All right, great. Well, thank you very much. First of all, I'd just like to thank everyone for inviting me, for the University of Montenegro, for Yoan persuading me to come to Montenegro. As we were discussing today, I've actually been rather fascinated by Montenegro for a long time. I used to — 20 years ago, I was a professor at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. And I had a colleague in anthropology. I was in the economics department, but I had a colleague in the anthropology department called Christopher Boehm. And Christopher's PhD dissertation from the early 1960s was actually on Montenegro, and he studied historical patterns of feuding amongst clans in the Montenegrin mountains. So mostly retrospective evidence from the 1930s and 1940s, but it's an absolutely fascinating book, like for me kind of intellectually, because one of the things that I've worked on for many years are the kind of the variation in the world in state structures and kind of the desire to build a state or the opposition to build a state, and in what circumstances effective state institutions emerge and consolidate themselves. You see this huge variation in the world in that. So Montenegro for me was a sort of fascinating example in the sense that, you know, it shared so much history with the rest of Europe, you know, part of the Roman Empire, whatever, Abrahamic religions, you know, many things which other parts of the world don't have in common, yet there was still this kind of antagonism towards the creation of a centralized state. So that's why I found the Montenegrin example so interesting, that's why it ended up in our book, The Narrow Corridor, and that's why I'm so sort of thrilled to be here in person. The only real question is why I didn't get here earlier.
And that's because I'm just spread too thin, and most of my real research is, you know, has been for many, many years in Latin America and in sub-Saharan Africa, and there's only so many days in the year, unfortunately. But anyway, the translation, which I'm very honored and very excited to see, gives me a great pretext for coming here. So I'm just trying to give you a kind of sense of how thrilled I am and how fascinated I am to learn, you know, more about your amazing country and its history and its society. And, you know, as a, you know, I started life as an economist, you know, and I won the Nobel Prize in economics, ironically enough. And, you know, it's ironic — I say ironically because, you know, when you learn economics and when I did my PhD dissertation, I was working in kind of mathematical economics and general equilibrium theory and in game theory. And when you study economic theory like that, you know, everywhere is the same. Everywhere in the world is the same. You know, everyone in the world has the same utility functions and production functions and markets, and economic theory is sort of projected to be something like Newton's laws of gravitational motion. You know, that force is equal to mass times acceleration, whether you're in Montenegro or Mongolia, you know, or Bolivia or — force is equal to mass times acceleration. But I guess what I've come to understand myself is that social theory is not actually like that. Social theory is much more conditional on the culture and the history and the sociology of different societies.
And for many years I just sort of tried to ignore that and bury it, and then at some point I completely changed and decided I should embrace it. You know, it makes your life much more difficult, but it's so interesting. You know, humans have created such different societies in different parts of the world, and it's just fascinating to study that and to learn about it, and it's complicated to understand, but that's just how things are. You know, for me, that's my own conclusion at this point in my career. You know, I work — I've been — the last six years I've been working a lot in eastern Nigeria, which I claim is like the most diverse place I've ever set foot in on the planet. And there's — Igbo is the main language spoken in eastern Nigeria. And there's an Igbo proverb that I like very much, which is the akwa. So the akwa, it's a type of kind of — it's like a guinea fowl. It's like a type of bird. The akwa sings differently in every village, you know. So the bird may look the same, but its song is different in every village. So it's a metaphor for every Nigerian village is different from the one next door. Politics are different, the social system is different. Anyway, so I digress.
