Praising Nation-States and Becoming Transnationally Connected

The globally renown academic and public intellectual, Francis Fukuyama, theorizes nation-state development as an imitation/emulation process. Together with colleagues, the transnational American-Japanese scholar strongly recommends the idea that the sooner struggling developing nations decide to move to a developmental situation similar to that of, for instance, the affluent Denmark, the better. Obviously, during his guest professorship (2009-2012) in Aarhus, Fukuyama fell in love with Denmark. In subsequent book publications and public speeches, reflecting his unique Danish experiences, Fukuyama contends that state-society development processes do not just concern about demographics or a country having abundance of natural resources and wealth. It is rather, he insists, the establishment and consolidation of effective and responsive trustworthy liberal political systems. Such political institutions will then ensure committed leadership that in return govern over often reliable and efficient bureaucracy and administration. Under such conditions, the point is, that a balanced rule of law prevails as well as the persistence of accountability in securing balances and checks in dynamically routinized and institutionalized state-society platforms. Despite the necessity, and probably unavoidability of state-society bureaucratization and professionalization in most societies, Weber warns us from the development of “extensive secrecy” and “iron cage[i]” while Durkheim highlights the side-effects of linear systematic organization of the state and society in bringing risks of anomie and even perpetual social malaise[ii].

Apart from the earlier mismatch of “the end of history” proclamation and the subsequent declaration of “the end of ideology” Fukuyama also suggested that potentially the pursue of societies in better and higher education for achieving prosperity will be replaced by the intense competition of satisfying increasing consumer demands within and beyond societies[iii]. Fukuyama also modified Lipset’s original take that liberal democracies often form stable, harmonious and non-violent oriented regimes within and beyond their boundaries[iv]. More recently Fukuyama shifted attention to the analysis of new forms of political identity formations in the world- particularly in the west. In his latest book “The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment” 2018, Fukuyama projects an alternative proposition that new forms of identity frictions are emerging in particularly, and paradoxically, among liberal democracies[v]. According to Fukuyama this partially includes an intense competition of transnational consumer demands of “dignity versus resentment” in which societies dialectically and transnationally position and strategize. Consequently, the concern is that, the current challenges confronted by liberal democracies due to public pressures from within and beyond, might eventually generate some form of illiberal transnational democratic regimes, possible competitive authoritarianism- and even full-blown dictatorships.