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NIALL FERGUSON: How Civilisations Flourish (or Fail) · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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  Get a humans welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas and here's an idea as dangerous
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  as any. There are principles underpinning Western civilization that we are currently
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  in the process of abandoning. Neil Ferguson today's guest is one of the greats, one of
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  the greatest historians that Britain has ever produced. He's written 17 books that are
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  in the literary canon, the historical canon of British education, including one called
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  civilisation, which is all about how civilisations flourish or fail, and one called empire,
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  which makes the now almost inconceivably controversial case that the British empire on balance
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  was a good thing. Neil has lately cropped up in my social media feeds as sort of a voice
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  on the kind of sub-stacky, podcasty, heterodox sort of centre-rights talking about how the
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  West has lost its way. But he's a much much deeper and more rigorous intellectual and
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  academic than that. And I wanted to go a bit deeper than many of his other appearances
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  have and get our hands dirty talking about civilisations, the British empire, where we
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  are today and where he thinks we shall be. We sat down in Westminster in London on the afternoon
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  of the American presidential election. We didn't yet know that Donald Trump was going to beat
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  Kamala Harris, so forgive any ignorance on our part if we speak in roundabout ways about the coming
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  future of American democracy. But it's a fascinating conversation nonetheless and even more
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  salience now that we do know that there will be a Trump administration at number two. Please
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  enjoy as much as I did the one the only Neil first. Exactly. What thanks for making time for us.
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  We're just eating a cramp sandwich into the listener if they're not aware, which was delightful.
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  Now we've got copies. I've heard you say that if Scotland became independent, that it would
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  probably be less like Scandinavia, which is what most scots think it would be and more like the
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  Balkans. That got me thinking what makes Scandinavia different from the Balkans?
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  Well it's partly a cultural phenomenon. If you look at the world values survey, which is quite
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  good with thinking about these things, there is a quite distinctive Scandinavian legacy,
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  which you can find in most of the Scandinavian countries, which explains why they are
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  relative to the rest of the world, very progressive on a whole range of issues.
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  And the scots would like to imagine at least some scots, certainly Scottish nationalists,
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  would like to imagine that they would fit right in with Sweden or Finland. And it's just not true
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  because if you look at the attitudes of the scots, they don't map on to Scandinavian attitudes
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  at all well. The thing that was very striking to me was a recent poll on the question of transgender
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  rights. Now you can't really get more work on this issue than the Swedes. But in the UK, the most
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  conservative responses to the questions came from Ershar, where I spent part of my childhood.
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  Now Scotland's interesting because it had a really bloody reformation and in a way it's not
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  quite over because there's still a deep sectarian divide between Protestants and Catholics in Glasgow
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  where I grew up. And it has shaped Scotland's culture in a number of interesting ways. One is that
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  Scotland's quite a violent place, much more violent than England. Do not get into fights in pubs
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  in Scotland. You're just much more likely to get a bottle in the face than in England. And so
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  Scotland isn't really like Scandinavia at all. It's much more reminiscent to me of the Balkans
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  where people drink a lot and are quite violent. And that's the terrible truth about Scotland. We
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  drink a lot and are quite violent. Does that mean that the reasons why Scandinavian countries flourish
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  to the extent that they do are all cultural? No very few things are all cultural because what really
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  matters when it comes to flourishing economically and also having political stability is just how
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  institutions are set up. And this is one of the central themes of my work going all the way back
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  to empire and then a book called civilization. The insight is that if you set institutions up so
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  that people are incentivized to respect property rights and not to engage in violence and so forth,
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  then it doesn't really matter what their culture is. If you've got the incentives right,
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  behaviour will improve. We know this because we've run a bunch of natural experiments around the
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  world to see what happens if you take one population, call them the Germans or the Koreans and give
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  them two completely sets of different sets of institutions. As soon as there was a clear dividing
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  line between communist and capitalist Germany after World War II in the Cold War and the same
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  thing happened in Korea, North and South Korea had radically different institutions, behaviour
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  completely changed. So I don't think we should invest too much in cultural explanations of historical
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  documents. That's contradictory to your thesis about Scotland then because presumably an
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  independent Scotland would have the same institutions as the UK. The interesting thing about Scotland
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  is that its institutions are quite different from England's because it has a different legal
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  tradition. And although Scotland's monarchy united with England's in 1603 when James VI inherited
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  England, we actually own England. But I won't tell anybody to forget this, but it's really,
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  you know, we basically inherited in 1603. And then the parliaments were fused in the early 18th century,
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  1707, but the legal systems were never merged. They're fundamentally very different
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  because England has common law and Scotland has a Roman law tradition. So the institutions in
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  Scotland have long been very different. And this is a really important reason why
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  Scotland and England, despite being parts of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern
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  Ireland, are really distinct countries still. They do things differently there. And that's why I
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  tattoo more importance to things like the rule of law, the legal system, than to nebulous notions
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  of culture because what is Scottish culture? It's very different if you've grown up as I did in
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  the middle class, Protestant West of Scotland, as compared with friends of mine who grew up in
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  working class, Catholic, East End of Glasgow. These are two completely different cultures. So different
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  that for most of my childhood, I thought they were the most extreme, different culture, the most
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  extremely different cultures that could possibly exist. It came as a shot to me to find that
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  there were people even stranger than Catholics. Right, but I'm interested as you are in why
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  some societies thrive and others don't. So just to clarify, if you transposed the rule of law
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  and the justice system of Scandinavia onto the Balkans and vice versa, what would happen?