Okay, so my task today is to talk about The Narrow Corridor, which, you know, has been so fantastically translated, and I haven't talked about this book for a while, actually. So, you know, it's always forward in academia, you know, it's always the next project and the next project and the next project. My wife is always very critical of this. She says, like, you know, the problem with academia is like you never get to sort of sit and relax and kind of enjoy what you've achieved. As soon as you finish something, it's like the next project or the next project or we have to finish that and we have to — so this is a nice moment maybe where, like, at least I can — I don't know that I achieved anything, but we did write this big book. So I'm trying — let me try to kind of enjoy the fact that we're proud of the book and we spent a long time researching it. Okay, so what's the book about? So of course a lot of our work as economists, Professor Acemoglu and I, has been about comparative economic development. But one of the things that we talked about and we thought about a lot when we were writing this book is could we kind of broaden the agenda in some sense, or instead of just thinking of the dependent variable or the outcome as being prosperity or economic material benefits or living standards or something. There's many other things about a society that we care about. Okay, and I think both of us would say liberty is one of those things. Okay, so we wanted to kind of broaden the discussion. I'm not sure we succeeded, but we wanted to broaden the discussion in terms of what kind of outcomes do we really care about achieving in society. Yes, we care about economics and prosperity and eradicating poverty, and we care about inequality and social mobility, but we care about things which are less easy to measure, you know, with a dollar sign in front of them or a euro sign in front of them, and, you know, we put the word liberty on that. Okay, so let me — I could talk about the book in different ways, but I thought I'd have a go at talking about it like this. Okay, and I'm going to start by quoting, you know, John Locke, and I do that for a reason, which is that, you know, I think Professor Acemoglu and I's — our next book, which we hope doesn't exist — it's sort of a fantasy at the moment — which, but I'll look forward to the Montenegrin coming back for the launch of the Montenegrin translation of our not-yet-written next book — is going to be paying a lot more attention to ideas and ideology, you know, so it's good to have John Locke up there to start with. So John Locke has a famous definition of liberty. This comes right at the start of his Second Treatise of Government, and he defines liberty as a state of perfect freedom. You know, well, humans want to — like, so here's the claim. There's two claims on this slide. The first claim is humans want to live in liberty, by which John Locke meant a state of perfect freedom to order their actions and dispose of their possessions and persons as they think fit, without asking leave or depending upon the will of any other man. Okay? So you could think of this as being a definition of, you know, so-called negative liberty. Okay? So, and it's a kind of claim here. There's a claim here that people aspire to live in such a state, okay, where they can make decisions about themselves or their persons as they like without asking anybody else, 'Is it okay if I do that?' All right. So, there's John Locke's definition of liberty. So I think it's pretty clear that, you know, if that's your definition of liberty and if that's what people are aspiring to, that's a kind of empirical claim, you know, we could debate that. It's pretty obvious there's a huge amount of variation in the world in the extent to which people experience liberty of this sort. Okay. So one way of thinking about the development of the theoretical framework in the book is to sort of say, here's a definition of liberty. Let's imagine that everybody aspires to live in liberty, which might not be true. There's a lot of variation in the world in the extent to which people have this sort of liberty, and we want to develop a theory to try to understand that variation. That's the motivation of the book. Okay. So to sort of see what that theory looks like, let me talk about this variation in the extent of liberty at some kind of intuitive level and try to think about what seems to be associated with liberty or illiberty. All right. And the most obvious source of illiberty, and this is certainly, you know, what John Locke was thinking about, the Second Treatise of Government, which was written in the 1680s, probably in the early 1680s, but became the kind of intellectual foundation for the so-called Glorious Revolution in Britain in 1688, which kind of derailed this attempt to create an absolutist monarchy in Britain and sort of institutionalized the sovereignty of Parliament. So that was a very important moment of political transition in Britain. That's, you know, Locke was thinking about liberty, and he was thinking about particular threats to liberty, and the idea he had in mind was that liberty seems very difficult to have in a situation where you have a very powerful state dominating society. Okay. So, what's an example of that? Well, an obvious example of that today would be China. Okay. So, you know, in the 1940s, I — it might be just a coincidence, but I recently reread 1984 by George Orwell. I don't know why anyone living in the United States at the moment would want to reread George Orwell's 1984, but anyway, it just happened. I'll talk to my psychoanalyst. So, of course, in 1984, Orwell talks about Big Brother is watching you. Okay, Big Brother is the dictator. Big Brother is watching you. Okay. Of course, in 1948 when Orwell published that book, it wasn't technologically possible for Big Brother to watch you. But now it is. Okay. So, if you go to China, there's millions and millions of these face recognition cameras on every street corner. This is, of course, in Tiananmen Square. There's Chairman Mao in the background with these face recognition cameras watching you. So, Big Brother really is watching you in China. Okay. So I think this is a pretty reasonable example of a situation where the state dominates society, and that dominance seems to be associated with illiberty. Okay, people don't have those abilities, that negative liberty that John Locke was talking about in China, because they always have to worry about what would the Communist Party think about that. Okay.
