Francis Fukuyama ble så berømt for sin tese og bok “End of history” at han virket som en pophistoriker. Det er feil. Fukuyama er i høyeste grad seriøs. Nå er han ute med en ny bok, State-Building Governance and World Order in the 21st Century. (Profile Books)
Fukuyama presenterer to teser i en introduksjonsartikkel: privatiseringen og markedsliberaliseringen har gått for langt, og 911 har vist at staten fremdeles har en viktig rolle å spille. Sikkerhet kan kun ivaretas av staten, ikke private.
Det er ikke bare i u-land og tidligere sovjetiske stater at privatiseringen har hatt katastrofale resultater: Det er nok å nevne alle skandalene i næringslivet, fra amerikanske Enron til italienske Parmelat, eller hjemlige Finance Credit, for å vise at den offentlige tilsynsfunksjonen ikke fungerer.
But there are signs that the Reagan-Thatcher era is ending and that the pendulum will swing the other way. Many recent problems have tended to come from the lack of sufficient state oversight, as with the Enron, WorldCom and other auditing scandals, or the privatisations of railways in Britain or electricity in California. The easy gains from privatisation and deregulation have long since been achieved.
Utviklingen i f.eks Russland har fått tidligere markedsprofeter til å tenke om igjen.
It is perhaps in light of experiences like these that Milton Friedman, dean of free-market economists, said a couple of years ago that his advice to former socialist countries 10 years earlier had been to ‘privatise, privatise, privatise.’ ‘But I was wrong,’ he added. ‘It turns out that the rule of law is probably more basic than privatisation.’ The cost of learning this lesson was high.
The 11 September attacks underlined the fact that the lack of governance in poor and troubled parts of the world like Afghanistan could have profound security consequences for the developed world. This has led to the ironic result that George W. Bush, who said when he was running for the presidency in 2000, ‘I don’t think our troops ought to be used for what’s called nation building’, has embarked on major nation-building exercises in Afghanistan and Iraq in his first term. The American experience in both countries has underlined another unpleasant truth: while the US has the ability to reach around the world militarily and unseat regimes, it does not have a corresponding capability or the institutions to provide them with strong governance.
