Copyright 1995 National Endowment for Democracy and the Johns Hopkins University

Press. All rights reserved.

Journal of Democracy 6.1 (1995) 7-14

The Primacy of Culture

Francis Fukuyama
Democracy's Future

What are likely to be liberal democracy's principal ideological and political competitors in the
years to come? I believe that the most serious one is in the process of emerging in Asia. I also
believe, however, that what happens on the level of ideology will depend on developments at
the levels of civil society and culture. A short methodological digression will help explain why
this is so.
There are four levels on which the consolidation of democracy must occur, and each requires a
corresponding level of analysis.
Level 1: Ideology. This is the level of normative beliefs about the rightness or wrongness of
democratic institutions and their supporting market structures. Democratic societies obviously
cannot survive for long if people do not believe democracy to be a legitimate form of
government; on the other hand, a widespread belief in the legitimacy of democracy can coexist
with an inability to create or consolidate democratic institutions. Level 1 is the sphere of
rational self- consciousness, in which changes in perceptions of legitimacy can occur virtually
overnight. Such a change, favorable to democracy and markets, has occurred around the world
in the last 15 years.
Level 2: Institutions. This sphere includes constitutions, legal systems, party systems, market
structures, and the like. Institutions change less quickly than ideas about legitimacy, but they
can be manipulated by public policy. This is the level at which most of the recent political
struggle has taken place, as new democracies, aided by older ones, have sought to privatize
state enterprises, write new constitutions, consolidate parties, and so on. Most neoclassical
economics operates at this level of [End Page 7] analysis, as did a great deal of political
science up through the end of the Second World War.
Level 3: Civil society. This is the realm of spontaneously created social structures separate from
the state that underlie democratic political institutions. These structures take shape even more
slowly than political institutions. They are less manipulable by public policy, and indeed often
bear an inverse relationship to state power, growing stronger as the state recedes and vice versa.
Until recently, civil society was a relatively neglected subject of analysis: in the West, it was
often taken for granted as an inevitable concomitant of modernization, while in the East it was
denounced by Marxists as fraudulent. Civil society became fashionable again after the fall of
communism, because it was recognized that post-totalitarian societies were characterized by a
particular deficit of social structures that were a necessary precondition of stable democratic
political institutions. 1 Over the past couple of decades, a great deal of interesting work in

wall: experiences of the past century have taught most democracies that ambitious
rearrangements of institutions often cause more unanticipated problems than they solve. By
contrast, the real difficulties affecting the quality of life in modern democracies have to do with
social and cultural pathologies that seem safely beyond the reach of institutional solutions, and
hence of public policy. The chief issue is quickly becoming one of culture.

Competitors to Democracy
Of the readily apparent systemic competitors to liberal democracy, only one is rapidly gaining
strength and seems able to challenge [End Page 9] democracy on its home turf. That sole
serious contender is a form of paternalistic Asian authoritarianism. The other possibilities that
suggest themselves are 1) extreme nationalism or fascism, 2) Islam, and 3) a revived neoBolshevism. Each of these has problems as a worldwide ideological movement; most notably,
all three have shown a limited ability to adapt to the requirements of modern natural science,
and hence are constrained from becoming integrated into the increasingly technological global
economy.
Take the case of fascism. In recent years, ethnic conflicts and immigrant movements around the
world have revealed a sizeable hole in traditional liberal political theory: by treating citizens
only as individuals, the liberal state ignores the group-oriented character of real-world
populations that, for better or worse, find great satisfaction in ascriptive collective identities. It
is not clear, however, that this is an insuperable problem for liberal states. Most have found it
possible to accommodate a moderate degree of group-oriented pluralism within institutions
based on the principle of individual rights. By contrast, more extreme nationalist states like
Serbia that violate fundamental liberal principles of tolerance have not fared well. Because
populations are not homogeneous, their emphasis on ethnic purity leads them to conflict, war,
and destruction of the economic basis of modern power. It is thus not surprising that Serbia has
failed to become a model society for anyone in Europe, East or West, apart from a few
discontented fringe groups in countries like Russia, Moldova, and Hungary. Although ethnic
conflict is a severe threat to democracy in the short run, there are a number of reasons for
thinking that it will be a transitional phenomenon. Similarly, while the Islamic fundamentalist
wave has not yet receded among marginalized populations in the Middle East, no
fundamentalist state has proved that it can master the process of industrialization. Even those
lucky enough to have inherited natural-resource wealth have not dealt effectively with the
social problems that helped bring them to power; discontent in Iran today remains extremely
high. This only reinforces Islamic fundamentalism's lack of appeal for anyone not culturally
Islamic to begin with.
Least serious of all as an ideological competitor to liberal democracy is a renewed form of
communism. It is true that former communists have been returned to power in Lithuania,
Poland, Hungary, and eastern Germany, while in some sense never having left power in other
parts of the former communist world. But these groups have not sought to do more than slightly
reduce the speed of the transition to capitalism and push for a broader safety net. Polling data
indicate that their support comes mainly from pensioners, members of the former communist
elite, [End Page 10] and others with a stake in the old system. Needless to say, the neoBolshevik economic agenda does not hold out the prospect of long-term economic renewal.
That fascism, Islam, and neo-Bolshevism lack good prospects as global ideologies does not
mean that they will not continue to expand within their own regional spheres. There they will
do considerable damage to the quality of life of local populations, while delaying or in some
cases making impossible the consolidation of workable democratic political systems. But they
are unlikely to gain either the appeal or the power to reach much farther afield.
This leaves some form of Asian paternalistic authoritarianism as the most serious new

