the basic frontier medicine, but i don't think there was any intention to it. it was simply what he did. he was selling the seedlings too, not apples. everything left. it was a dollar store business. pile them on and watch them fly, sold them for pennys. not a bad model. any other questions? can i -- sure? let me give a pitch at the end, and i'll be quiet. i just wanted to close by saying how lucky i've been with the book, lucky with the help i got from people like joe and author here, and from my publishers, my editor, alice, her bound and determined this would be not only a good book, but a beautiful book. i happen to think the cover is just a beautiful cover. the paper is beautiful. they did everything just right. the maps add to the story, and best of all, from my point of view, there's nine original

illustrations in the book that are magnificent done by my daughter, and so, thank you for enduring this. i appreciate it very much. thank you. [applause] ..?

or have it e-mail to you by pressing the c-span alert button. up next on booktv, the origins of government from the development of tribal societies to the rise of politics in europe. >> good evening, everyone. thank you all for coming. this is clearly a standing-room-only audience and i know we are eager to get into this and have lots of discussion because we are here to celebrate the publication of francis fukuyama's major contribution, the origin of political order from prehuman times to the french revolution. i want to say that this is a momentous time for politics and

froze. i am david cohen who is carla cohen's husband. she and barbara meet with the stellar staff at politics and prose and you, the engage and articular lovers of books and ideas for and community of writers, publishers, editors and agents that made politics and prose into more than a brick and mortar bookstore. it is a thriving community institution. it is a setting for the discussion and dissemination of ideas and a public space where people meet and talk and disagreed and do it in a civil way and it will continue that way under the leadership of its new owners, brad graham and

alyssa musket. continuity will-around ideas and public space. i want to introduce frances fukuyama tonight because i respect him even though as i told him i'd taught civil society activists in asia and africa, work on civil society and we had a lot of vigorous discussion about the end of history ten or 15 years ago. that is one reason. be more important reason is he is an open-minded scholar who embraces big ideas, who is not encapsulated by silos or artificial boundaries. he clarifies as he pursues new

ones and complexity. don't be fooled by the fact that this book says from prehistoric times to the french revolution. professor fukuyama takes us through the relationships with the state, laws and accountable government. he wants to know the origin of state, law and accountable government and having one of those in place doesn't presuppose others will have barber dandelion institutions. he discusses failed and failing states in his writings, provide the appropriate questions about the united states as well. i love the fact that you'd defend the necessity of politics even as you take us through political anxiety, political decay and make us think about our own society in the united states. i have not read the whole book yet but i have already been made

to think. you helped me realize there is more to frederick hayek than market absolute. let's welcome frances fukuyama. [applause] and add to public discourse in this country and those who work the cameras that make it happen. [applause] >> thank you. it is a great honor to be here and have this wonderful audience. i am grateful you are all here at politics and prose. one of the nice things about a new book is going to real brick and mortar bookstores and realize there are still people who really like real books and come out to events like this

because of the intellectual challenge and interest. thank you for coming. i will get straight into it. i wrote this book for a number of reasons. samuel huntington was my teacher when i was a graduate student at harvard. he wrote an important book in 1968 called political order in changing societies which rereading it now in light of the arab spring is one of the best guides to what is going on in the middle east at the moment. but it needed to be updated. so i thought of a project of doing a revision of this book. among other things it opened on the first page the soviet union and the united states are equally developed political quarters and that didn't seem right after the fall of the berlin wall. the other major issue was just referred to. i was thinking of nation-building, fail safe, iraq and somalia and all these foreign policy challenges that

we face and we have this illusion that i would call problem of getting to denmark. denmark is in quotation marks. it is not a real country but a mythical place with local russian, democracy, stable government, good services delivery efficiently and so forth. we have this vision of denmark in the back of are head and we go to afghanistan and say how do we get afghanistan to look like denmark? it doesn't look that way. part of the reason i began to realize what we don't understand how denmark got to denmark. i had a visiting professorship in denmark. i have been going there the last few years and i'd tell you that most danes don't know how denmark got to be denmark. as a political scientist there ought to be a basic book that says where political institutions come from. i didn't see one so i decided to