Okay, great. That's what John Locke was thinking about. But I think if you think about the variation in the world, it's also pretty clear that that's not the only source of illiberty in the world. Okay, that's not the whole story. Locke, he was writing in a particular time, in a particular kind of historical and political moment, he was fixated on this one problem. Okay. But if you think about the world today or historically, it's clear there's other sources of illiberty. And in fact, you have societies, you know, which are almost the opposite of the Chinese case, where it's not the case that the states dominate society. You could almost say it's the other way round. Okay, here's an example. Not Montenegro historically. I could have put it in there. It's coming later. But Yemen, okay, so the example of Yemen is sort of fabulous. You know, this is high — this is mountainous Yemen. You can see all these boys here. These are like young men, boys. They all have a dagger in their belt. When you come of age in Yemen, you get given a dagger. There's different sorts of daggers. As you move along in life, you get different sorts of daggers and weapons. So, northern Yemen in particular, the highlands of northern Yemen historically never had a centralized state. It was organized around kinship groups, clans, lineages, etc. There was never a central state. There was nothing like the Chinese state or the absolutist state that was being tried, which was kind of in the process of construction in the 1680s in Britain when Locke wrote the Second Treatise of Government. There's never been anything like that in Yemen. Okay. But there's not much liberty despite the absence of a large state. Okay. And I think, you know, if you look at the history of Yemen and you pick up any book by an anthropologist about Yemen, it's full of examples of violence, of feuding, of retaliation, of illiberty. Okay. And I think there's two reasons for that. One is obvious, and one is kind of subtler. And I want to say something about that picture, which is, you know, the most — you know, I'm talking about the state, and I'll be talking a lot about the state. You know, the most famous definition of the state was due to the German sociologist Max Weber, and Weber said, you know, the state is that entity or that human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence within a given territory. Okay. But in Yemen, it's almost the opposite way round. It's almost people in society have the legitimate use of violence. Everyone has a dagger. They can legitimately use the dagger, but the state doesn't have the ability to use violence against society in Yemen. So, it's like the opposite of Weber's claim. Okay. So there's two sources of illiberty in Yemen. One is, you know, very familiar from this other great political philosopher of 17th century Britain, Thomas Hobbes, who was writing, you know, in the 1640s at the time of the English Civil War, proposing that the solution to this conflict was the creation of a hegemonic state, what he called the Leviathan, you know, from the Book of Job in the Bible. And without a state, you're going to have a kind of chaotic situation. He calls this war. W-A-R-E. That's the kind of archaic spelling he used, which we sort of like. And that's a situation where, with continual fear, the danger of violent death, with the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. I'm sure that's a quotation you've seen before. So I think I could quote more from Hobbes's Leviathan, but this is not a situation with much liberty. Okay, there's a lot of insecurity and violence and illiberty, but I think that's not the only thing that is going on to some extent in Yemen, but it's not the only thing that's going on because there's other ways of adjusting to these problems. And I think what you see, what I see very often working in sub-Saharan Africa is in sub-Saharan Africa there's many societies which historically did not have a state. Even today, you know, you could sort of say Somalia doesn't really have a state. It's terribly difficult to construct centralized authority in Somalia. But there's lots of ways of reacting to that. Okay. There's lots of ways of adjusting society. There's lots of social norms that develop to reduce all of these problems. Okay. But what's interesting about that is often these social norms, which we call the cage of norms, are a different source of illiberty. Okay. So those norms typically don't promote liberty. In fact, rather the opposite. They restrict it in order to reduce some of the potential negative consequences of living in this world where society dominates the state. So there's two sources of illiberty, the kind of Hobbesian sort and what I'm going to call in a couple of slides the cage of norms. Okay. All right. So now you sort of think of this balance. Okay. On the one hand, you have something like China where the state dominates society. That doesn't create liberty. Let's go to the opposite extreme. Society dominates the state. That doesn't seem to create liberty either. So where on earth does liberty come from? And, you know, this motivates the title of the book. Well, somehow in between, where you have a balance between the state and society, that's where liberty emerges. Okay? And it's in the middle where we call this narrow corridor where you get some kind of balance between state and society that liberty emerges. Okay. So there's this kind of trichotomy: state dominates society, society dominates the state, or in some circumstances you can get this balance. Okay. And, you know, we have this diagram. You know, this is a representation of a mathematical model. It looks a little bit too nerdy probably for a book, but anyway. So, and we're on the vertical axis we have the power of the state. You know, what do I mean by that? Well, the Chinese case, think about the power of the state, the capacity of the state to kind of monitor society, to control society, to regulate society. On the horizontal axis, something which is a bit more kind of nebulous conceptually, we sort of talk about the power of society. So, the ability of society to organize collectively. It's not just about organization, it's also about defining collective goals. And we want to talk about, you know, here's this — is the kind of Chinese equilibrium on the boundary, if you like. I'm going to come and talk about the arrows in a minute. The Yemen equilibrium we were talking about, Lebanon earlier, you could think of as being on the horizontal where society is powerful but the state is weak or maybe even completely absent. And in the middle there's this corridor, okay, this narrow corridor. Okay. So, and, you know, this diagram is meant to indicate, you