James Robinson: Why Nations Fail, Historical Lessons for Ukraine, and the Role of Education

If that's right, then, you know, Ukraine is out in the cold. But we still have friends in Europe and we have a limited time to become European. What does it mean to be European? You know, that's a kind of vague thing. We don't have a friend in Washington anymore. My father hated the Americans. We sat, you know, through the Battle of Britain while the Americans twiddled their thumbs and played baseball.

Yeah, I think, I mean, I think, you know, when I was here before, we talked a lot about, you know, Maidan and the kind of attempt to create a democratic, kind of European Ukraine and the institutional reforms, you know, that my research suggests, you know, need to happen, and how can you make them happen, and what's the politics of that. And I think, you know, the war obviously has sort of put a lot of things into suspended animation, you know, is the term I was thinking, you know, meaning, you know, the war, the focus on survival, and, you know, which has been sort of remarkable, you know, like I think if anyone had explained to you what was going to happen, they'd say Ukraine wouldn't exist anymore. But Ukraine does exist, and it's just been extraordinary. But you're going to exit from this, but the threat is not going to go away. There'll be peace, but the threat will not go away.

And I think for me, like what I've seen so far talking to people, is like this is really, you know, what in our theory we call the critical juncture, you know, it's a moment where the society can go in different directions, very different directions, you know, it can collapse like South Vietnam did, you know, or it can flourish like South Korea did, and I think what South Korea, sorry, South Korea, but, you know, or Taiwan or Finland, you know, but which path is not determined. You know, that's about the choices you make. It's about the Ukrainians. It's about what Ukrainians do and the Ukrainians' ability to kind of formulate a kind of project.

I, you know, I think what went wrong in South Vietnam is that, you know, they were much too reliant on the Americans. They were too reliant on American... ironic in today's climate. Well, you know, there's a lesson to be learned there. They were too reliant on American weapons, American security guarantees, which turned out, you know, not to be sustainable politically in the United States. They were too, you know, and they didn't develop a kind of separate identity from North Vietnamese. They didn't develop a national project, you know, which could have allowed people to like really believe that we're something different, you know, we can sustain a kind of nation. And then they collapsed, you know.

And I, you know, I think that's an enormous difference, you know, if you compare like Taiwan, for example. So in Taiwan, one of the tricks in Taiwan was, you know, so this was a Kuomintang government, they left at the time of the communist revolution, they moved to Taiwan, so Mao took over. And the communists, what did they do in Taiwan? They said we have to be different from the communists. So they reinstated this sort of Confucian philosophy, they kind of emphasized very much the traditional Chinese philosophy to distinguish themselves from the communists. You know, the communists were destroying ancestral temples and, you know, lineage temples and sort of traditional Chinese religious shrines and things like that. You go to Taipei, they're everywhere. Religious shrines, you know, they found a kind of access in Chinese culture to really emphasize, you know, why we're different in Taiwan and why we're not like the communists. And that's very important. And they never did that in, they could never do that in South Vietnam. You know, of course, Finland, you know, the Finns are very different from the Russians. Totally different language. I mean, Finnish is not even an Indo-European language. You know, it's really distinct. And so, but that culture had to be created in Taiwan.

No, I mean, like, you know, the Ukrainians are far more distinct from the Russians than the Taiwanese are from the Chinese. I mean, there are some indigenous people in Formosa and whatever, but most people in Taiwan now are the descendants of Chinese people who fled in the 1940s.

Well, I think, yeah, I think if you look at South Korea in the 1950s when Syngman Rhee was the president, it was extremely corrupt. You know, in fact, I always give, when I teach in Bogota in Colombia, I put these slides up and I start talking about South Korea in the 1950s and all the Colombians think I'm talking about Colombia. It's like corruption, there's corruption in procurement, there's all these monopolies, there's businessmen bribing the, you know, like it sounds like Colombia. And then I tell them, no, actually this is South Korea, you know, in 1960, and the Americans got exasperated with this and Kennedy started running down the aid. So that's actually one of the things that precipitated, you know, President Park to sort of decide we can't rely on the Americans, you know, we need to do it ourselves. And what was one of his first priorities? A steel industry. Why did he care about steel? The World Bank said it'll never be economically viable. You can't, you know, he wanted an armament industry. And if you want to have an armament industry, why? Because you can't rely on the Americans, you have to have a steel industry as an input into the armament industry. So I think that's exactly it, it was the running down of aid that convinced the South Koreans that we have to do this on our own. Yeah. And absolutely. So sure, the Americans, there are still American troops in South Korea, whatever. But I think it's almost the opposite of the truth that, you know, it was the running down of aid that precipitated this kind of realization amongst Korean political elites that actually we need to take a new direction here.

Yeah. I mean, I think you could think of examples either way. You know, you could think of examples where outside military interventions were important in, you know, keeping some government going. And, you know, but the example that, you know, came to mind immediately for me, you know, when we were discussing this the other evening, is Congo, you know, Democratic Republic of Congo, that I work, you know, in the Democratic Republic of Congo. I've been working there for 15 years. There's all these United Nations peacekeeping troops everywhere. They never do anything to stop anything. They don't stop the Rwandans invading. They don't stop these guerrilla groups like taking Bukavu and Goma, which are the two biggest cities in the east of Congo. What they do do is they allow their president in Kinshasa, in the west of the Congo, to pretend that everything's fine because the peacekeepers are dealing with it and we don't have a security problem in the east. Actually, he doesn't care about the east and he doesn't have to do anything because he can basically pretend that, you know. And but for the people, these peacekeepers don't do anything. They just lull everybody into a false sense of security. So I think like most of the examples I've seen close up are very counterproductive, you know, and I'm sure in the case of South Vietnam, the presence of, you know, enormous numbers of US soldiers basically kind of gave the political elites the thought that, well, you know, we're fine. We have all these Americans protecting us, and then suddenly the Americans left, you know, and they were on their own, and they didn't have the resources or capacity to do anything.