write it. i also did not want to write a book on the origins of politics that told the traditional eurocentric or a low centric story. not because i am opposed to england or the west, but it is a distortion. and one that has been taught in a lot of the discourse. it really begins with karl marx who sees england as the model for modernization. england at present is everybody's future is something karl marx said. what you realize when you learn about the history of england, it is a very peculiar country in a number of ways that i will explain and to expect other countries to replicate england's modernization path is highly unrealistic and in fact in my view it was china--china did not

establish the first state. that happened a lot of places in egypt and mesopotamia and the valley of mexico but in my view the chinese establish the first modern state. modern meaning not based on hiring cousins and friends to run the government but based on civil service examinations, rational bureaucracy progress little centralized administration. they did this in the third century b.c. and is a historical achievement that i think a lot of people have not adequately recognized. instead of starting with england or greece and rome and going through the rise of democracy, it made more sense to start in china. china created the first modern state. why are other societies different? that is the basic background. there are three important baskets of political institutions we need to think about. the first is the state itself. the state is all about power. the state is ability to

concentrate power in a hierarchy and use it to a certain rules over particular territory. in the developing world, and this is why we sometimes take politics for granted, we assume that things will happen. i lived in fairfax county for 20 years and it filled every spring. what do pot holes get filled? turns out there is a hidden social structure that provides the services and does it efficiently and least in a rich county like fairfax. it is interesting how those differences happen. all the antigovernment activists of which there are many especially in our society don't understand that if you want a country that doesn't have a strong government that is a will to enforce rules you ought to move to somalia or afghanistan or a less developed country that

actually cannot enforce rules on its own territory. in some molly and you own and not just an assault rifle butt a shoulder fired antiaircraft weapon you are free to do it but it is not a very happy society because it doesn't have institution. second is the rule of law. the will of law is all about community rules of justice that are regarded as superior to whoever's running the government whether it is a president or prime minister, you don't just make of the rules on the fly but implement a law that someone else makes. that is the second set of important institutions. and the third is institutions of accountability. today we associate those with democracy, with elections. but that is not the only form of accountability.

when accountability institutions were first put in place in seventeenth century england became was accountable to parliament and only represented and% of the with population. the richest 10%. you can have accountability without having democracy. i believe that in china you can have moral accountability. a government can feel obligated to take the interest of its citizens into account even in the absence of elections. so where do these come from? the state is about concentration of power. the rule of law, accountability are means of limiting power. the miracle of modern politics is that you get the president of the united states who is the most powerful individual in human history. he can nuke the rest of the world if he wants to but he doesn't because it is limited by law and accountable political institutions. it is the miracle of modern politics. i will tell you stories about the book in each of these

baskets. the state in some sense is in my view a struggle against the family. human nature tell you a couple things. there's universal human nature. there are a couple of biological principles that govern human sociability. we sometimes get this incorrect notion that before the rise of the state you just had people clubbing each other over the head in a war of all against all but that was never true. human societies never went through that period. they were always social and they were social because they're born with certain characteristics that allow them to cooperate. one is a principal called inclusive fitness by biologists which means you will be altruistic to people in proportion to the number of genes you share with them. in other words nepotism. you are going to favor relative is. the second principle is reciprocal altruism. you scratch my back, of will scratch yours on a face-to-face

basis. note human child growing up anywhere has to be taught these mechanisms. these are in bold forms of sociability. they are the default ways we relate to each other. friends and family. in the absence of a modern institution that forces you to hire yourself with qualifications rather than your cousin or brother-in-law that is the way you do it. that is normal politics. state arose from organizations organized tribally. they believed they were descended from a common ancestor, third or fourth or fifth cousins. how do you get from a state based on kinship as a form of social organization to one based on citizenship in which it is not a matter of who you are related to but i am a citizen of the state of france or japan or whatever? that is why there's a struggle

against especially this biological urge to protect your children? how did this happen? in china it is unfortunately happened as a result of centuries long military conflict. there's a famous political scientist who was famous for arguing in the case of europe that the state makes war and war makes the state. it is military competition that drove people out of tribal societies in to these more organized hierarchical units and if you look at chinese history that is exactly the story that unfold. so at the beginning of the western chou dynasty these tribes come in from manchuria and conquered the change people. at that point their split into 3,000 tribal groups. in the spring and autumn period they fight 1200 wars with one another. in the warring states period they fight 450 wars. the numbers reduced because so many states have been snuffed