know, as the kind of mathematical model shows, is there's a kind of very interesting sort of dynamics here. Okay. And so let me try to talk about the dynamics by getting into some questions about, you know, okay, so here's a way of sort of — it's a simple way of classifying different societies and trying to understand, you know, why they end up where they do. But of course, you know, you'd also be interested in asking, like, you know, how come Yemen looks so different from China, or how come China looks so different from Western Europe. And the point of this diagram is to sort of show, well, there are kind of dynamics which spread these societies apart. But if you went back in time, these societies could look fairly similar, but there'd be a lot of sensitivity to initial conditions which become massively amplified over time. And one of the things we try to do in the book, in terms of the kind of historical stories, is give some sense of how these dynamics can lead pretty similar places, at least historically, to diverge. Okay. So let me kind of talk about that a little bit by, you know, talking about Europe or Western Europe perhaps, or even Britain. You know, why is it that some parts of the world are in the corridor and others not? Okay, so let me start with Europe. So what we do in the book is to sort of say, you know, okay, if we think about countries that have been in the corridor, that have experienced these dynamics, you know, what happens with the dynamics? You know, let me say along the corridor here, the state becomes stronger and society becomes stronger. So there's a kind of competition. The way we characterize this is there's a competition between the state and society. And I want to show you that in action in the European case. So, you know, as with all of these historical discussions, you have to decide when to cut into the story. And the way we do that in the book is to sort of say, okay, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. But what happens when the Western Roman Empire collapses? Western Europe becomes overrun by Germanic tribes, including Britain. Okay, the Saxons, you know, and what's interesting about the Germanic tribes, the Germanic tribes had extremely interesting political institutions. So this seems to be most definitively described by Tacitus in his book Germania. Even though Tacitus never actually visited Germany, he was obsessed because the Germanic tribes were so effective militarily defeating the Romans. The Romans became sort of obsessed, and Tacitus became obsessed with trying to understand how on earth, why can't we defeat these barbarians? Like, what's their trump card? You know, we — so here, you know, and so in the book, the book is sort of fascinating because first of all because he goes through the different Germanic tribes, he talks through a whole bunch of them, and he talks about the nature of political institutions. Okay, so over matters of minor importance only the chiefs debate; on major affairs the whole community. How does that debate? The assembly is competent also to hear criminal charges, especially those involving the risk of capital punishment. These same assemblies elect, among other officials, the magistrates who administer justice in the districts and villages. So the Germanic tribes had this intensely participatory political system where there was mass involvement in deliberation, in making decisions, and in particular in judicial decisions here. Okay. So, you know, in some sense, if you ask the question, why did all of these parliaments appear all over Western Europe? Why were these parliaments in France and England and — like, where did all that come from? It really came from the subsequent institutionalization of these Germanic political institutions that spread all over Western Europe. Okay. But these Germanic political institutions came into interaction with late Roman state institutions. Even after the Western Roman Empire collapsed, there were lawyers, there was the church, there was understanding of fiscal institutions, and the person who kind of brought that together was Clovis. Okay, here's Clovis being baptized. So, Clovis decided, ah, he was a heathen, the Catholic Church — I can get that working for me. He converted en masse with his entire army and got them all baptized and became a Christian. Okay. He held assemblies. Okay. Subsequently the Merovingian and Carolingian monarchies held assemblies. They institutionalized these Germanic assemblies. The earliest written description of these assemblies we have is from Hincmar in the 9th century. Okay. And he says at that time the custom was followed that no more than two general assemblies were to be held each year. Those of lower station were present in order to hear the decisions and to deliberate concerning and to confirm them, not out of coercion but by their own understanding and agreement. Okay, just to give you a flavor. So what's remarkable about Hincmar's description is it's very similar to the way Tacitus describes the political institutions of the Germanic tribes. It's more institutionalized, but it lived on to be brought into kind of some synergy with more centralized state institutions that the Germanic tribes did not have: church institutions, fiscal institutions, legal institutions. Of course, the Roman law left this massive legacy. Okay. Now, Clovis also promulgated the Salic Law. Okay. And I say promulgated, not wrote. Okay. Who wrote it? So here's the introduction of kind of one of the earliest existing copies of the Salic Law. Therefore, four men chosen out of many stood out. Their names were Wisast, Aragost, Saligast, and Widowgast. It sounds like Lord of the Rings. They came from beyond the Rhine. Okay. Okay, they were Germans, you know, they came from beyond the Rhine, coming together in three legal assemblies — remember, assemblies, Tacitus, Hincmar — and discussing the origins and cases carefully, they made judgment on each case as follows. So the Salic Law was not some kind of top-down micromanaging — Clovis decides he's going to write a constitution to keep everybody under control. No, it was a bottom-up codification of legal principles, social norms of the Germanic tribes. Okay, it was bottom-up construction. Okay. So I'm trying to give you the sense here of if you go back in Europe and you start thinking about these kind of historical dynamics of political institutions, it really has this aspect of interaction between society, between the organization of society, between the state, and it goes backwards and forwards. Okay. Move forward a few centuries. The birthplace of modern democracy. Okay, only British people could say something as stupid as that. This is