The key question raised by Acemoglu and Robinson’s review concerns sequencing. Democracy and Dictatorship argues that consolidated liberal democracy requires a fairly strong state and sense of national identity, but it does not argue that “liberal democracy emerges from a particular sequence,” as they put it, with “state-national identity first and liberal democracy following later.” In fact, Democracy and Dictatorship argues that there were many sequences of state, nation, and democracy development in Europe—none of which were simple, straightforward, or easy.

In Western Europe, the pattern that Acemoglu and Robinson emphasize occurred—state-building, followed by nation-building and then stable democracy—but Democracy and Dictatorship stresses that even countries in this region took a long time to achieve stable democracy and had to endure conflict, violence, and backsliding along the way. France began modern state-building under the ancien régime. But this state-building stalled, contributing to the outbreak of the French Revolution. The revolution then began the modern struggle for democracy and propelled French state and nation-building forward. But despite the early start of state- and nation-building in France, it took another century and a half of struggle after 1789 to achieve stable democracy with the Fifth Republic. Even Britain, the clearest case of the state- and nation-building before democracy sequence, and the case often held up as the paradigm of peaceful political development, required the tumult of the seventeenth-century civil wars and Glorious Revolution to put it on this path. After 1688 state-building was propelled forward, as was the often-forcible unification of the parts of the British Isles, but it took centuries more until universal manhood suffrage was achieved in 1918.

In Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe, the sequencing of state, nation, and democracy development differed. But the difference between these regions and Western Europe concerned not whether liberal democracy could be achieved or how much violence and instability were part of its backstory, but rather when and over how long a period this violence and instability occurred.

In Spain state- and nation-building began in the early modern period but then stalled, and so the challenge of democratization had to be faced with a weak state and national identity—contributing to the high levels of political instability and violence the country experienced during the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries, before achieving stable democracy at the end of the twentieth. In Italy, a national state emerged in the late nineteenth century and then soon thereafter confronted the challenges of nation-building and democratization. Italy quickly collapsed into political disorder and violence, culminating in fascism, before achieving a fairly stable democracy after 1945. In Eastern Europe, independent countries only emerged at the end of World War I and, as in other newly decolonized regions, had to confront the challenges of building a state, nation, and democracy simultaneously. This proved overwhelming, and these countries’ initial democratic experiments quickly failed. After several more decades of colonization, East European countries transitioned again to democracy in 1989, but these democratic experiments have proven fragile. Given the history of democratic development in Western, Central, and Southern Europe, this should not surprise us, because none of these regions experienced rapid, linear democratic development.

Again, a key lesson of Democracy and Dictatorship is how difficult achieving successful liberal democracy is, precisely because it requires myriad political, social, and economic conditions to be in place. Among the most important of these are indeed a strong state, along the lines traced out by Acemoglu and Robinson in The Narrow Corridor, as well as a fairly strong sense of national identity and unity. But there was no “particular sequence” that enabled them to develop simply or easily. Like all good things, liberal democracy requires struggle; in history as in individual life, there simply is “no free lunch.”