out and concord. there are not as many to fight these wars and finally this process winnows down to seven surviving states and finally in the year 221 bc this powerful western state of chin conquers all of its rivals and to establish the first unified chinese dynasty and as in europe, another 1800 years later this process is driven by the needs of warfare. you are fighting with aristocrats, if you conscript peasants and create an infantry army, in order to conscripted the -- and surveys to create a bureaucracy, and you need an administrative hierarchy to run this whole machine, and if you hired your cousin to be a general has lincoln get all these patronage appointments

early on in the civil war you will lose the war and so you need a different principle. you need and in personal merit based principle and this is what the chinese did. they were first to come up with a civil service examination as a means of entry into the government. it didn't last. the han dynasty that the feinstein these civilizations of the flourishing of centralized high-quality government. aristocratic families, people with wealth and power recaptured the government. this continues and the modern chinese state that had been established in the third century doesn't get put back into place until the 1100s.

the first institution designed to beat back the family is military slavery developed by the second big dynasty and carried to its logical conclusion by the ottomans. every three or four years they send a group of people into the balkan problemss of the empire to the delight football scouts, they would look for young men between 12 and 19, they were taken from their families and they would raise them as slaves in the palace. they would train them not for degradation but to be senior military officers and administrators. and the prime minister of the ottoman empire. why did they create this strange institution? the people recruited in this

fashion were not allowed to marry and not allowed to have children. if they did have children they were either expels from the core and their children were never allowed to rise to positions of status. why did they do it? all because of the family. the moment you allow people to have children what they do? they want to secure positions for their children and the ottomans understood a modern administration has to be based on promoting people by merit and if you allow them to have families you wouldn't be able to do this so they created a one generation aristocracy and the ottoman system began to collapse the moment these entrenched groups took the opening caused by famine and rising inflation in the seventeenth century to start the demand that their children be allowed to assume their position. this is a general problem in

france. old regime france before the french revolution. they have the same problem. wealthy elites could oppose the king so this all the office will be individuals. this broke up the centralization of louis xiv and these other great monarchs. this desire to -- there is the desire to privatize public office. you want to grab as much of the public sector as you can and in the early 1600s it became permissible for these wealthy individuals to actually turn them over to their children as charitable property. along with the chateau and everything you also get the

position of public office. by the time of the revolution the entire public sector had been sold off to wealthy individuals. the constant struggle -- you can create a modern state under the circumstances. one thing the revolution did was divested all these old elites of not just their property and offices but there heads and a lot of cases. it took a violent revolution to eliminate that. let's talk about the rule of law. this is the second important basket institution. the will of law. the limitations, rules that limit the discretion of wallers to do as they want. where do you get this system? in my view historically it has always come out of religion. if you think of that religion is the only source of rules that is

outside of politics where it was are limited by rules that they themselves don't make. this was true in many civilizations. it is true in christian and muslim civilization and india. you have a religious law made by religious authority and interpreted by hierarchy's of religious judges, the brahmans in the case of india and in all of these cases the ruler has to go to the religious authority to get sanctions so india to become a raja you have to be sanctified by a braman. there's a clear status distinction. the priest on top of the warrior in that society. that is rule of law and that is what we mean by rule of law. the only world civilization that did not have rule of law in this

sense was china. the reason i believe the chinese never had this rule of law is they never had a transcendental religion. they had ancestor worship. it is amazing the chinese got to be so sophisticated with such a primitive religion because ancestor worship you're not required to worship the emperor's ancestors but only your own ancestors so there's no authority from this. is controlled by the state. note chinese emperor ever felt there's a higher source of law than they have to obey. that continues to the present day. they make the constitution. the constitution doesn't limit what they want to do. in the west the will of what develops early and powerfully. one of the heroes in my book, classic modernization theory like the reformation, i like the catholic church. a couple important historical respect.