Runnymede, west of London, where in 1215, King John signed the Magna Carta, you know, which is this kind of foundational document of British political institutions. There's nothing original about the Magna Carta. More or less the same time, Magna Cartas were being written all over Western Europe. But the British, you know, love to accentuate their own genius. Why here? Okay. Why in Runnymede? Now, you might think, well, look, there's a pub over there. After they'd written the Magna Carta, they could go and have a beer in the pub. But actually, there's a much more profound reason. Although drinking beer is very profound for Englishmen, as you probably know, there's a more profound reason why the Magna Carta was signed in Runnymede, and that's because Runnymede was one of the places where in the Anglo-Saxon period — so this is 1215, this is after the Norman invasion of Britain and the creation of the Angevin monarchy — prior to that, before 1066, when Anglo-Saxons ruled Britain. This was one of the traditional places where the Witen met. What was the Witen? The Witen was the Saxon, the Anglo-Saxon version of the Germanic assembly. The Witen met here, people assembled here to deliberate. When the Normans invaded, the first thing they did was to basically say all of that law, all those principles, yes, we love all of that. Because William the Conqueror's claim to the throne was based on the fact that he was the true heir to the Anglo-Saxon king Edward the Confessor. So the first thing that William the Conqueror did when he came was to sort of say, 'Yes, we agree with all those laws, all those principles. We're going to abide by them, etc., because I'm the true king. So of course I'm going to abide by that.' It was a bit phony, but if you've ever been in Bayeux in France, the Bayeux Tapestry, which is kind of written by the ladies in the court to kind of — it's an amazing piece of art. It's an amazing piece of propaganda to justify the legitimacy of the Norman invasion. You see at the start Edward the Confessor and the story of — anyway. Okay. So it's very symbolic that the Magna Carta was signed there. It's a continuation of these Germanic institutions of how they shaped the construction of legitimate political authority in Britain. Okay. Keep going through what we tell in the European chapter is sort of this interaction between the state and society. Okay, let me talk a little bit about modern state building. Okay. Somebody should have a clock somewhere so I know when I'm running out of time. Is there a clock? Someone's going to tell me. Huh? 20 minutes left. Okay. Okay. Once many years ago, I gave a lecture at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing. And the communication was very poor before I got there. So I really didn't know what was going on. So I came in, there were all these — there were hundreds and hundreds of these Chinese scholars. And I asked someone, you know, how long should I talk for? And he said, not more than four hours. But that was communism, you know, so maybe you're used to that. I don't know. Okay. So let me try to speed up a little, because I want to talk about Montenegro. Charles Tilly famously theorized the construction of the nation-state in early modern Europe. He has a marvelous book where he looked at the construction of the English state in the 18th century. Okay. After the Glorious Revolution that I was mentioning earlier, theorized by John Locke. Okay. And he points out that in the 18th century, society changed dramatically. A new type of mass popular politics emerged. A new variety of claim-making took shape. So mass politics started emerging. People started making claims against the central state. He points out that when there was a business cycle depression, instead of people complaining that the baker was charging too much for the bread or wages were too low and blaming the lord of the manor, they started blaming Parliament. They started blaming the national government. Okay? Why? The state pushed popular struggles from local arenas and from significant reliance on patronage towards national arenas. So it was the expansion of the state into society that created this reaction from society. What do I mean by the expansion of the state? Here's John Brewer's reconstruction of the creation of the fiscal system, the excise tax system in 18th century Britain. This is a — I love this diagram. These are the excise rounds of Supervisor Calpathweight. That's a great Saxon name, by the way. Supervisor Calpathweight. Okay. This is the first time that Britain ever had a proper fiscal system other than the customs on the coast. Before this time, there had never been a systematic taxation of people, bureaucratized, systematic, regulated. What was Supervisor Calpathweight going around doing? He was checking on production. How much bread, how much butter, how much beer were people producing? The state was in people's face for the first time. What did Tilly show? They reacted against it. Okay, the state and society reacted against each other. Okay, so this process, you know, which we claim in the book, this is what somehow leads to liberty, this kind of dynamic in that narrow corridor, this dynamic interaction between the state and society, which we call the Red Queen effect. Okay, that creates a state which has power. The British state has power, but it's under the control of society. You know, it's shackled. We call it a shackled Leviathan, which is — it's very complicated terminology, but there you go. All right. Okay, so that's our reading of British history. We talk about other examples. Okay. But why not in China? You know, why not in China? Well, you could sort of say, well, you know, come on. China was so different, you know. Well, I don't know about that. Okay. Here's a passage from one of the great Confucian classics, the Xunzi. All right. So here's — I don't know Chinese. One of my friends in Taiwan translated it for me. Here's what this says. Okay, this is a very famous — you know, Confucius was very interested in governance and how the state should be organized and how society should interact with the state. Here's one of his acolytes. The king is a boat. The common people are the water. The water can hold up the boat or it can sink the boat. Okay. So what's that? That's a metaphor of accountability. It means that the king has to please the common people or the people can sink the king. All right? So if you go back far enough in history, you can actually find lots of practices of accountability, representation, etc., before the rise of the first dynasty. Okay? When a new model emerges. Here's the great philosopher of the new model of the first Qin dynasty, Lord Shang or Shang Yang. Okay. So