two generations. The political upheaval that began with the Liberal Democratic Party's loss of
power in July 1993 has inaugurated a process that will eventually make Japan a more
American-style democracy than it has been in the past. The kind of aggressively anti-Western
and overtly antidemocratic rhetoric that has come from Singaporean and Malaysian officials
and intellectuals in recent years is very much related to the personalities of Lee and Malaysian
prime minister Datuk Seri Mahathir. With the next generation of leaders, it is much more likely
that both societies will move toward the Japanese-Taiwanese-Korean version of democracy
than away from it. [End Page 12]
The mistake on Huntington's part is more conceptual in nature. He misidentifies the essence of
Confucianism as political Confucianism, when in fact the part that has best survived is a
doctrine about the family and other lower-level social relationships. 3 There is no theoretical
reason why Confucian social structures could not coexist perfectly well with democratic
political institutions. Indeed, the case can be made that democratic institutions would be
considerably strengthened by them.
On the other hand, the fact that Confucianism is compatible with modern democracy does not
mean that democracy will inexorably advance in Asia. The prestige of democratic institutions
in the future will depend on Asian perceptions not so much of the effectiveness of Western
institutions as of the problems of Western society and culture. That prestige has dimmed
considerably over the past couple of decades: not only have modern means of communication
made people in Asia much more aware of developments in the United States, but American
social problems--the usual litany of pathologies like violent crime, drugs, racial tensions,
poverty, single-parent families, and so on--have themselves gotten worse. In other words, while
Americans look down their noses at Asians when comparisons are made on levels 1 and 2,
Asians increasingly feel that their own societies have certain key advantages over America on
levels 3 and 4. Asian critics of the United States such as Lee Kwan Yew assume that levels 1
and 2 are inextricably linked to levels 3 and 4--that is, that liberal, rights-based institutions have
a corrosive effect on civil society and culture, and that democracy eventually leads to the
breakdown of the social fabric. The fate of liberal democracy in Asia will therefore depend in
large measure on the degree to which the United States can deal successfully not with its
relatively minor institutional problems, but with its more intractable sociocultural ones.
There is indeed a linkage between levels 1 and 2 on the one hand, and levels 3 and 4 on the
other, but it is a good deal more complicated than Lee and others imagine. Liberalism based on
individual rights is quite compatible with strong, communitarian social structures and
disciplined cultural habits. Indeed, one can argue that the true importance of civil society and
culture in a modern democracy lies precisely in their ability to balance or moderate the
atomizing individualism that is inherent in traditional liberal doctrine, both political and
economic. As Tocqueville, Weber, and many other observers of American society have pointed
out, America has never resembled a "sand heap" of atomized individuals, because other factors
(such as the sectarian character of American Protestantism) have exerted a powerful
countervailing pressure in a more group-oriented direction. It is only during the past 50 years
that individualistic currents have come to predominate over the more communitarian ones. It is
not an accident that the American system produced this outcome. But its emergence was [End
Page 13] by no means inevitable, and was not a necessary consequence of "democracy" as
such. The United States, as constitutional scholar Mary Ann Glendon points out, has its own
unique "language of rights" that is quite distinct from those of European democracies. 4 This
American liberal dialect has come to be associated, in the minds of many Asians, with
democracy per se.
Thus the struggles that will help determine the fate of liberal democracy will not be over the
nature of institutions, about which there is already a great deal of consensus around the world.
The real battles will occur at the levels of civil society and culture. These realms have been