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  Things would change. People would adapt because the institutional rules would have, in other words,
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  the veterans would become Norway, not immediately. But if you, if you imagine, if you run the
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  experiment, because these things don't happen very often, sure. But if you run the experiment of
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  taking a population and changing its its rules, changing the institutions, changing the incentives,
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  then behavior does tend to adapt. Now, it's not likely that Sweden's going to conquer Serbia
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  nor the other way around. So this is a hypothetical discussion. But what we do know is that where
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  there are radical changes in institutions, behavior changes, this happened all over Eastern Europe
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  with the end of communism. Right. And let me give you two interesting cases. Poland,
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  which had been under communist rule for much less time than Ukraine, as Ukraine had been part of
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  the Soviet Union and Poland had not really quite quickly recovered the notion of a free market
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  and a democracy that was free based on open elections and a free press. Poland was a huge success
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  after the collapse of communism partly because Poland's educated class had never really accepted
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  communism. Ukraine having been part of the Soviet Union and therefore had having had
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  communism for much longer took and has taken much longer to emerge from the mindset of
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  homo-Sovieticus. And that's the kind of thing that's interesting to me. Why was that? Well,
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  partly because it wasn't possible to have the kind of privatization that happened in Poland,
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  where the state-owned assets ended up being quite widely, the ownership became quite widely
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  distributed. In Ukraine, as in Russia, a relatively small number of oligarchs acquired the
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  property that had previously belonged to the state and so the outcomes were different pretty
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  quickly in the 1990s and this has continued to lead to very significant divergence of paths.
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  The Polish economic performance has been vastly better than Ukraine since 1990
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  and that's a really interesting illustration of my central point. The reason that Ukraine's state
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  poor can't be cultural. Why? Because these countries we're talking about have borders that were
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  quite drastically reset after World War II. And what is today Western Ukraine was up to World War
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  II, Eastern Poland. And so when we talk about national cultures, we're not really able to
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  be very rigorous with countries like Ukraine and Poland because they end up divorced. We think
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  culture changes when that population that you mentioned. You don't change rapidly. So there's
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  still a noticeable difference between Western and Eastern Ukraine. But if you change institutions,
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  if you change them by, say, reforming land ownership or reforming the ownership of the
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  industrial capacity or if you change the tax system, these things have really quite quick effects
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  regardless of people's cultures. And this is a very liberating insight because if culture was
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  really dominant, it'd be very, very hard to change say a poor country that was poor because of
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  culture. If, for example, Hinduism sort of predicted relative poverty, that'd be really discouraging,
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  would have been very discouraging for India in the 1990s when it seemed trapped in poverty. But
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  it wasn't really Hinduism that was the problem. It was just that the way India was governed,
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  had been governed since independence, wrapped the economy in red tape and really reduced
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  incentives to be entrepreneurial. So the liberating argument of the book's civilization is that
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  it's not your culture religious or otherwise that determines your fate. It's actually the
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  set of institutions within which you have to operate. And these can be reformed quickly. And we've
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  seen this again and again in our lifetimes, thanks to our paying radically altered incentives
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  for Chinese farmers and a businessman and as a result, because economic, miracle, perhaps the
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  biggest industrial revolution of them all had changed. No, clearly it's not either or,
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  but the ability of institutions to take hold and for people to abide by them is presumably
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  contingent on their willingness to go along with whatever those institutions are. So I'm thinking
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  for example, I was in West Africa last year and we were buzzing a car packed full of locals
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  sort of a bush taxi and it would stop every few kilometers because a cop would be sitting
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  lazily under a tree in a plastic chair and would wave them down and they would head over a bribe.
