Francis Fukuyama

Fukuyama's central architecture (*The Origins of Political Order*, 2011; *Political Order and Political Decay*, 2014) holds that a well-ordered polity rests on three institutions that must be balanced: a capable, impersonal **state** that can actually deliver and enforce; a **rule of law** that binds even the most powerful, including the state itself; and mechanisms of **democratic accountability** that make the state responsive to the governed. Order fails when these fall out of balance - a strong state without law and accountability becomes tyranny; law and accountability without state capacity becomes ungoverned drift. Applied to space, the binding question is not "is there a treaty?" but "is there an actor with the capacity to enforce it, a law that binds the powerful operators and states, and an accountability loop to the affected parties?"

For Fukuyama the decisive variable in development is **state capacity** - the ability of public authority to formulate and implement policy, regulate, tax, and deliver services impersonally and effectively - as distinct from the mere scope or size of the state. A high-capacity state is one whose bureaucracy is competent, autonomous from capture, and able to act. Weak capacity, not weak intentions, is the usual failure mode. In the space domain, this maps directly onto the regulatory capacity of national licensing authorities (FAA/AST, national space agencies, NOAA, ITU members) to actually supervise launch cadence, on-orbit behavior, and constellation deployment - the gap between a rule on paper and an administration able to enforce it.

In *Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity* (1995), Fukuyama argues that the prosperity and institutional reach of a society depend on its stock of **social capital** - the radius and depth of generalized trust that lets actors cooperate beyond kin and contract. High-trust orders sustain large-scale, low-transaction-cost cooperation; low-trust orders are confined to small, defensive, familial units and pay a "spontaneous-sociability" deficit. In space, trust is the hinge variable for conjunction avoidance, data-sharing for space situational awareness, and arms-control-style restraint: actors will share position/intent data and forgo destabilizing behavior only when they trust the information and the reciprocity of others. Transparency and confidence-building measures (TCBMs) are precisely the machinery for manufacturing this trust where it does not naturally exist.

Fukuyama's theory of **political decay** (*Political Order and Political Decay*, 2014) holds that institutions, once built, do not automatically adapt; they become rigid, are recaptured by powerful insiders ("repatrimonialization"), and persist past their useful life because elites entrench around them. Decay is the default tendency of any institution absent deliberate reform. For space governance, this is the lens on a 1967 Outer Space Treaty regime designed for a two-superpower, state-actor era now strained by thousands of commercial satellites - a possible case of institutional rigidity, where the formal regime endures while the underlying problem (congestion, debris, commercial actors) has outrun it.

Fukuyama's "getting to Denmark" problem (*The Origins of Political Order*, 2011) is the observation that everyone wants the institutions of a well-governed state ("Denmark"), but those institutions emerged through long, contingent, path-dependent historical processes and cannot simply be airlifted in by decree or by copying a template. Effective institutions must fit the society and the problem; imported blueprints without local capacity and legitimacy fail. This disciplines space-governance proposals that lead with "just create a global space traffic regulator" or "just write a new treaty" - the institution must be matched to the actual distribution of capacity, interests, and legitimacy among spacefaring actors.

Fukuyama's *The End of History and the Last Man* (1992) argued that liberal democracy had emerged as the final form of human government, with no remaining ideological rival of comparable legitimacy. The framework's contemporary stress test is the return of great-power competition and authoritarian-capitalist models. The retrieved IR literature documents the liberal international order's strain and the possibility of its decline (Mearsheimer 2019, DOI 10.1162/isec_a_00342). For space, this is the macro-lens: the governance question is whether a liberal, rules-based order can hold in orbit and cislunar space, or whether spheres-of-influence and bloc competition (Artemis Accords vs. ILRS, U.S./EU vs. China/Russia) displace it - a decisive premise for any candidate's claim about which space-governance future is feasible.