Evolved institutions are not superior: “The French Revolution of 1789 [...] violently toppled the established regime and started a complex process, involving both the infamous French Terror and also radical institutional changes, including the abolition of the remnants of feudalism in agriculture, the reduction of the power of the nobility and the clergy, the abolition of guilds and internal tariffs, and the declaration of equality before the law for all citizens. More importantly for the focus of this paper, the French Revolutionary armies, and later Napoleon, invaded and controlled Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Switzerland, parts of Germany. In all of these places, the Revolution undertook essentially the same radical political, legal, and economic reforms as in France. However, invasion by the French Revolutionary armies (and later by Napoleon) also came with chaos and the exploitation of the occupied territories.
“The evidence suggests that areas that underwent the institutional reforms of the French Revolution experienced more rapid urbanization, especially after 1850. This pattern is fairly robust when we look at cross-country data on urbanization and if anything stronger when we focus on within-Germany variation. [...]
“[...] our findings support recent empirical work emphasizing the centrality of institutional differences for comparative economic development. More importantly, the results are inconsistent with influential theses in social sciences emphasizing the potential negative effects of the French Revolution because it imposed potentially ‘inappropriate,’ ‘designed’ and ‘French’ institutions in a ‘Big Bang’ style—all of these often argued to be inimical to economic progress. On the contrary, the evidence supports our hypothesis that the institutions of the ancien regime impeded prosperity, and that the radical institutional reforms removed these barriers and paved the way for industrialization and economic growth. [...] our findings do suggest that radical institutional reforms can have long-run beneficial consequences, at least in certain historical contexts.” [emphasis mine] Acemoglu-Cantoni-Johnson-Robinson,2009: The Consequences of Radical Reform: The French Revolution [pdf]
Cf.
“[...] the paper [was] to show that “evolved institutions are not inherently superior to those ‘designed,’” the “evolved” institutions that did so much worse have to be, well, evolved. The problem here, however, is that 1790s Prussia, Russia, and Austro-Hungary were far from spontaneous orders—rather, they were quite authoritarian given their technological constraints. [...] The work that Acemoglu, et al, have done does show that French economic institutions were superior to serfdom, at least in the long run. [...] French-occupied territories tended to have better economic development a half-century or so later than those with relatively less French influence. One major exception here is Great Britain [...] But there’s an alternative which I think would have been greatly superior to both setups as they were: what the British and Americans accomplished and what the Polish tried to do: develop government-limiting institutions, free their populaces, and promote liberty and order as opposed to Terror and Napoleon. That would have been significantly better than what did happen.
http://36chambers.wordpress.com/2009/07/26/in-the-papers-the-red-flag-of-revolution/
and:
“In my view, apart from the convincing empirical evidence of the positive long-term impact of the French invasion on the occupied territories, the explanatory power of their analysis is limited in several ways. In view of the fact that their paper is a contribution to a debate on economic policy in today’s developing and emerging economies, I find the drawing of conclusions from the experience of military occupation and the forced implementation of reforms highly problematical. This is not primarily a question of moral considerations. Occupation can be interpreted as the forced import of state capacity. Only its superior state capacity allowed France to accomplish both radical and economic reforms in the occupied territories in a short space of time. Developing countries, however, usually lack the state capacity needed to accomplish an enlarged reform agenda within short periods of time and are thus forced to concentrate on only a few reform areas [...]. Shock therapy versus gradualism, then, is not a matter of choice but of capacity. Also, if the use of force remains outside the scope of the possible means of accomplishing reforms, key political actors necessarily have to deal with the preferences of interest groups and broader strata of society (which does not necessarily exclude the option of a ‘big bang’ strategy).
[...] open access to political competition in the medium to long term is certainly necessary to sustain open access to economic competition. But opening access in both fields presupposes that the state has established a firm monopoly of power. Otherwise it will mainly improve the chances of privileged elite groups to appropriate rents. Prussia is the prime historical example of how liberal reforms were started before a firm monopoly of power was accomplished. Opening access to the Junker class without depriving it of its political privileges allowed them to transform their economic power into political power.” Zweynert,2010: The French Revolution and the Transfer of the Open Access Order to the South-Western German States and Prussia [pdf]
