We need government and we need it to be boring
Geoff Mulgan, a former senior adviser to Tony Blair, says that government has had a bad press and that its future lies in cooler rhetoric and stronger accountability When Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinksy was uncovered, it unleashed a tidal wave of media speculation, official inquiries and impeachment proceedings (and in the end his own explanation for why he’d done it: ‘because I could’). When François Mitterrand was confronted with the allegation that he had fathered an illegitimate child, he simply responded, ‘et alors?’ As Britain’s government descends once more into an unseemly morass of scandals over sex, money and practical failures, it’s a good time to ask what really matters in the business of government, and which kinds of scandal or failure forfeit the right to rule.
For one school of thought, none of this matters much. According to this view, government is just a sideshow to real life in the age of the iPod and global markets, a soap opera that is occasionally entertaining and often exasperating, but of limited significance. Living in an individualistic age we prefer to ascribe our successes to our own virtues, not to the actions of bureaucrats or politicians. Yet the evidence suggests that this view is profoundly misplaced. According to an unusually thorough study by the Canadian academic John Helliwell into the causes of human happiness across some 50 countries, ‘the effects of the quality of government on wellbeing were above and beyond the effects flowing through better education, higher incomes and better health, all of which were themselves dependent on the quality of government’. His conclusions are confirmed by a quick glance at the top ranks of economic competitiveness. In the 1980s it was assumed that these would be the countries with the sparest and leanest governments. Instead, countries like Finland, Sweden and Denmark, with large and active governments, now predominate. So government matters, and bad, incompetent or immoral government soon affects us all.
But what counts as quality, and what makes a government good? In Good and Bad Power: the Ideals and Betrayals of Government I’ve looked at how people have judged the quality of their governments over many thousands of years and across several continents. I found to my surprise that the measures of governmental success and failure have been remarkably consistent over time. Despite their many differences, modern democracies and ancient kingdoms have made very similar claims to justify their power. They include the promise to protect people from harm, the promise to improve people’s welfare and the promise to promote justice — promises which seem to reflect the fundamental needs of any human community. King Ur-Nammu who reigned in Sumeria around 2100 BC, for example, promised his people that he would ‘establish equity in the land and banish malediction, violence and strife’. Two thousand years later, Kautilya, adviser to the Mauryan empire, described the duties of rulers as including protection of the state from external aggression; safeguarding the welfare of the people and maintenance of law and order within the state. Two thousand years later again, George W. Bush promised the American public that he would protect them from terrorism, maintain economic growth and pump money into health and education.
These surprisingly consistent ideals are matched by surprisingly consistent vices. Throughout history, governments have been captured by small cliques, families and tribes, which have then abused power and turned the state into a tool for their private interests. Russia is an extreme example. When Nikolai Karamzin, the author of one of the first multi-volume histories of Russia, was asked to sum it up he did so with one word: ‘Voruiut’ (‘they steal’). But few countries have been immune. The corruptions of Silvio Berlusconi (who unashamedly corralled Italy’s legislature to serve his personal interests) and the very murky stories of party funding and lobbying both in the UK and elsewhere show that even mature democracies are vulnerable to similar risks of capture. And of course bureaucrats over the millennia have proved equally adept at manipulating public power for their own ends. The reform tablets of Uruinimgina in Sumeria around 2000 BC — which describe a newly established ruler putting to rights a ruling administrative class that had abused its power, given short rations and exacted illegal payments — tell a timeless story.
If the virtues and vices have been so consistent, is it meaningful to talk about progress? I believe that it is. Over the past 150 years the powers of government have grown enormously. Many of these powers have been grossly misused, as states have applied industrial technologies to war, torture and genocide. But particularly in the last half-century governments have achieved vastly more than their predecessors in helping their people to remain safe from war or crime — murder rates today are barely a twentieth of what they were a few centuries ago — extending life expectancy and spreading prosperity. Indeed I would argue that governments have been at their best when they’ve concentrated on the rather boring prose of practical achievement, and at their worst when they’ve been carried away with the rhetoric of revolution and nationalism.
