Liberal democracy seems under threat from all sides. The international institutions supporting the liberal democratic project, like the European Union, teeter on the brink, while the president of the United States argues at the United Nations that “the future does not belong to globalists; the future belongs to patriots.” One wonders, surrounded by such enemies, how liberal democracy ever managed to be created in the first place. The answer, revealed in this thought-provoking new book by Sheri Berman, is that the creation was very recent, after World War II, and even then, it was touch and go.

Why so recently? The notion of democracy in Europe is old, dating at least to classical Greece, and notions of liberalism were widespread by the seventeenth century and already fused, at least in the work of John Locke, with notions of democratic representation and accountability. But there were always some flies in the ointment.

Aristotle, who keenly observed Athenian democracy with all of its active citizen participation, did not approve of it. Democracy, as far as he was concerned, was a “deviant” form of constitution, pregnant with danger. Locke understood well that achieving liberty, or what he described as a situation where men were in “a state of perfect freedom to order their actions … as they think fit … without asking leave, or depending on the Will of any other Man,” required a particular institutionalization. But he did not articulate a positive theory of how democracy would arise and whether it would be stable in the face of challenges. Modern political scientists have usually signed up to notions of “modernization” whereby economic development and rising educational attainment naturally bring out liberal democracy. Unfortunately, the facts do not support this claim (see Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, James A. Robinson, and Pierre Yared, “From Education to Democracy?” American Economic Review 95 [2], 2005; “Income and Democracy,” American Economic Review 98 [3], 2008). So where does liberal democracy come from?

Berman’s book takes us into the deep historical roots of liberal democracy in Western Europe and its somewhat unlikely emergence. The main reason for this is that liberal democracy “requires transforming not merely the political procedures and institutions of dictatorship, but societies and economies as well” (p. 386). The types of institutions Locke sketched out in his Second Treatise are not stable on their own and collapse if they do not sit on top of the right type of society. Although this might sound like modernization theory redux, it is not. Berman does emphasize that “it often takes powerful structural forces like economic development or violent events like war or revolution to uproot” the “social and economic legacies of the old order” (p. 391). Her focus, however, is much more on the violence than economic development. In addition, Berman argues that there are two types of interrelated institutional and social prerequisites; a strong central state and the creation of a national identity. Indeed, a key finding of the book is that “the sequencing of state-, nation-, and democracy-building mattered” (p. 391) and “liberal democracy … has consolidated only in countries possessing relatively strong states and national unity” (p. 392). But she also points out that the types of states that formed and how they went about trying to create national unity mattered, observing, “As opposed to dictatorships, democratic and particularly liberal-democratic regimes have at least the potential to promote national unity and cohesion as well as potentially a greater ability to integrate diverse groups into a national whole” (p. 396).

Now one begins to see why, in Berman’s view, liberal democracy could only finally emerge in the wake of World War II. It was only during this time that the last vestiges of nonliberal interests and institutions were swept away. Yet even then liberal democracy’s existence was precarious. It depended not just on domestic factors but also on coordination between countries, and it required intensive intervention in the economy so that mass unemployment or inequality did not emerge. These changes created a positive feedback loop so that “by showing how broadly responsive liberal democracy could be, the postwar order helped to undercut the appeal of anti-democratic extremists on the left and right who claimed only non-liberal democratic regimes could truly represent ‘the people’” (p. 400). Berman’s book is a salutary reminder of how recently both the Left and the Right were following in Aristotle’s footsteps in rejecting democracy as a deviant political form. Berman then concludes that liberal democracy is now threatened because many of its critical preconditions have come unstuck.

There is much to like about the book—and much to learn from it. Berman is surely right that one cannot understand the emergence of liberal democracy without grasping the historical dynamics. It is equally true that even in the places with the best initial conditions, such as Britain, the process was highly volatile and violent. This is, in fact, what we tried to capture with the notion of the “Red Queen effect” in The Narrow Corridor: democratic institutions and the protection of liberty depend on the messy competition between society and elites (and state institutions), where each side has to run as fast as it can just to keep up with the other. Berman also provides a very plausible connection between this history and the current malaise of liberal democracy.

