Excerpt from The Adaptable Country: How Canada Can Thrive in the Twenty-First Century, by Alasdair Roberts, published by McGill-Queen’s University Press, Kingston, Canada, in 2024. Subtitles and emphases added by the editors.
The Inevitable Demise of Political Systems
No political system lasts forever. Some systems expire after only a few decades; a handful last for centuries. A system might plunge into crisis and emerge in a different form, still governing roughly the same territory. Or it might fracture into many smaller systems. Or it might be absorbed into a larger system. One way or another, though, every system ends eventually. Leaders rarely acknowledge this fact – for understandable reasons – but it is a hard reality.
In the 1970s, Estonian political scientist Rein Taagepera calculated the lifespan of empires throughout history. Before World War II, most people lived within empires. Empires were the default mode of political organization, but they were also mortal. Taagepera calculated that the average duration of empires throughout history was three or four generations. Most were short-lived. Fewer than one-fifth of the empires in Taagepera’s study lasted for more than ten generations.
After World War II, the remaining empires were broken up, and states became the default mode of political organization. A state is a political system that exercises control over a defined territory and is recognized as the legitimate authority in that territory by other states. There are roughly 190 states in the world today, and Canada is one of them.
The Rise and Fragility of Modern States: A Realist Perspective from the Post-War Era
We take the world of states for granted, but it is just as brittle as the world of empires. Most states are very young. Two-thirds of the states represented in the United Nations General Assembly are less than eighty years old. Most states are also unstable, according to the research organization Fund for Peace.
About half the world’s population lives in very unstable states. Several states have collapsed within the life experience of the average Canadian, which is about forty-three years. The most striking example of state collapse in recent decades is that of the Soviet Union in 1991.
We can list the problems that have contributed to the collapse of political systems in the past. The list includes rebellions by regional leaders, popular uprisings, invasions, economic shocks, plagues, mass migrations, and climate change among other disruptions. However, a political system rarely collapses for just one reason. Usually, collapse happens because problems pile up.
One problem aggravates another, which aggravates yet another. Political leaders and government agencies are overwhelmed. The entire situation becomes too complex to understand and manage, and the system unravels. This dire scenario is called a polycrisis.
Polycrisis: The Complex Web Leading to State Collapse
The structure of any state, including Canada, can be seen as an apparatus for avoiding, or at least managing, problems that are potentially fatal to that state and, above all, for avoiding a polycrisis.
For example, we give substantial power to provinces to reduce the risk of regional rebellions. We give people the right to vote to reduce the risk of mass discontent. We establish an army to protect against invasion, police forces to reduce internal disorder, regulatory agencies to prevent economic collapse, a public health system to avoid pandemics, and so on. In a sense, the state as a whole is like a giant risk management scheme.
Of course, we have positive goals for the state as well. We want to build a just and prosperous society, but this is only possible if the state itself survives. Political leaders must anticipate the worst case, so that they can work toward the best case. Leaders must be vigilant about potential dangers. They must devise a grand strategy for achieving their ambitions, given the dangers they are likely to face. They must generate agreement about the wisdom of their proposed strategy. And they must build or renovate governmental institutions so they are capable of doing all that the strategy requires.
No realist would ever talk about a universal formula for governing well.
Moreover, leaders must be prepared to revise their work. The world is a complicated place. Some threats abate with time while new ones come into view. Think about all the dangers Western countries have encountered so far this century that were dismissed as unimportant in the year 2000: terrorism, financial crises, pandemics, gross inequality, ethno-nationalism, and war. For any state, the threat matrix, as security specialists call it, is constantly evolving. In a world like this, vigilance can never be relaxed. Grand strategy always requires readjustment. Institutions must be renovated constantly to meet the new requirements of strategy.
The view of governance I have just described is known as realism. It emphasizes the prevalence of danger, the fragility of states, the need for vigilance, and the importance of nimbleness in adjusting strategy and institutions to accommodate new circumstances.
Machiavelli and the Foundations of Realism in Political Governance
In the Western world, one of the most famous advocates of realism in governance is Niccolò Machiavelli. Today, Machiavelli has a reputation for encouraging dirty politics. This is unfair to Machiavelli and, for present purposes, beside the point. We are interested in Machiavelli’s broader view of what governing a state requires.