Progress also reflects the spread of democracy. Democracy remains deeply imperfect as a method of government. But it has decisively enhanced the virtues of government and constrained the vices by making governments more afraid of citizens than vice versa. As I show in my book there are long traditions of argument about when and how to eject bad leaders. Mencius in China, for example, wrote more than 2,000 years ago that the ruler has a duty ‘to serve the people with just rule. If he fails and oppresses the people, the people have the right, on behalf of heaven, to dispose of him.’ But it is only in recent times that most people have had the power to act on these principles, with the help not only of competitive elections but also of mechanisms to impeach or dismiss elected leaders who are seen to have turned against the public interest.
Even the moral qualities of our rulers have improved. Despite exceptions like Berlusconi, and the dwindling band of dictators like Kim Jong-Il, standards are generally higher. In recent years a Finnish prime minister, Anneli Jaatteenmaki, and a prospective Swedish prime minister, Mona Sahlin, both had to resign over very petty transgressions that would barely merit a mention in other walks of life, and today it would be much harder for a leader to be a serial philanderer (like Kennedy) or to hide a chronic medical condition (like Roosevelt).
Yet I have also concluded that judgments on the moral standards of administrations are rarely straightforward. Although we can easily recognise corruption when we see it, much of the business of government isn’t black and white but rather involves judging between alternative goods and alternative bads (the Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes once commented that politics is ‘the art of swallowing toads without making a face’). Take, for example, the questions of truth that have so dogged Tony Blair (or ‘Bliar’ as countless Tshirts proclaim). Certainly misleading statements on weapons of mass destruction have taken a heavy toll on public trust. But transparency in government is never an unalloyed good. Governments are likely to know things that would be very dangerous if widely known, such as the expertise needed to prosecute biological warfare; as well as ambiguous information that could be dangerous if made public. For example, when a modern government receives unconfirmed intelligence about a possible terrorist attack on an airport, it is far from clear whether it should publicise this information and risk mass panic, or keep it quiet (or, as the UK government did in a similar situation in 2002, flood Heathrow with troops and police so as to scare off the terrorists and generate communications traffic from them). Often halftruths may in the end turn out to be for the best. Should de Gaulle have revealed his strategy for Algerian independence — since by revealing it its success would have been doomed — thus risking many more lives? Should Gorbachev have been honest about his intentions for reforming the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s and so guaranteed the maximum opposition to them from his colleagues? As Churchill once said, the truth may be ‘so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies’.
Our best guarantees that rulers will act morally come less from imposing rigid rules and more from establishing powerful ways to call them to account so that others can judge if their claims are self-serving. Here there has been much progress with the spread of inquiries and commissions, as well as codes and rules. Modern democracies are full of third-party institutions — like the Audit Commission or the Committee on Standards in Public Life — that can examine decisions and help the public to make rounded judgments.
Democracy is no longer directly threatened by competing ideologies. Nor does it look as vulnerable to policy failure as it did in the 1970s or the 1930s. Instead its biggest threat may be more subtle: the threat that the public may become such passive observers that they can no longer participate in decisions, and no longer calibrate their judgments. The great philosopher Bertrand de Jouvenel once wrote that a society of sheep begets a government of wolves. Anyone who has practical experience of exercising power in a school committee or on a local council soon comes to understand the complexities of power, and widespread experience of power keeps governments honest. By contrast, too much centralisation and too much power in the hands of technocrats and managers leave the public detached, disengaged and prone to oscillate between excessive identification with leaders and excessive contempt: between populism and cynicism.
The great Italian political thinker Azo, writing in the 13th century, described the legacy of Rome as one in which ‘the people never transferred power except in such a way that they were at the same time able to retain it themselves’. This remains the best guarantee of good government, and the best description of the spirit in which any renewal of government, either here or elsewhere, needs to take place.
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