Yet, like all good works of social science, the book raises many questions to investigate further and debate. Let us focus on two here. The first is the issue of sequencing, which is critical to Berman’s conceptual framework. Is it right, as Berman claims, that liberal democracy emerges from a particular sequence: state-national identity first and liberal democracy following later? We are not sure. There are two parts to this claim, one relating to identity that we will discuss in the context of our next point and another related to the view that state development must precede liberal democracy; for example, as claimed by Francis Fukuyama in his influential book, The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (2011). Much evidence goes against this sequencing. As we argue in our book, the typical pattern is one in which state capacity develops at the same time as democratic political participation. There are certainly many examples of nondemocratic, despotic strong states in history, but they often use their unaccountable power to block democracy, rather than preparing the ground for it. More tellingly, in most cases despotic states do not develop the deepest form of state capacity, because they lack both cooperation from society and the impetus that comes from society’s powerful challenges. Put differently, without the Red Queen effect, state capacity remains ultimately limited. The British case, in fact, far from supporting the sequencing at the center of Berman’s conceptualization, vividly illustrates the simultaneous development of state institutions and a more mobilized and democratically empowered society (Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1998, being perhaps the best empirical articulation of this pattern).

Berman’s conceptual account also places great emphasis on favorable initial conditions, emphasizing again the British case as an exemplar. But where do these favorable conditions come from? The book takes its cue from the perspective offered by Eugene Weber (1976) in his seminal book Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. In this account, the path to modernity goes through the development of a powerful state that then socializes its citizens. Yet, it is clear that Britain took no such path. Arguably, there was a notion of being English already at the time that the Venerable Bede wrote in the seventh century—long before there was any powerful English or British state. Indeed, the state had no tools for effective socialization until the Elementary Education Act of 1870. England made a pathetic hash in the eighteenth century of trying to socialize the Scots into being British by banning the wearing of kilts. Yet this policy was worse than ineffectual; it seems to have led to a backlash and made Scots even more Scottish (see Hugh Trevor-Roper, “The Invention of Tradition: The Highland Tradition of Scotland,” in Eric Hobsbawm and Terence O. Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition, 1983). The fact that state socialization may have such effects seems even to be true in the United States, an apparent poster child for the creation of a national identity. Efforts to erase German identity in the United States appear to have increased parents’ willingness to invest in the German identity of their children (Vasiliki Fouka, “Backlash: The Unintended Effects of Language Prohibition in U.S. Schools after World War I,” Review of Economic Studies 87 [1], 2020).

Not only was there never a British identity but the English identity also does not seem to have been created by the state. Benedict Anderson (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 1983) argued that it was the decay of hierarchical notions of society and the emergence of “print capitalism” that created national identity. The state features almost nowhere in his argument, except as an employer of people who could buy books and newspapers. Locke himself, in an essay in 1693, observed that what really defined English identity was assenting to and obeying the common law, which was at least a partially bottom-up project. Many attempts to characterize the core of English identity similarly turn to features unrelated to the state as its defining features. George Orwell (The Lion and the Unicorn, 1941), for example, follows Locke in his emphasis on the law and also notes the “privateness of English life”: he argues, “All the culture that is most truly native centres round things which even when they are communal are not official—the pub, the football match, the back garden, the fireside and the ‘nice cup of tea.’” In other words, what is critical for Englishness is not anything defined by the state, but rather the autonomous spaces outside the reach of the state.

It is easy to think of other examples, like the Finns or Kurds, who have historically developed very powerful “national” identities with no states and thereafter went in search of a state. This all suggests that national identity is not the universal precondition and that, when it develops, it often does so without an active guiding hand from a state-building project.

None of this is to say Berman is wrong in her emphasis on the importance of identity, arguably even national identity (even if Britain seems not to have had it). Our point is that the roots of these identities are much more varied in interesting and important ways.