No. There's no project in Ukraine. I think there's people talking about it, but I don't see it yet. I think that's sort of natural. I mean, everything is about the war, and, you know, in some sense you can only have one priority. You know, maybe you can have three maximum, but in this circumstance, you know, it makes sense, you know, to have this one priority, but you could prepare, you know, you can prepare.

I don't think it's vague, but I don't think, I mean, I think that's a great project. I don't think it's vague because, you know, being European is sort of institutionalized by the European Union, you know, so nowadays there's some things that you have to kind of commit to to become a European, and so there's a sort of, there's a goalpost, you know, which is helpful, I think, in a case like Ukraine. There's steps you have to take, and there's, you know, and there's people who help you on that road, you know, kind of explain, and there's models also, there's role models, you know, like how did the Poles do that, you know, how did the Bulgarians do that, you know, why couldn't the Serbians do it, you know, and so I think there's lots of lessons to be learned from very recent experience of like how you go down that road, you know, also. So I think that's absolutely an aspiration, but I think you have to figure out like practically how to get there, you know, what levers do you have, you know, and what to prioritize on that road, and how to get everyone to buy into that, you know, get it.

Yes. Absolutely. Yes. You know, I don't pretend to be omniscient, and, you know, there's different images of what's going on in the United States at the moment, but I'm pretty convinced that, you know, that there's a very high probability that the US has moved on to a very different path. Now, it's what I was calling like a post-liberal kind of societal order. I mean, because it's not just about politics, or it's anti-liberal in the political sphere, but it's anti-liberal in the economic sphere, the retreat from globalization, you know, the retreat, you know, and it's anti-liberal in the sort of the intellectual and the social sphere too, you know, it's anti-, you know, gay rights. It's anti- all sorts of things, you know, it's anti- kind of personal freedoms in a liberal sense, you know, and so it's anti-liberalism, you know, intellectually. That's why there's this attack on universities. And I don't think this is just about President Trump, you know, President Trump is a symptom of the way society's been moving, you know. So I think there's a big likelihood that, you know, that model is going to gain momentum and it's going to go forward, you know, even when President Trump passes from the scene. And if that's right, then, you know, Ukraine is out in the cold, you know, because that's a very sort of specific isolationist model of foreign policy.

And, you know, I was reminding everybody also, it's not too long ago, you know, I was telling the story of my father, you know, that the US was isolationist even during World War II. Well, you know, over two years, the US sat on their hands while Hitler annexed Europe. Basically, the Japanese annexed Southeast Asia. The Americans did nothing. Absolutely nothing. You know, like to that kind of existential threat, you know, to the world. They did nothing for over two years. It was only when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, you know, that they entered the war. You know, if the Japanese hadn't done that, you know, the Japanese decided that at some point the Americans were going to enter the war anyway, so they might as well strike first, you know. But that, you know, you could say that was a miscalculation, you know, if that had not happened, they would have sat there and, you know, who knows, like what, you know, we could do a nice counterfactual history, you know. So my father hated the Americans because he just thought like that we sat, you know, through the Battle of Britain while the Americans, like, you know, twiddled their thumbs and played baseball.

Well, they lived in London during the war. Yeah. My father didn't fight in the military because he was an electrical engineer and he worked on radar, the development of radar basically. So he was like an exempt profession that helped develop radar, you know, which was a kind of super high priority. So he never fought in the army, but they lived in London. My mother was a teacher, and they used to, like, they tell you all these amazing stories about the Battle of Britain when the Germans were bombing London, and you had then all these flying bombs, and, you know, like, it might resonate with Ukrainians.

I think it's a, yeah, I mean, similar forces are definitely at work, you know, this, you know, in France with the National Front, you know, in Italy, although this lady, you know, turns out to be much more kind of moderate than people thought she was going to be, you know, in Germany with this AfD party, you know, so I think you see similar things everywhere, you know, even in Sweden for heaven's sake, you know, but I think that, you know, the sociological context is very different. One of the problems in America is, you know, there's no social insurance, there's nothing helping these working-class people who've been kind of cast adrift, you know, by globalization, by, you know, the China, what they call the China shock in economics. In Europe, there's mechanisms of social insurance. You still have welfare states, you know, a lot of people might not be as angry. I don't think they're as angry. They're not as angry. Yeah.

Well, I think that's so hard to think through. I mean, you know, one thing is the AGI, you know, like the sort of when the computers take over, you know, the physicists, you know, deeply believe in this artificial general intelligence. In fact, you know, one of my co-Nobel laureates, the way he put it was, you know, first there was pond slime, and then pond slime evolved into Homo sapiens, and, you know, Homo sapiens are much more powerful and intelligent than pond slime. So we dominate pond slime, and then, you know, Homo sapiens invented computers, and we kind of invented, you know, something which will dominate and control us, and that's just evolution, and isn't it beautiful seeing evolution playing out, you know. So yeah, but that's a kind of linear, predetermined or deterministic, and no one could take any actions to stop it, and, you know, so that's not the way an economist would think, that's a kind of evolutionary view.