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  And I was speaking with them about how they felt about this and I sort of had my predictable
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  outrage at this and they were saying, well, you've got a family. His family needs to eat as well.
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  They don't pay police very much. So for them, it's just a normal part of life. Suppose you have an
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  anti-corruption mission in a country like that where the norm is that bribery is just a normal
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  way of life and the paying people off is the way that things get done. Is that possible?
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  So the grabbing hand phenomenon is fairly universal in early history. So you can encounter this
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  kind of behavior in Anglo-Saxon England and it happens where there's low state capacity
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  and the way that local officials who have public functions to perform get remunerated is just
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  by levying we call them bribes but they were in effect on the spot taxes. So this is quite a wide
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  spread phenomenon where countries have relatively limited state capacity. If you want to get rid of
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  that kind of behavior, then you have to pay officials as well as monitor their behavior.
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  Now the problem in West Africa is illustrated in a country like Sierra Leone where I went
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  many years ago now just after the Civil War there had been brought to an end partly by British
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  intervention. In Sierra Leone, and this was also true in Liberia, it wasn't just that the guy
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  sounded a tree and collected some modest amount from passing traffic. It was that the guy had
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  an AK-47 and was stoned and would as likely rape the women and kill the men on the passing
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  vehicle. So there are these dystopian nightmare models that emerge in which the grabbing hand
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  becomes the kind of murderous hand. And that's happened in multiple African countries
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  in the relatively recent past in the period since independence. So the challenge in parts of
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  West Africa is how do you get beyond that because if you could get to just the guy under the tree
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  taking a modest amount of money but not killing and raping anybody that would actually be progress.
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  So we're talking here about baby steps, small wins. You see it's actually preferable to move it
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  with small steps than to attempt drastic changes that are unsustainable. Many post-colonial regimes
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  attempted ludicrously radical changes to their institutions usually based on Marxism,
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  lendism and the results were catastrophic. I mean that's sort of what I'm trying to tease
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  out as well. What are the necessary conditions for institutional change to stick? I'm thinking
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  also of the Iraq War for example where there was an overly optimistic idea about we can just
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  install Jeffersonian democracy and it'll take. Well it didn't take and I'm sure there are lots
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  of institutional reasons why it didn't take but fundamentally the more parsimonious
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  explanation would probably be cultural ones and tribal ones. Yeah I'm going to resist those
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  explanations because there's a sort of technological quality to them. In the case of Iraq the problem
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  was that the US had a naive vision which we associate with near conservatives but it wasn't just
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  the near cons who thought this. Then if they got rid of Saddam Hussein that would make
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  everybody happy because he was a brutal dictator and then they would hold elections and everybody
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  would vote for something recognisably like liberal democracy like they'd all be reading Francis
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  Fukuyama which will be just great and this was crazily unhistorical. I remember asking somebody
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  in Washington in 2002 before the invasion what the template was what was the model for post Saddam
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  Iraq and she replied she was in the US government that they saw post communist Poland as the model
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  and I said well have you ever been to the Middle East because it's really quite different.
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  The biggest difference in the case of Iraq is that you have this big division between Sunni and
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  Shia Muslim communities as well as the Kurds and so you have high stakes risk of one group
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  sort of gaining control and then taking it out on the others that's the danger with democracy
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  pretty much any multi-ethnic setting that the winner takes all and the most numerous will likely win.