In two of his most famous books, The Prince and The Discourses, Machiavelli describes a world that is confused and fraught with perils. Political leaders wrestle with shifting circumstances, which Machiavelli calls Fortune and compares to “one of those violent torrents that flood the plains, destroying trees and buildings, hurling earth from one place to another.” The best way to deal with Fortune, Machiavelli says, is by building “dikes and dams in times of calm, so that when the torrent rises it will gush into a channel, its force neither so harmful nor so unbridled.”
Realists are skeptical about constitutions that are highly detailed and inflexible, precisely because realists anticipate the need to adjust and reinvent institutions as conditions change.
A good political system, in Machiavelli’s view, is ready to bear foreseeable hazards. But the set of potential hazards varies by place and time. “All the affairs of this world are in motion,” he warns. “Fortune is changeable.” A leader must watch carefully for new threats and build new dikes and dams – new institutions – where necessary. Renovating institutions is hard but essential work. “States that have a long life,” Machiavelli concludes, “are those which can keep renewing themselves. It is quite clear that if they do not renew themselves they will not endure.”
Machiavelli did not invent realism. He was one of dozens of scholars who wrote handbooks for rulers around the world in the centuries before the Enlightenment. Look at the work of Kautilya, a celebrated thinker in Indian political philosophy. His Arthashastra, written two millennia ago, is obsessed with the ephemerality of political order. Kautilya details all the calamities that might befall the Mauryan empire, which ruled much of the Indian subcontinent around the third century BCE. Survival, Kautilya warns Mauryan leaders, requires foresight, preparedness, and quick adjustment to changing conditions.
Realism pervades the millennia-long history of Chinese statecraft. “Everything on earth is subject to change,” says an ancient text, the I Ching. “Evil can be held in check but not permanently abolished.” It follows that a good leader must “be mindful of danger in times of peace, downfall in times of survival, and chaos in times of stability.” A seasoned observer of China attributes the country’s endurance over centuries to its “seemingly unlimited capacity for metamorphosis and adaptation” and refusal to be “trapped into set forms.”
Global Perspectives on Realism: Lessons from Ancient to Modern Political Thought
We can see elements of realism in the political thinking and practices of America’s Indigenous peoples. Pre-colonial Indigenous societies, says Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, “were dynamic social systems with adaptation built into them.” White colonization was a calamity for these societies. Survival required agility in the face of centuries of oppression.
In a recent book, Pekka Hämäläinen charts the history of the Lakota people, who have endured, he argues, because of their “stunning ability and willingness to change” while preserving the essence of Lakota identity. The “shapeshifting Lakota regime,” as Hämäläinen calls it, takes inspiration from Iktómi, the spider-trickster, who can transform himself at will into any form.
Realist thinking thrives whenever societies enter moments of severe stress.
The early twentieth century saw a revival of the realist perspective among the settler populations of North America. American and Canadian intellectuals recognized that public institutions built in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were no longer suited to societies convulsed by economic, technological, and cultural change.
In 1927, American philosopher John Dewey said government ought to be regarded as a never-ending “experimental process.” A professor at the University of Toronto, Robert MacIver, agreed. “The state,” he said, “never achieves a final perfected form. It is a domain of constant innovation.”
Realism vs. Anti-Realism in Twentieth-Century North America
Realist thinking thrives whenever societies enter moments of severe stress. Writing in 1973, during another period of social and economic disorder in the United States, Professor Donald Schön said it was time to abandon belief in the “stable state.”
The truth, said Schön, was that no set of governing institutions was likely to remain workable for more than a few decades. The task for policy-makers was to guide a never-ending process of institutional transformation. In 2016, another moment of deep stress in the United States, Schön’s message was echoed by Professor Donald Kettl: “The challenge of adapting government to shifting problems is ageless and universal.” He added that “the biggest challenge of governance, across the globe, is adapting the institutions and processes of government to the new problems it faces.”
Not everyone is a realist. Throughout history, there have been philosophers and politicians who have emphasized the need for continuity in the design of political systems rather than change. These anti-realists come in different varieties.
