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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Germany and Japan had highly functional states for centuries--in the case of Japan, over a millennium--before the allies installed democracy. Not only that, those places had cultures that had long internalized administration and rule of law even if people couldn't vote on those systems.

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Germany as a single state emerged only at the second half of XIX. You may argue that those multitude of German states which existed before still count, but how more functional each of them were compared to e.g. Khmer Kingdom is an open question. What is 'functional' to begin with? I probably would agree that there should be some sort of pre-requisite for a working democracy, but your theory of a 'functional state' (at least as I can derive it from your commentaries) feels a bit too raw so far

Functional means it has some form of bureaucracy that can collect taxes from the population and use that to do state things, usually provide for the defense of that population against internal and external threats. The actual system of government is irrelevant and in many cases the state itself survives even radical political change. What matters is whether it has the resources to actually exert authority.

Haiti lost its functional state when the French colonialists fled en masse after the 1804 massacre. Due to racism, they were the only ones allowed in administrative positions in the bureaucracy so when they left Haiti, it was left with no one qualified to run the state apparatus. Since the population were transplanted slaves, they had no tribal traditions to fall back on. Without a continuity of bureaucracy it was left hobbled to this day. Since the state can’t afford to police the population, these gangs fill the void because they can use force to collect taxes (in the broadest sense because usually this takes the form of business shakedowns and roadblocks that they use to extract money from the population).

The question is not that we need some system of gov't before coming to democracy. It's just that we can't explain multiple failures of building/exporting democracy by this thing alone. There are way more functional bureaucracies than there are democratic governments. The question is what is the secret ingredient.

The bureaucracy is the secret ingredient and it’s orthogonal to the system of government. Throughout history the bureaucrats have survived regimes and adapted to the demands of their new rulers, whether that be kings or constituents. Successful conquerors and revolutionaries both tend to repurpose that bureaucracy rather than rebuilding it from scratch (which tends to end very badly, see Haiti or the Democratic Republic of Congo).

I don't think so. China shows us an example of exceptionally developed bureaucracy, having long historical roots, even entrenched in culture - and no democracy. I really don't think governing system in the US had the same at its birth, and look how it went. I'd rather suggest some features of judicial system is the key

Unified Germany was a direct outgrowth of the Prussian state, which was an efficient, centralized modern state. Most of Germany was also within the holy roman empire, which had a sophisticated government with an elective monarchy (though the electors were a handful of princes).

Of course German elements of democracy goes back to pre-Christian times: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_(assembly)

Thanks for the answer, but we haven't moved anywhere. Prussian state became a 'modern' (to its time) state not long before. HRE wasn't a state at all, and I'm not sure one can really call an assembly of princes 'a sophisticated government'. It didn't have direct power over anything for the most time of its existence, and to tbomk never had functional executive bureaucracy. Pre-Christian Germanic 'ting' is as irrelevant to the problem of modern representative democracy as qurultay (which existed arguably for longer periods, but most Turkic countries are not democracies). Practically all significant tribes had a period when heads of clans had their gatherings to reduce amount of internal violence. Long story short there's a tradition (starting from Marx, if I'm not mistaken) to call it 'military democracy', but once you look at it closer, it's a clear case of misnomer. In addition, I dare to say, centralization doesn't really correlate with democracy.

What? This is totally ahistorical. The Meiji era (the beginnings of what we might call a modern Japanese state) didn't start until 1868. Before that, Japan was feudal with wars happening all the time. Quoting from Wikipedia about the infamously-chaotic Sengoku period in the 1400s [1], which was just one of many turbulent times prior to the Meiji period:

> The period saw a breakdown in the traditional master-servant relationship between a lord and his vassals, with many instances of vassals rebelling against their lords, internal dynastic conflict over lordships within noble families (in which vassals would take sides), and the installation of figurehead lords by cadet branches of noble families.[3] The period was also marked by the loosening of samurai culture, with people born into other social strata sometimes making a name for themselves as warriors and thus becoming samurai.

> [W]eariness of war, socioeconomic unrest and poor treatment by aristocrats provoked the wrath of the peasant class. Farmers, craftsmen, merchants and even villages would organize uprisings (known as "ikki") against the ruling class. An extraordinary example is the Kaga Rebellion, in which the local ikki had staged a large-scale revolt with the support of the True Pure Land sect (thereby establishing the term ikkō ikki) and assumed control of the entire province of Kaga.

Whatever post-Heian, pre-Meiji Japan was, it was not an orderly, harmonious society.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sengoku_period

Rayiner is using the word “state” in a subtly different manner than you are. You’re talking about concrete polities, but he’s talking about the state apparatus which generally survives between republics, dynasties, and even empires. It’s the bureaucracy (in a broad sense) used by the feudal lords to collect taxes, raise retinues, etc. that was transformed into the modern state. Tax collectors that are familiar with how much everyone owns in an area, agronomists who are familiar with farming and irrigation techniques suited for the area, judges or local chiefs that have the trust and authority to settle disputes, recordkeepers and their records, that kind of thing. After a revolution or conquest, any of these people that survive are usually recruited to help run the new state, just under new instructions from up top.

On the contrary, there ended up being not much continuity between pre-Meiji Japan and Meiji Japan--the daimyo's domains were replaced with prefectures and the daimyo themselves were largely forcibly retired. This was intentional on the part of the Meiji oligarchy, in order to prevent the daimyo from retaining enough power to be able to rebel [1]. The Meiji Restoration was an enormous change in Japan's government, really from top to bottom.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abolition_of_the_han_system

The abolition of the han system is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. The majority of daimyos first became government employees, eventually becoming the governors of the prefectures, responsible for their administration with funding from the central state. The Meiji government even paid stipends so that the daimyos could pay their former samurais to disarm. The subsequent reforms (which took years) did transform the state away from the hereditary system but there was a continuity in the administrative apparatus. Likewise when the US occupied Japan after WWII it kept much of that apparatus and slowly reformed it further.

Contrast that with Haiti where the vast majority of Haitians weren’t allowed to hold administrative positions in the colonial government so when the remnants of the French bureaucrats fled after the 1804 massacre, Haiti was left with very few people who knew how to run any part of the government. They were left with post offices but without anyone with the experience to actually run a postal system. No officers capable of training and disciplining a police force or military. And so on. They had to build up their bureaucracy entirely from scratch which is an incredibly hard thing to do and usually turns into situations like in Haiti, as opposed to outcomes like Japan where the state isn’t violently wiped clean. It’s hard to overstate how big a roll that continuity plays when a new polity forms in its success or failure.

I didn’t say it was an orderly, harmonious society. I said it had a highly functional centralized state. Which it did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edo_period.

Feudalism is the literal opposite of a highly functional centralized state! And you said 1,000 years, which extends well before the Edo period, even if you consider the Edo period a centralized state (which I would not--the establishment of a centralized state is what characterized the Meiji Restoration).

I think that Edo was centralized to a similar degree as medieval England - not that it necessarily had a central bureaucracy that we'd associate with a modern state (although I believe in actuality that the samurai-staffed bureaucracy in Edo was on a similar level to contemporary states in Europe, if not as sophisticated as China), but that it was never under any serious doubt that one government had legitimacy to rule over the entire country. There were no daimyo, as far as I know, that ruled territories that the Edo government struggled to control, after the foundation of the Tokugawa Shogunate. By contrast, France had powerful independent duchies until at least the 1500s.

Yeah, that's basically what I'm saying. Building a state/civic society is extremely hard and generally takes a long time to sink in. In contrast, taking an existing evil state and making it less-evil seems a lot easier, as you can see with Japan and Germany.

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