in his surviving writings, which is absolutely fabulous, probably about 500 BC, written about 500 BC, it's a sort of Machiavellian-style analysis of politics and how a state has to be organized. Here's the bit we like. When the people are weak, the state is strong. Hence a state that possesses the way — that's a kind of Chinese thing — strives to weaken the people. Okay. So there's an interesting aspect to this that we don't talk about in The Narrow Corridor, which is, you know, there's a philosophical aspect of here, the way. What is the way? The rightful path. I'm not going to start talking about that now, but we ignored it in The Narrow Corridor, and it's probably a mistake to ignore it. So if you ignore that, it says when the people are weak, the state is strong. Hence, the state strives to weaken the people. And that's sort of how it's been in China ever since. Okay. The mentality is strong state, weak people. Let's weaken the people, that makes the state stronger. This is the so-called, you know, social credit system. If you know something about China, they now have this thing called the social credit system. Whatever you do, they're monitoring you, and you get more points or you take points off. So, you know, if you go and you buy alcohol, that's bad. So you lose credit, you know, but if you pay a debt on time, you gain credit, you know. So, and if you lose too much credit, you're cut out of things. You can't buy train tickets, you can't buy, you know, you get penalized. All right? So, your social credit score. All right? So this, you know, this is what we call the despotic Leviathan. Okay? But in the chapter on China, we try to say with that quote from the Xunzi sort of illustrates that, well, you know, these societies don't need to be so radically different historically, but these dynamics diverge over time. Okay. The fact that, you know, creating a state like in China is creating an institution that can be very difficult to control, of course, provides an enormous deterrent to actually building political hierarchy in the first place. So when we start talking not about the corridor or about despotic Leviathans, but we start talking about examples like Yemen, we talk about how it's in some sense the anticipation of creating political hierarchy or creating a state which you can't control that deters you from doing it in the first place. Okay. So I was going to give an African example, but I'm going to jump over the African example because I'm going to run out of time. Okay. So just to kind of give you a flavor of the argument, like what's the mechanism that's driving this here, you know, the mechanism is sort of clear. You know, if you go back to the origin of the Qin state, the Qin were a kind of, you know, marcher lord type society on the western fringe of China. In the Warring States period, China was divided up into many different polities. A kind of military and ideological and organizational kind of revolution allowed the Qin to conquer everybody else and create this very despotic equilibrium in China. Okay. But in other parts of the world, they proliferated mechanisms which made it very difficult to kind of amass that control. Okay. So that's the story with the absent Leviathan. Okay. So we draw out some implications for this. Maybe I won't talk more about this and I'll just kind of jump on. You know, that diagram is meant to illustrate a few things also. Meaning like the way that Professor Acemoglu and I have always thought about this is like the big pattern in history is not convergence, you know, this sort of idea that history ends and everyone nowadays, you know, this seems so ridiculous that it's, you know, but let me say it even though it's ridiculous, since five years ago everybody believed it in the United States, which is, you know, history had ended and all the world was converging to kind of liberal democratic societies. I think if you know anything about the history of China, that's a kind of ludicrous claim. You know, Yemen isn't converging to some liberal democratic society. It has its own culture. It has its own history. It has its own way of thinking about the world. And, you know, part of that diagram is to sort of help you think that, you know, well, even if societies weren't so radically different, if you go back in history, these intrinsic dynamics can create enormous persistent divergences. Okay? So but let me talk kind of more about, you know, a, about the economic implications, and b, about some of the kind of putting the theory to work a little bit so I can talk about Montenegro. Okay. So, you know, the economic implications — I started talking about liberty, but of course we also talk about economics in the book, and, you know, our earlier book, Why Nations Fail, was much more about economics. How would I think about the relationship between Why Nations Fail and The Narrow Corridor? Well, it's in the corridor where what we called inclusive economic institutions emerge. So prosperity as a consequence of inclusive economic institutions that comes in the corridor too, along with liberty. So either when the state dominates society or society dominates the state, that's when you get what we called extractive economic institutions. So why is this model in The Narrow Corridor useful for talking about the economics? I think two reasons. First of all, the reasons that institutions differ in China and Yemen are radically different. Okay? And that difference is extremely important if you want to think about what to do about it. If you wanted to think about what to do in terms of policy, those institutions are very different. So that distinction doesn't arise in Why Nations. In Why Nations, we just have inclusive institutions and extractive institutions. And we don't kind of unpack these different sources of extractive institutions. So one of the motivations for kind of developing this framework was it seemed to be a very powerful way of kind of making a
big important distinction. The other thing which I think we liked about this relative to Why Nations Fail is that, you know, what I tried to communicate with these examples is like building liberty or building inclusive institutions is a process, you know. It's not in Why Nations Fail, it's too much of like you transition from one to the other, you know, it's too abrupt and it's just like you flip a switch, and it's not an easy switch to flip, but everything, you know. But I think if you look at really existing societies, these things take time. It takes time, you can't transform a society instantaneously, okay. So that corridor, moving in the corridor, those dynamic arrows are meant to emphasize a lot this kind of process, and we like that, okay.