A realist would say every state must find its own way as history unfolds.
One kind of anti-realist is the hardline constitutionalist. The premise of hardline constitutionalism is that we know enough about the world to set up a scheme of government that will work for a very long time. The operating rules for this political system can be spelled out in detail in a constitution, a foundational document that is hard to change.
By contrast, realists are skeptical about constitutions that are highly detailed and inflexible, precisely because realists anticipate the need to adjust and reinvent institutions as conditions change.
The American constitution was drafted by hardline constitutionalists. According to a famous nineteenth-century jurist, it was “reared for immortality.” President Woodrow Wilson said it was designed on “the Newtonian theory of the universe.” He meant that drafters of the constitution saw the political world as though it were a piece of clockwork, composed of well-defined pieces interacting in predictable ways. “Study government,” said one of the drafters, John Adams, “as you construct steam engines.” Today, the tradition of hardline constitutionalism is continued by legal scholars who insist the American constitution must be interpreted exactly as it would have been in the eighteenth century.
Hardline constitutionalism does not have deep roots in Canada. Still, political leaders have expressed an appreciation for it now and then. In 1987, Pierre Trudeau said the recently modified Canadian constitution had established a system of government that would “last a thousand years.” This was an unusual sort of comment for Trudeau, who would normally be classed as a realist.
Trudeau was frustrated with politicians who wanted to revise the constitution he had worked so hard to bring home to Canada in 1982. Some of those politicians might have been affected by anti-realist thinking too. They thought the 1982 constitution was flawed but that, properly amended, it would “finally resolve” problems that threatened to tear the country apart.
The Legacy of Hardline Constitutionalism: Enduring Stability or Unrealistic Rigidity?
A second kind of anti-realism can be found in the political theory known as neoliberalism. Neoliberalism is a political philosophy that emerged after World War II and became influential around the world by the end of the twentieth century. A central tenet of neoliberalism is that elected politicians have strong incentives to make decisions that damage long-term growth. The authority of politicians has to be curtailed, for the good of the country.
As Thomas Friedman famously said in 1999, neoliberals want politicians to don a “golden straitjacket.” The straitjacket includes strict rules against borrowing money that would ideally be entrenched in a national constitution. Central banks must be given iron-clad independence, so they can fight inflation without interference. International agreements, enforced by bodies such as the World Trade Organization, must be established to stop governments from interfering with trade and investment across national borders. There are other elements to the straitjacket too.
Arrangements like these are sometimes called commitment devices, because they commit decisionmakers to policies that make sense in the long run but are politically awkward in the short run. Politicians surrender their freedom to avoid mistakes, just as Odysseus tied himself to the mast so that he would not be lured onto the rocks by the Sirens.
Neoliberalism’s Golden Straitjacket: Universal Solutions or Constraints on Governance?
Organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank played a significant role in spreading such reforms around the world in the last years of the twentieth century. The list of reforms that they recommended is widely known as the Washington Consensus. It was regarded as a universal formula for governance, good for all times and places.
No realist would ever talk about a universal formula for governing well. A realist would say every state must find its own way as history unfolds. But in the 1990s powerful people believed that the world had reached “the end of history,” a new plateau of stability in which most of the fundamental problems confronting states had been resolved. The world would witness the emergence of the “final form of human government,” that system of market-friendly democracy proscribed by the Washington Consensus. Even communist China seemed to be following a path toward economic and political liberalization.
Of course, history was rebooted in the twenty-first century, as one crisis followed another. One result was that the Washington Consensus, the universal formula for governing well, was consigned to the dustbin. Institutional reforms of the 1990s were not abandoned, but they were challenged everywhere. Borrowing limits were ignored, central bank independence was infringed, trade rules were bent, and governments intervened more directly in their economies. Governments improvised as they reacted to one shock after another. Politicians were realists again.
For further insights and detailed analysis, explore The Adaptable Country: How Canada Can Thrive in the Twenty-First Century by Alasdair Roberts. This excerpt is reproduced with permission from McGill-Queen’s University Press. Subtitles and emphases added by the editors. All rights reserved.