in terms of the rule of law the church was extremely important. in the early middle ages bishops and priests could marry and have children and guess what they did. they all sought to turn their benefits over to their children and got involved in court politics. they were all wrapped up in the klan shenanigans of all the local princes of italy and germany and at one point in the late eleventh century, the rise of pope gregory vii who was a titanic historical figure much like martin luther who would come after him by a few centuries who realized that unless the church itself eliminated this biological principle of being able to have children it would not have moral authority to become an independent institution. furthermore at that point all the bishops in the church were being appointed by the emperor so the church did not have

control over its own personnel policy basically. so he declared the church independent and they will appoint bishops and all the priests and bishops have to be celibate. they cannot marry or have children. this is something of a surprise to all these married priests. they don't like it. is a huge struggle within the church and a bigger struggle with the emperor because the emperor wants to keep the church has his legitimate source of authority. they fight a two generation war. the allies of the pope offers is the allies of the emperor and at the end of this period the church achieves independence. at that point they establish a separate ecclesiastical law presided over by bishops and priests appointed only by the church. the first lawyers are all ecclesiastical lawyers. the idea of bureaucratic government by legal specialists

is the creation that happens first in the church and then gets transferred to the secular realm and also in the christian west divides church and state at this early point, legal authorities have legitimacy and a separate hierarchy that is completely independent of european rulers. this is extremely important for subsequent european development because any european rulers that wants to be like a chinese emperor and do whatever he pleaseds has to contend with the fact that there is a preexisting set of legal constraints that prevent him or her from doing that. the final basket of institutions are institutions of accountability, a.k.a. democracy. you sometimes get the idea and this comes from popeville that once the idea is out is unstoppable. one of the things you realize when you look at the actual

history of the rise of democracy is just how weird it in a way contingent this emergence was. it a rose really because of survival of a peculiar feudal institution into modern times which is called the parliament. every country in the middle ages had a body called parliament or sovereign court, cortes in russia or in poland and hungary, these were collections of notables of gentry and high mobility, sometimes of the bourgeoisie. the king had to go to the bodies to get permission to wage war and collect taxes. in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries you had these powerful monarchs who wanted to behave like a chinese emperor. they wanted to create a

centralized powerful bureaucratic realm in which everything was uniform and they way it this long struggle against these estates in every single country and only in one of them did the parliament or the estates when that battle and that was england. in a sense it shows you how accidental history is. parliament didn't prevail in france and didn't prevail because the french had sold off all these offices to wealthy individuals. once they took care of me and my family i am fine with everything else. we won't defend our liberty. the fringe interpreted liberty as privilege. it didn't happen in spain in russia where the czar basically recruited the entire mobility into his own military organization. it did happen in england for a very peculiar reason. because parliament for a variety

of reasons have a lot of solidarity. they hung together. not only did they hang together but raised an army and fought a civil war with the king. they cut off his head. this was charles i in the 1640s. in 1688 they deposed another king and brought in william of orange from holland to be their new monarch. because of this whole issue that they did not want to be taxed without parliamentary consent. it just happens that in this one island nation you get this powerful parliament that is able to force a constitutional settlement on the english monarch. from there to the american founding is a short distance because john locke was a participant in the events of the glorious revolution. he wrote the second treatise on government justifying rule as something that has to come out of consent of the government and the american revolution is based on the principle no taxation

without representation. so the distance from those english events during the english civil war and our own from the average country based on democratic consent is not a long distance at all but wouldn't have happened if we had been colonized by spain and in latin america it didn't happen on that timescale and didn't result in a powerful commercial empire the way england evolve to except for this balancing of rule of law, accountable government and a strong state. this is the miracle -- this is how this miracle happened but if you think of it there was no necessity. there was no historical driving force that dictated that this would be the outcome. once england got there it was a powerful model that other people wanted to imitate but the fact they got there in the first place was a historical accident. in china because the state was

so powerful let such an early stage they never allowed free cities or a blood aristocracy or the opposing religious groups to appear and they don't do it to this day. they control falun gong because it is the source of opposition to the regime. let me conclude with some observations about how this is relevant to understanding politics. let's begin with india and china. every business school for the last 15 years has been doing these emerging-market courses contrasting in the and china. when china wants to build three goerges. they just do it. these beautiful airports in

