Building a democratic state: is it possible?

• Author: Pastor, Robert A.
• Position: State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century - The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad - Book Review

State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century Francis Fukuyama Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004, 137 pages.

The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad Fareed Zakaria New York: W. W. Norton, 2003, 256 pages.

In the 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush criticized the Clinton Administration for pursuing "nation building" in Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti and elsewhere, and he pledged that if elected, he would "absolutely not" do nation building. As president, however, George W. Bush embarked on two other nation-building experiments, in Afghanistan and Iraq, that made Clinton's efforts seem modest and inconsequential by comparison. Moreover, as Francis Fukuyama notes in his new book, State-Building: Governance and World Order in the 21st Century, the Bush Administration failed to learn any lessons from the Clinton experience, repeating the same mistakes in far more dangerous terrain.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States and the international community have faced numerous crises in failed or weak Third World states, including genocide in Rwanda and Kosovo, refugees from Haiti and violence in East Timor. After September 11, compelling security considerations have joined humanitarian concerns as a motive for intervention, and so there are likely to be many more responses by the world community to future crises. But overwhelming force can only take the sole superpower so far. The real challenge for the 21st century is not overthrowing the repressive regime, but building a democratic state on its back.

Two insightful books have arrived to help understand state building and democratization--Fukuyama's State-Building and Fareed Zakaria's The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad. Both are serious treatises that analyze elements of the state-building challenge that previously have been poorly understood or simply obscured. And both are written by public intellectuals who can convey complex ideas with clarity and insight.

Francis Fukuyama reminds us that the challenge of failed states is not nation building but state building, which he defines as the "creation of new government institutions and the strengthening of existing ones." (1) He begins by asking whether the United States is a strong or weak state, and his answer emerges from a distinction that represents the book's principal theoretical contribution--that there are two dimensions of state power, namely scope and...