So putting the theory to work, what do I mean by that? Well, I want to illustrate why these differences are important, and the way we do that in the book is, you know, a bit sort of nerdy perhaps, but we kind of use it, we apply it to talk about some famous hypotheses in social science, okay. And one of the most famous is due to Charles Tilly. I mentioned Charles Tilly's work about the emergence of the state in early modern Britain, but maybe the thing that Tilly is most famous for in his work on state formation is the claim: war made states and states made war. So his claim is it's warfare that created states, okay. Now, of course, you know, from our perspective, the first question you'd ask is, well, what sort of state? You know, there's a state in Britain and there's a state in China, but they're very different sorts of states. But Tilly just says war made states and states made war, okay.
But the interesting thing in the context of the model is to sort of say, well, maybe warfare does push a society in a particular direction, but the consequences of that is going to depend on the initial balance of power, if you like, between the state and society. So in the chapter we talk about, you know, let's talk about what Tilly was, let's look at what Tilly was talking about, which is the military revolution in 17th century Europe. So this is the invention of the trace italienne, more sophisticated fortifications, new military tactics, you know, new types of weaponry. There was a military revolution which Tilly claimed led to the emergence of modern states such as Prussia, okay, modern absolutist states, okay.
And it's true, after the Thirty Years' War, Prussia went on a trajectory where the state became much more hegemonic relative to society. So, you know, a series of Prussian kings basically suspended the power of traditional assemblies, suspended a lot of mechanisms of accountability and representation, and they gathered political power to the Prussian state, okay. So you could imagine a situation where, after all, Prussia was also influenced by Germanic tribes just like Britain was. If you looked at the long history of Prussia, you could argue, what we argue in the chapter, is that Prussia was in the corridor, but the Thirty Years' War knocked it out of the corridor, okay? So it pushes it into this zone where a despotic state starts to emerge.
What about other parts of Europe? Well, we make this comparison between Switzerland and Montenegro. In particular, you could say, well, Switzerland had a lot in common with Germany. Switzerland, you know, historically had many historical things in common. It was part of the Habsburg Empire. It was invaded by Germanic tribes. You know, it had had many of the same small-scale representative accountable institutions, but the central state was a sort of shadow in some sense compared to what emerged further north in Germany, okay. So Switzerland, like Montenegro, was very decentralized. It had clan social structures like Montenegro. Power was very localized in the cantons.
There was more of a central state, but not really a proper central state until the middle of the 19th century, okay. So this is to say, you know, what was the effect of warfare can be in all circumstances to push societies towards having a stronger state. But the consequences of that are radically different. In the case of Prussia, it pushes it towards having a despotic leviathan. In Switzerland, it forced more centralized political institutions to emerge, which pushed it into the corridor. In the case of Montenegro, Montenegro was so far from the corridor that it stayed in this zone, okay.
So we use examples like this just to sort of show there's a huge amount of kind of like these claims, you know, war made states and states made war. Well, that's much too simplistic. You know, it can't be true, okay, fine. But to show something is simplistic, you need an alternative way of kind of dealing with the nuance to be able to say something structured. So what we liked about this was it gives you a way of saying, okay, fine, warfare may push societies in a particular direction, in the direction of having stronger states, but the consequences of that are very different and they depend on your initial conditions, kind of where you start from.
All right, now you might think, okay, I was going to give you another example, but I think, you know, I'll just say the example, you can read the book, it's available outside, it has a very nice yellow cover I noticed, good for Christmas presents, birthdays. You know, what went on in Eastern Europe at the collapse of communism is also super interesting. You know, if you think about that heterogeneity, the shock is the same, the Soviet Union collapses, but you get these very different types of societies. Look at Poland, you know, look at Bulgaria, you know. So how do you think about that? Well, you can think about it in the same way, like they're in different parts of this diagram. You know, Poland had a real sort of civil society. It had Solidarity. You know, it didn't have collectivization of agriculture. In many ways, it was different from other parts, particularly Bulgaria. So just to give you a flavor.
All right, so I'm trying to get to, how long do I have? Five? Five, okay. All right, so let me ask, you know, okay, I put Montenegro on the diagram and yeah, I sort of explained why I got interested all those years ago in Montenegro. Okay, so Montenegro was a sort of society historically where society dominated the state. Okay, I think we can agree on that, right? But that, you know, that's the 19th century maybe or the 18th century, like how does Montenegro look like today? How would I think about Montenegro today? We don't talk about that in the book. How would I think about it based on my highly superficial and imperfect knowledge? I'd say probably none of those equilibria fit very well today, okay.
So as we get on in the book, we sort of say, you know, there's other mechanisms, okay. And there's a fourth type of society which we call a paper leviathan, okay. So there's a despotic leviathan, there's a shackled leviathan. What's a paper leviathan? Well, remember Chairman Mao said that the United States was a paper tiger. It looks like the ferocious powerful beast, but actually that's not true. It's phony. It's an illusion. It's a paper tiger, okay. So a paper leviathan is something that looks like it has sovereignty in some sense. It looks like a state, but it's not really capable of doing many of the things that states could do, okay.