chinese cities, turnpikes, infrastructure. they have this very strong and high-quality authoritarian government that does not need to respect the interests of citizens. in india just to give you one example the motor co. wanted to establish a car assembly plant so what happens? they get hit with lawsuits, they go on strike. in india you have a problem with basic infrastructure because they are a democracy. there are checks and balances. they can't do anything because it evolved in this fashion where law and accountability are more important. a lot of people will say this is

the inheritance of british colonialism or something that happened in the last couple hundred years. i think having written this book i now understand that this is total nonsense. these reflect patterns of government that are 2500 years old. since the unification of china in 221 bc the country has fallen apart but it has always come together and spend more time as a unified authoritarian country governed by a single authority than it has a state of disunity. india has been unified for two periods. when the moguls and british innovated none of them were able to extend their rule through th

to extend their rule through the whole of the continent. the fact that india is not a chinese dictatorship is not accidental. no one in indian history has been able to rule india and an authoritarian fashion because indian society is too tough. it is organized into the village associations and very powerful religious groups all of which have resisted any political effort to dominate. the final thing, i mentioned accounts of modernization, don't understand how peculiar european modernization is. that is important to remember. when we try to modernize through development assistance a country in the third world today. how is european development peculiar? you exit from kinship, not done

by a state, by a powerful state that demanded people have allegiance to it but by the catholic church. the church at the end of the roman empire set rules of inheritance that forbade concubine's or a divorce, they forbade marriage up to five degrees of relatedness so these were means of cutting off the ability of plants, of tribal groups to keep property within the clan. they supported the right of women to hold, alienate property at an early stage in the middle ages. they did this for self interested reasons. because they wanted to break the economic power of tribal groups and it worked beautifully. it turns out a lot of widows and spinsters in that period ended up with all the money in the family and when they died without children guest who

inherited that money? catholic church. so it goes up by 30% in the first part of the eighth century as a result of these changes in rules and also means individualism started in europe at an earlier point. it was not a product of the industrial revolution or reformation. within two or three generations of their convergence to christianity all these barbarian tribes were already no longer living in tribal associations. and england gets carried to this extreme. you can turn your portion over to your son before you die without having signed a maintenance contract. you can be in big trouble because the kid could just say goodbye. i got my own business to worry about and i will try to take care of you but it is not a priority.

in english families, already in the 1500s, you have families sign contracts with each other because you could not rely on children to take care of their children and other parents in old age. already that presumes a huge amount of individualism. we are not bound by the tyranny of cousins in which everything within the state is a conglomeration of relatives. we are more individualistic. the sequence of development in europe goes like this. first, rule of law. then you construct a powerful centralized state and later you get democratic accountability. lobby comes before the state. the early modern european monarchs that wanted to create chinese style state had to do this against the background of existing laws that limited their ability to exercise power. final anecdotal will leave you with is my favorite historical

character recounted in this book, the evil emperors' wu. the only woman in chinese history who established a dynasty in her own name as opposed to ruling as a regent for her son or husband. she came early in the tongue dynasty in the sixth century and was a concubine of the second han emperor. she got into his graces and displaced existing impressed by having her own daughter have an audience with the empress and was smothered. the death was blamed on the empress and the emperor got rid of her and made madame wu the new empress. she killed a couple of her own sun is in her rise to power and she managed to kill off a great part of the tongue nobility that

stood in her way. it didn't do much for women's empowerment in china. there is a plaque in the forbidden city that warns against women and politics after the experience of the evil empress wu. the reason i tell this story is to contrast that to stories from europe. you had a couple big revolts. in the 1520s there is a revolt against the emperor charles v. they fought a civil war for a few years. the emperor won of the few -- defeated his enemies. a civil war in france. cxxx years later under reena nadler. they fought a bloody civil war and the canes defeated his aristocratic foes. in both ofking defeated his aristocratic foes. in both of those cases it is remarkable a part and their nobles and lived happily ever

after. of this was china the emperor would have killed aristocratic opponents. and every lineage of them to make sure the rope of dissent was broken. the early presence of what a european development made some difference in terms of the kind of authoritarian government you could create. until these horrible governments of the 20th century were the result of modernization, you undermine all of the authority of traditional forms of law. evil process by which we get to modern liberal democracy which is the only realistic alternative for modern society was based on an awful lot of

