Francis Fukuyama*, The National Interest, Summer 1989
In watching the flow of events over the past decade
or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has
happened in world history. The past year has seen a flood of articles commemorating
the end of the Cold War, and the fact that "peace" seems to be
breaking out in many regions of the world. Most of these analyses lack any
larger conceptual framework for distinguishing between what is essential and
what is contingent or accidental in world history, and are predictably
superficial. If Mr. Gorbachev were ousted from the Kremlin or a new Ayatollah
proclaimed the millennium for a desolate Middle Eastern capital, these same
commentators would scramble to announce the rebirth of a new era of conflict. And yet, all of these people sense dimly that there
is some larger process at work, a process that gives coherence and order to the
daily headlines. The twentieth century saw the developed world descend into a
paroxysm of ideological violence, as liberalism contended first with the
remnants of absolutism, then bolshevism and fascism, and finally an updated
Marxism that threatened to lead to the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war. But
the century that began full of self-confidence in the ultimate triumph of
Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to
where it started: no to an "end of ideology" or a convergence between
capitalism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to an unabashed victory of
economic and political liberalism.
The
triumph of the West, of the Western idea,
is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic
alternatives to Western liberalism. In the past decade, there have been
unmistakable changes in the intellectual climate of the world's two largest
communist countries, and the beginnings of significant reform movements in
both. But this phenomenon extends beyond high politics and it can be seen also
in the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture in such diverse
contexts as the peasants' markets and color television sets now omnipresent
throughout China, the cooperative restaurants and clothing stores opened in the
past year in Moscow, the Beethoven piped into Japanese department stores, and
the rock music enjoyed alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran.
What we may be witnessing
in not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of
post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of
mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization
of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. This is not
to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs's
yearly summaries of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has
occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet
incomplete in the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for
believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run. To understand how this is so,
we must first consider some theoretical issues concerning the nature of
historical change. . .
In the past century,
there have been two major challenges to liberalism, those of fascism and of
communism. The former 11 saw the political weakness, materialism,
anomie, and lack of community of the West as fundamental contradictions in
liberal societies that could only be resolved by a strong state that forged a
new "people" on the basis of national excessiveness. Fascism was destroyed as a living ideology by World War II.
This was a defeat, of course, on a very material level, but it amounted to a
defeat of the idea as well. What destroyed fascism as an idea was not universal
moral revulsion against it, since plenty of people were willing to endorse the
idea as long as it seemed the wave of the future, but its lack of success.
After the ear, it seemed to most people that German fascism as well as its
other European and Asian variants were bound to self-destruct. There was no
material reason why new fascist movements could not have sprung up again after
the war in other locales, but for the fact that expansionist ultranationalism, with its promise of unending conflict
leading to disastrous military defeat, had completely lost its appeal. The
ruins of the Reich chancellory as well as the atomic
bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed this ideology on the level of
consciousness as well as materially, and all of the proto-fascist movements
spawned by the German and Japanese examples like the Peronist
movement in Argentina or Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian
National Army withered after the war.
The ideological challenge
mounted by the other great alternative to liberalism, communism, was far more
serious. Marx, speaking Hegel's language, asserted that liberal society
contained fundamental contradiction that could not be resolved within its
context, that between capital and labor, and this contradiction has constituted
the chief accusation against liberalism ever since. But surely, the class issue
has actually been successfully resolved in the West. As Koj�ve
(among others) noted, the egalitarianism of modern America represents the
essential achievement of the classless society envisioned by Marx. This is not
to say that there are not rich people and poor people in the United States, or
that the gap between them has not grown in recent years. But the root causes of
economic inequality do not have to do with the underlying legal and social
structure of our society, which remains fundamentally egalitarian and
moderately redistributionist, so much as with the cultural and social
characteristics of the groups that make it up, which are in turn the historical
legacy of premodern conditions. Thus black poverty in
the United States is not the inherent product of liberalism, but is rather the
"legacy of slavery and racism" which persisted long after the formal
abolition of slavery.
As a result of the
receding of the class issue, the appeal of communism in the developed Western
world, it is safe to say, is lower today than any time since the end of the
First World War. This can be measured in any number of ways: in the declining
membership and electoral pull of the major European communist parties, and
their overtly revisionist programs; in the corresponding electoral success of
conservative parties form Britain and Germany to the United States and Japan
which are unabashedly pro-market and antistatist; and
in an intellectual climate whose most "advanced" members no longer
believe that bourgeois society is something that ultimately needs to be
overcome. This is to say that the opinions of progressive intellectuals in
Western countries are not deeply pathological in any number of ways. But those
who believe that the future must inevitably be socialist tend to be very old,
or very marginal to the real political discourse of their societies.
.
. .
The rise of religious
fundamentalism in recent years within the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim
traditions has been widely noted. One is inclined to say that the revival of
religion in some way attests to a broad unhappiness with the impersonality and
spiritual vacuity of liberal consumerist societies. Yet while the emptiness at
the core of ideology -- indeed, a flaw that one does not need the perspective
of religion to recognize 15 -- it is not at all clear that it is
remediable through politics. Modern liberalism itself was historically a
consequence of the weakness of religiously-based
societies which, falling to agree on the nature of the good life, could not
provide even the minimal preconditions of peace and stability. In the
contemporary world only Islam has offered a theocratic state as a political
alternative to both liberalism and communism. But the doctrine has little
appeal for non-Muslims, and it is hard to believe that the movement will take
on any universal significance. Other less organized religious impulses have
been successfully satisfied within the sphere of personal of personal life that
is permitted in liberal societies.
The other major
"contradiction" potentially unresolvable by
liberalism is the one posed by nationalism and other forms of racial and ethic
consciousness. It is certainly true that a very large degree of conflict since
the Battle of Jena has had its roots in nationalism. Two cataclysmic world wars
in this century have been spawned by the nationalism of the developed world in
various guises, and if those passions have been muted to a certain extent in
postwar Europe, they are still extremely powerful in the Third World.
Nationalism has been a threat to liberalism historically in Germany, and
continues to be one in isolated parts of "post-historical" Europe
life Northern Ireland.
But it is not clear
that nationalism represents an irreconcilable contradiction in the heart of
liberalism . . .
The end of history will
be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's
life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called
forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic
calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns,
and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands. In the post historical
period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual care taking
of he museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around
me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed. Such nostalgia, in
fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post
historical world for some time to come. Even though I recognize its
inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that
has been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian
offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of
history will serve to get history started once again.