Event
by Humphrey McQueen
Presented at the first of the 'Continuing the Great Conversations' winter dinners at MCH
Fifteen years ago, Francis Fukuyama's essay, 'The End of History?', suggested that the contest between the Big Ideas of political freedom and social-economic equality was over. One of the several misunderstandings about 'The End of History' was that Fukuyama's thesis came in response to the collapse of the Soviet Bloc.
More than a year before Fukuyama presented his ideas in the Summer 1989 issue of the Washington-based quarterly, National Interest, a professor Paul Kennedy had published The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, which discussed the links between economic and military might since 1500.
At the same time, fears abounded that Japan Inc. would overtake the United States as the world's leading economy to snap up its productive assets and iconic brands. The alarmists saw Tokyo then using its wealth to fund a new round of militarism.
By 1992, the Soviet Union had disintegrated and Japanese bubble burst. Fukuyama spelt the end of Kennedy. Today, the Kennedy diagnosis is regaining respect.
In January, the IMF cautioned Washington about the dangers of twin deficits in the budget and trade. Fukuyama's editor at the National Interest, Owen Harries, warned in his 2003 Boyer Lectures that the United States had over-reached itself .
Even if the Kennedy-Harries prognosis proves correct, that outcome will not disprove Fukuyama. For him, 'history' was not a matter of budget blowouts. Two Gulf wars would refute his position only if they proved to be harbingers of a Big 'Idea' to rival that of liberal capitalism. For Fukuyama, History came with a capital-H.
Many commentators still misunderstand this key to Fukuyama. One reason is because the spirit of our age is antithetical to the very notion that an age can have a spirit. Secular thinking has taken over as part of liberal capitalism.
Fukuyama retrieved the views of the young Hegel who had been inspired by the liberal-democracy associated with the French Revolution and Napoleon. It was this version of freedom, Fukuyama argued, that had the field to itself by the 1980s.
My published response in 1989 was that although liberal-capitalism had vanquished socialism as an alternative future, liberal democracy had as yet to escape from a variety of alternative pasts, whether Confucianism or Islam.
Paradoxically, the people most in tune with the possibility that an Idea could be the motor of History are those who most resent the rise of liberal capitalism, namely, Islamic traditionalists.
An even greater paradox is that the long-term interests of the U.S. national security state would have fared better by backing the Communists in Afghanistan from the 1970s. As urban modernisers, the communists there were many times more likely to end up establishing Fukuyama's liberal capitalism than the tribal chieftains whom the U.S. funded its global contest with Moscow.
On its own terms, Fukuyama's case remains as persuasive as ever, refuted neither by events nor an alternative Idea. No new Idea is on the horizon to challenge liberal capitalism in the way that that Idea did when Napoleon's armies were vanquishing feudal mentalities across Europe. By contrast, tying regime change across the Middle East to Washington's armed forces is looking more like the retreat from Moscow.