could it be that these rights were granted by men? The United Arab Emirates, for instance, has a Gender Balance Council formed in 2015 by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, vice president and prime minister of the country and ruler of Dubai. It gives out gender equality awards every year for things like the “best government entity supporting gender balance,” “best federal authority supporting gender balance,” and “best gender balance initiative.” The awards for 2018, given out by Sheikh Maktoum himself, all have one thing in common—every one went to a man! The problem with the United Arab Emirates’ solution was that it was engineered by Sheikh Maktoum and imposed on society, without society’s participation.

Contrast this with the more successful history of women’s rights, for example, in Britain, where women’s rights were not given but taken. Women formed a social movement and became known as the suffragettes. The suffragettes emerged out of the British Women’s Social and Political Union, a women-only movement founded in 1903. They didn’t wait for men to give them prizes for “best gender balance initiative.” They mobilized. They engaged in direct action and civil disobedience. They bombed the summer house of the then chancellor of the exchequer and later prime minister, David Lloyd George. They chained themselves to railings outside the Houses of Parliament. They refused to pay their taxes and when they were sent to prison, they went on hunger strikes and had to be forcefed.

Emily Davison was a prominent member of the suffragette movement. On June 4, 1913, at the famous Epsom Derby horse race, Davison ran onto the track in front of Anmer, a horse belonging to King George V. Davison, according to some reports holding the purple, white, and green flag of the suffragettes, was hit by Anmer. The horse fell and crushed her, as the photograph included in the photography section shows. Four days later Davison died from her injuries. Five years later women could vote in parliamentary elections. Women didn’t get rights in Britain because of magnanimous grants by some (male) leaders. Gaining rights was a consequence of their organization and empowerment.

The story of women’s liberation isn’t unique or exceptional. Liberty almost always depends on society’s mobilization and ability to hold its own against the state and its elites.

Chapter 1

HOW DOES HISTORY END?

A Coming Anarchy?

In 1989, Francis Fukuyama predicted the “end of history,” with all countries converging to the political and economic institutions of the United States, what he called “an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.” Just five years later Robert Kaplan painted a radically different picture of the future in his article “The Coming Anarchy.” To illustrate the nature of this chaotic lawlessness and violence, he felt compelled to begin in West Africa:

West Africa is becoming the symbol of [anarchy] … Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources, refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and international drug cartels are now most tellingly demonstrated through a West African prism. West Africa provides an appropriate introduction to the issues, often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that will soon confront our civilization. To remap the political earth the way it will be a few decades hence … I find I must begin with West Africa.

In a 2018 article, “Why Technology Favors Tyranny,” Yuval Noah Harari made yet another prediction about the future, arguing that advances in artificial intelligence are heralding the rise of “digital dictatorships,” where governments will be able to monitor, control, and even dictate the way we interact, communicate, and think.

So history might still end, but in a very different way than Fukuyama had imagined. But how? The triumph of Fukuyama’s vision of democracy, anarchy, or digital dictatorship? The Chinese state’s increasing control over the Internet, the media, and the lives of ordinary Chinese might suggest that we are heading toward digital dictatorship, while the recent history of the Middle East and Africa reminds us that a future of anarchy is not so far-fetched.

But we need a systematic way to think about all of this. As Kaplan suggested, let’s begin in Africa.

The Article 15 State

If you keep going east along the West African coast, the Gulf of Guinea eventually turns south and heads to Central Africa. Sailing past Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, and Pointe-Noire in Congo-Brazzaville, you arrive at the mouth of the river Congo, the entry point to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a country that is often thought to be the epitome of anarchy. The Congolese have a joke: there have been six constitutions since the country gained its independence from Belgium in 1960, but they all have the same Article 15. The nineteenth-century French prime minister Charles-Maurice Talleyrand said that constitutions should be “short and obscure.” Article 15 fulfills his dictum. It is short and obscure; it says simply Débrouillez-vous (Fend for yourself).

It’s usual to think of a constitution as a document that lays out the responsibilities, duties, and rights of citizens and states. States are supposed to resolve conflicts among their citizens, protect them, and provide key public services such as education, healthcare, and infrastructure that individuals are not able to adequately provide on their own. A constitution isn’t supposed to say Débrouillez-vous.

The reference to “Article 15” is a joke. There isn’t such a clause in the Congolese Constitution. But it’s apt. The Congolese have been fending for themselves at least since independence in 1960 (and things were even worse before). Their state has repeatedly failed to do any of the things it is supposed to do and is absent from vast swaths of the country. Courts, roads, health clinics, and schools are moribund in most of the country. Murder, theft, extortion, and intimidation are commonplace. During the Great War of Africa that raged in the Congo between 1998 and 2003, the lives of most Congolese, already wretched, turned into a veritable hell. Possibly five million people perished; they were murdered, died of disease, or starved to death.

Even during times of peace the Congolese state has failed to uphold the actual clauses of the constitution. Article 16 states:

All persons have the right to life, physical integrity and to the free development of their personality, while

--">