But what we notice and what we talk about in that chapter, looking at many kind of post-colonial societies in Latin America and Africa, is there seems to be an equilibrium where you get kind of stuck with a state that's not very good at doing lots of things, but also where society is weak. Society's not good at organizing collectively, acting collectively, articulating collective goals. So we sort of say, we introduce it to start with to talk about India, but it's sort of like there's some kind of balance between state and society, but it's like a low-level equilibrium and you're stuck and you never kind of move in the corridor, okay.
So why is that? There's other mechanisms that we don't really talk about, and let me mention two, okay. So the image that we have when we start talking about Britain or China, whatever, is, you know, the state wants to dominate society and society wants to keep the state under control, and that's a kind of contest and that evolves dynamically. But I think if you look at these types of countries and you think about it, you can see there's countervailing mechanisms, meaning sometimes the state doesn't want to control society. You know, I've worked for 35 years almost in Colombia in South America, and I can tell you the Colombian state is not interested in dominating anybody. It doesn't even control half the country. There's no roads in half the country, okay.
So why, okay, and I think there's two reasons for that, you know, very much motivated by my knowledge of Colombia. One is, and we talk about it in the chapter, one is if you make yourself stronger, you risk creating a reaction from society. You risk protests. You risk people, and you don't want that, okay? You don't want it because it might force you to become more accountable, right? So we call that the mobilization effect. So one thing that deters states becoming stronger, which kind of blocks that dynamics I've been talking about, is this threat of mobilization.
The other reason, I think, again, which I see, we talk about this a lot in the Colombian case because I know a lot about it, is states that are weak have political advantages, okay. You can use them politically to distribute patronage, to act in a clientelistic way, to be discretionary. You can also steal money yourself. So there's a whole suite of mechanisms, you know, corruption, there's a whole suite of mechanisms that sort of stop the dynamics taking place. You know, you may be here where state and society are balanced, but the Red Queen effect never gets going. Why doesn't it get going? It doesn't get going because there are these mechanisms that stop it, okay? That are missing from the basic model.
So I want to end by just saying, imagine you were in such a situation, purely hypothetical. Colombia is in such a situation. Imagine you were in such a situation. How could you get out of that situation? How could you kind of break this low-level equilibrium trap? How could you change the incentives, okay? Well, I think, you know, one obvious thing is, you know, if the state is weak to stop mobilization, if you can manage to mobilize society to start protesting, you know, then you can get the state to react and you can get the dynamics going, okay. So one way of getting that, you know, if the state is kind of holding back, if you could organize society collectively to kind of demand something different, you might get that dynamic process going.
Another obvious solution, you know, would be increase the size of the corridor. So in the book we kind of talk about, all right, I didn't mention this today, but the narrow corridor is where it is, but you know, mathematically where that narrow corridor is depends on parameters in the model. So the width depends on the model, okay. And I think the way to think about something like the EU or joining the EU or the possibility of joining the EU makes the corridor wider. So you might not be in the corridor to start with, but the EU, if it makes the corridor wider, it could put you in the corridor and then the dynamics can get going. I think that's an obvious one.
I say, you know, nothing is guaranteed. You know, one of the things, of course, with my books translated into every language or not, 51 languages, Bulgarian, Romanian, Polish, etc. So I've been around a little bit in Eastern Europe, and one appreciates all the variation there. So nothing is for sure. But it makes the corridor bigger and easier to enter. And the last thing I would say, you know, is another way out of that is just to say we're stuck in this equilibrium here, but my gosh, we can imagine something way, way better for everybody, okay.
So that process may have winners, it may have losers, some people find it hard to adapt, other people are resistant to change, but I think you also see examples of negotiating your way into the corridor. You know, if I thought about the creation of social democracy, that's an example we use in Scandinavia in the 1930s. What did the Swedes do in 1937 at that hotel in Saltsjöbaden? They negotiated their way into the corridor, okay. That's what social democracy was. It was a social contract to get into the corridor, and it was designed in a way that there were no losers. The business people wouldn't lose, the trade unions wouldn't lose, the agricultural sector wouldn't lose. It was designed with that purpose in mind.
If you think about the transition from apartheid in South Africa that Nelson Mandela organized, Cyril Ramaphosa, the current president, was the person who actually negotiated. I thought he was pretty well equipped to deal with Trump because he's the guy who negotiated the end of apartheid. Not Mandela. Mandela kind of set the scene, but Cyril Ramaphosa was the guy who actually did the negotiating. So you could negotiate a social contract, like you could get out of the mess you were in and negotiate your way into the corridor. That's what they did in South Africa also. So I think that's a third exit, you know.
These are just hypothetical ideas since I don't really know where Montenegro is, but I think just to talk about more cases that might be relevant. So I probably talked too long, but it's... [Applause] Thank you. But not for four hours though. Okay.