accidents and in a sense good luck to. it means that if we try to create similar institutions in other societies that have and had similar experiences it is a hard process. thank you very much. [applause] >> what a rich presentation. maybe nominally political scientist but lots of historic sensibility. one of the things you ought to know is frances fukuyama has been in public service. he is one of those who has tried to let government have a longer-range outlook than governments have by serving in the state department policy standing twice and as deputy under dennis ross. as you know there has been a distinguished group of people

who served as head of the state department policy planning staff. george kennan, san lewis, wins the award, dennis ross, people who have a passion for public service. let's begin with the questions. >> that was a wonderful overview and maybe this question is too specific and not general enough but you began by saying how did we get to be denmark? there is a big divide opening between england and us and europe. their version of the state involve a lot more state responsibility to take care of retirement, organize health and we seemed to be going in the other direction. is there something in your theory that speaks to that? >> you have got to wait for volume ii for that.

is a very good question. it is a volume ii kind of issue. most of what i know about this subject i learned from seymour martin lips and the great sociologist and political scientist who wrote an excellent book called american exceptional is in. which is a book about why the united states is so peculiar compared to other developed countries. one of the important ways is different is we don't have -- we don't trust government. in europe people see the government as the embodiment of public interest, something you look up to and respect because it represents public interest. in the united states it has always been regarded as something potentially aggressive. that came out of the american revolution because the u.s. was born in revolt against

overweening monarchical -- your children or grandchildren could arise and that reinforces this american view that if you are poor it is because you haven't worked hard enough and if you are rich it is because you were industrious and thrifty and there's enough truth to that that it reinforced this american unwillingness to have the state put you ahead. it ought to be individuals doing this on their own. >> a question from state department days when you talk about democratization and the

process but there is one element you haven't brought up and that is the issue of technology and the spread of information and are suspect that will be in your second volume. i wonder if you could speak to that briefly because it seems we might be at the end of history moment where information technology has radically changed a lot of the underlying fear is of some of these arguments. >> i think there has been an important change with social media for example. it played a very big role. it is good at mobilizing people. social mobilization is critical for producing democratic change. what is not clear to me is whether it is as good at producing institutions down the road as it is short-term mobilization. if you look at tunisia or egypt right now what they desperately

need is not more social mobilization. they need political parties, free media, all of these institutions that make civil society powerful and able to stand up and demand things of government. technology can help with that but i think it is not a panacea that some people see it as being. >> more in the sense of transcending the other inherent problems that information can overcome these things that we didn't have before. that was my point. >> for the second volume you might want to track some other authority than martin wetst.in..

[talking over each other] >> i have a question that represents the defamation. you think in big terms, one of the social scientists who do. every campus has one for better or for worse. i am not -- this city is full of tens of thousands of university graduates, highly educated in federal bureaucracy, are a services, general david petraeus is proud of his princeton ph.d.. if you look at the results in terms of policy derivatives,

what we think they learned in our universities, the results are far from sublime. what is your comment? >> as a professional educator i don't want to denigrate the impact of university education. i talked at sites for a decade and some of my students are here as we speak. did you learn anything? however -- let me make this comment. i actually think that the direction of social sciences that moved in the last 20 years has not been helpful because it has been taken over by economics so actually one of my agenda is in writing this book full of history is to remind people that they can't understand the way the contemporary world is unless

they know more history. you can't do things by theoretical models and aggression alone. one of the reasons a lot of contemporary american political science has not been terribly useful to policymakers is because it moved into this abstract realm where people don't know about real places and therefore they can't tell you, what do you do when confronting these tribes because no one has bothered to learn the language or spend time in villages and figure out what is going on. i will grant you that. my students spend time in the villages and their big exceptions to the general rule. >> my students in my harvard college. the fellow students like henry kissinger were simply awful so congratulations.