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  That was the great worry for the Sunnis that the Shia were numerous and we're going to end up
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  taking control and then secondly and this was the thing that policymakers really underestimated
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  because neighboring Iran is predominantly sheite it would be tremendously beneficial to Iran to have
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  stand over thrown and replaced with the Shia majority government in Iraq that they anticipated
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  they'd be able to control so the unintended consequence of thinking that you could kind of have
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  post communist Poland in Mesopotamia were but really large and very nasty. There wasn't in other words
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  a shortcut because you can't just hold elections hand out copies of the end of history and go home.
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  Elections are like the icing on the cake they're the thing you do when you've already built certain
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  foundations now the foundations are worth spelling out they're really crucial you really do need
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  the rule of law to exist and private property rights to be respected and courts to function.
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  What do you mean by the rule of law? Well there is of course because if if I talk about the rule
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  of law in England I mean something very different from the rule of law in Iran. In civilisation I
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  tried to spell it out and say that the rule of law based on Sharia does not seem to have
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  particularly benign outcomes. The rule of law that we associate with England with the common law
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  has been a very successful operating system for a market based society in which disputes get
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  resolved nonviolently through the courts and so the rule of law that seems to work very well
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  is this common law system which the British exported or I should say the English exported
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  wherever they went including in North America and in Australia. And by that you basically just
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  mean don't resolve disputes into personally take it to an impartial other. No other source.
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  Much more than that the common law is common laws all about the accumulation of precedent rather
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  than there being a code. The Roman law tradition is to have a codified system of law this is the law
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  and then officials implemented. The common law system says you know this is how we've done things
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  and when the last time this came up this is what the judges ruled and so it's an organic system
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  that evolved over many centuries in England and this system of common law was then exported still
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  having this organic quality and it's a tremendously good operating system that people in the
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  English speaking world take for granted. They find it hard to imagine that the system of law that
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  operates in Muslim majority countries is radically different in almost every way because it derives
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  from Syria. So the rule was important but there's another thing which is important which is the
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  idea that that civil society has an autonomous rule in which people organize themselves
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  into associations or societies to deal with local problems that don't require the government to
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  intervene. This was a very distinctive feature of North American society that Tocqueville was
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  struck by great French political thinker Alexis Tocqueville when he traveled in the United States.
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  He was really struck by how much Americans did locally through voluntary associations without
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  the government needing to get involved. To the to the Frenchman this was strange because
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  he came for a tradition in France where whatever happened in provincial France you expected
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  somebody from Paris to solve the problem. So there are these important preconditions for the
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  successive democracy really helps to have the rule of law established with private property rights
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  and common law seems to do relatively well though you can have a civil law system that does well too.
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  And then you need some tradition of civil society where people self-organize and don't
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  require officials to come and tell them what to do. These are very distinctive traditions which
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  evolved in the English-speaking world first though versions of them existed in Western Europe
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  and they're very different from how China ran or how they also been empire ran, how they
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  oriental empires operated and that's I think a really important insight. If you want to have
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  free and fair elections you really do need those things to be in place. If you just come along
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  to somewhere without those traditions and say right everybody gets to vote for the first time
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  we're doing this differently from that one. The immediate response in a society with a strong
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  ethnic division is we've got to make sure the other guys don't win this because if they do
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  the first thing they'll do will be to use the state to reward their own people and screw us.
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  I mean even if there's not a strong ethnic division I mean I'm thinking of Gaza when the Bush
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  administration after Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005 you know was very starry-eyed about democracy
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  and this was a post-911 period when they really wanted the democratization of the Arab world
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  or so they thought us and so they pushed hard for elections in Gaza rather than a more moderate
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  reform you know so garrisons were faced with this impossible choice of this moribund corrupt
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  Palestinian authority or this jihadist death cult and we will know what ended up happening
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  right. So I mean do are we a little bit too besotted them by democracy quiet democracy?
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  Well I think we were and it wasn't perhaps entirely surprising because the events of 1989 to
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  1991 were exhilarating if you were a conservative it seemed as if the ideas that Margaret
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  Thatcher and Ronald Reagan had come to personify that we we need free markets and we need democracy
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  we mustn't have over powerful unions we are individualists but we care about our families all
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  those ideas suddenly won I mean they won more more completely than we'd ever dared hope for
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  in the mid 1980s one of the great turning points in my life was the fall of the Berlin wall.
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  Do you remember it? I do I missed it by about 48 hours because I I was living in Berlin
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  it's got a funny story actually I was living in Berlin as a graduate student finishing off my
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