>> distinguished professor at georgetown has written a book, fascinating book. >> in the end of history and the last man you argue that liberal democracy represents the end point of history which is to say unlike previous stages of history does not contain within itself the seeds of its own destruction. does not have the internal contradictions that have destroyed all others. in the first chapter of your new book you touch on some disturbing themes in our culture. the notion among a lot of people that government is simply bad and not needed additional stratification of wealth, rise of corporations. in the 20 years since you've published the end of history

have you had reason to doubt that we are in fact that the end of history or might we be seeing destruction of what we thought was the end of history to spawn something new? >> a couple different parts of the answer to that. i have been thinking a lot in the last 20 years. i haven't stood still. one of the important themes in the current book is one i've picked up from huntington which is the possibility of political decay. one thing you see very clearly is that you create institutions for one set of purposes and people invest them with intrinsic worth either through religious sanctification or historical tradition or whatever and the circumstances change and institutions need to be changed and they become dysfunctional. i would say we have a problem in the united states because we face certain long-term challenges, fiscal

sustainability of where we are and so forth. our political system is so checked and balanced and polarized, the underlying political culture so polarized that we can't make basic decisions. if we cannot solve these problems there's no reason to find that our particular american democracy is going to do all that well and it could very well the case overtime. that is a slightly different question from the one i raised in the end of history which is in theory can you think of a better political system that would solve these problems? right now the one that is out there is this for cherry and capitalist china. for a number of reasons i think they are on a roll right now. but i don't actually believe that that system is sustainable over a longer period of time compared to a system like ours that has checks and balances. largely because i don't think

the chinese have a ever solve this problem that they themselves call the bad emperor problem which is to say that if you have an authoritarian system without checks and balances at you have a good number you are sitting pretty. quick decisions, much faster than a democracy that has to get consensus and agreement and so forth, interest groups and that sort of thing but if you have a bad number you are in big trouble because there's no way of getting rid of a bad person. the evil empress wu with a megalomaniac who buried 400 confucian scholars in an open pit for not liking what they were saying about him and mao tse tung was the last batch number most chinese would acknowledge. you don't get that in a democratic system because we do have checks and balances. in that respect i still go with our system down the road for all

of its problems. >> thanks very much. >> you dated the importance of in the law in the church to the eighth century. >> that was the end of the family. the investiture crisis happened in the eleventh century. >> that shoots the question because i was wondering, we were always told that charlemagne save civilization. already had the foundation of what in the eighth century he would have been -- he did not have that. i misunderstood you. >> congratulations on the book and your success. as somebody who believes you made very correct predictions the year before the end of communism in eastern europe and even the end of history, my belief is -- the two persons

before me after of the question but i want to emphasize a little more. we don't want war. we don't want chaos. we want democracy and free market in the arab world and iran and china. that is obvious. is this something you would recommend to policymakers in the united states? they deal with a lot here in the united states. are you saying we want democracy and free markets to prevail without chaos? >> absolutely. i believe historically the united states is always regarded as part of its national identity to be not just we happen to be democratic in north america but we are a model to other people. we believe this is based on universal human rights and rules of justice. we promoted democracy all over the place.

my objection during the iraq war we shouldn't do it militarily. it ought to be based on people in the societies that want democracy and there are plenty of ways to level a playing field when they are facing repress of authoritarian regimes. the means was different. european union is a more accurate version of the end of history because of power politics replaced power by rule and so forth. >> thank you. how does india's policy in kashmir -- 75,000 dead for decades. >> i am not going to act as a spokesman for the indian

government. i don't know what they're doing this in kashmir. democracies do a lot of dumb things. look at american foreign policy and we make a lot of mistakes in the world as well. the other thing is just because the country is a democracy doesn't mean that it puts the promotion of democratic values first and foremost in all aspects of its policy. we support saudi arabia because they have got oil, not because they're a democracy. that is a fact of life. it is interesting that a lot of newer democracies like india, turkey, brazil are different from the united states because they don't regard the projection of democratic mao use around the world as it thevalues around th world as it the same imperative

americans do. [inaudible] >> we have to come to an end. everyone who is in line -- >> this is a volume iii question. given the supernational organizations like the un and world trade organization and world court and a bunch of regional organizations can i coax you into commenting on the prospects of a world state? >> sure. i think the prospect is zero. i just think if you look at a political system it has to be based on some minimal degree of consensus about basic rules of justice and values and so forth and a diverse democracy like the united states we are