Theory and Context Term 2, Week 3: fukuyama and history

Poland recognises Solidarity, paving way for end of Communist rule

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1989: A Key Year

The last Russian troops leave Afghanistan



PW Botha resigns in South Africa; Nelson Mandela released in 1990



George Bush (Senior) succeeds Ronald Reagan as US President

Sky Television launched in UK & Europe

1989: A Key Year

First GPS satellites launched

First full-length episode of the Simpsons

US Savings and Loan crisis: Charles Keating eventually jailed. $200 billion bailout.









1989: A Key Year

The end of the Iron Curtain: the checkpoints between East and West Germany are opened, allowing Germans to travel freely between the two nations for the first time since 1961. The Berlin Wall falls; Germany is rapidly reunited.



1989: A Key Year

“Velvet Revolution” in Prague as Communist Party gives up power and Vaclav Havel is elected President.



1989: A Key Year

Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu and his wife Elena overthrown and executed



The most rapid change in Europe since the end of World War II

Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini hanged with his mistress, April 1945



Francis FukuyamaAmerican political theorist Francis Fukuyama: “The End of History” The National Interest, 1989

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



http://www.wesjones.com/eoh.htm#source





The End of History?American political theorist Francis Fukuyama: “The End of History” The National Interest, 1989



What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar 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.

The concept of history as a dialectical process with a beginning, a middle, and an end was borrowed by Marx from his great German predecessor, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Hegel believed that history culminated in an absolute moment - a moment in which a final, rational form of society and state became victorious.


Liberal democracy was imposed on Japan by a victorious United States. Western capitalism and political liberalism when transplanted to Japan were adapted and transformed by the Japanese in such a way as to be scarcely recognisable. [The governing "Liberal Democratic Party is far from "democratic"]

Nonetheless, the very fact that the essential elements of economic and political liberalism have been so successfully grafted onto uniquely Japanese traditions and institutions guarantees their survival in the long run. More important is the contribution that Japan has made in turn to world history by following in the footsteps of the United States to create a truly universal consumer culture that has become both a symbol and an underpinning of the universal homogenous state.






The Soviet Union could in no way be described as a liberal or democratic country now, nor do I think that it is terribly likely that perestroika will succeed such that the label will be thinkable any time in the near future. But at the end of history it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society. And in this respect I believe that something very important has happened in the Soviet Union in the past few years: the criticisms of the Soviet system sanctioned by Gorbachev have been so thorough and devastating that there is very little chance of going back to either Stalinism or Brezhnevism in any simple way.



The End of the USSR

Twenty years ago, on December 25, 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev resigned as president of the Soviet Union, declaring the office extinct and dissolving the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), a massive communist empire that had existed since 1922.

He introduced several reforms, including perestroika (economic restructuring) and glasnost (openness). Glasnost opened the floodgates of protest and many republics made moves toward independence, threatening the continued existence of the USSR. In August of 1991, a group of Communist Party hardliners frustrated by the separatist movement attempted to stage a coup. They quickly failed due to a massive show of civil resistance […] By December of 1991, 16 Soviet republics had declared their independence, and Gorbachev handed over power to Russian president Boris Yeltsin, ending the USSR.



http://www.theatlantic.com/infocus/2011/12/20-years-since-the-fall-of-the-soviet-union/100214/




The End of Yugoslavia



The Siege of Dubrovnik, Croatia (December 1991), a key moment in the war between Serbia and Croatia

Karl Popper and George Soros

The Open Society and Its Enemies, published in 1945


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Fukuyama’s position - neo-conservatism

"The End of History" was published in The National Interest, the neo-conservative journal founded by Irving Kristol to replace the liberal consensus in American intellectual life with a conservative climate. It developed out of a lecture that Fukuyama was asked to give at the University of Chicago, the home of neoliberal economics, by (among others) Professor Allan Bloom, himself the author of a conservative bestseller, The Closing of the American Mind. [And a student of Leo Strauss]

The lecture was funded, indirectly, by the ideologically committed, conservative John M Olin Foundation. Fukuyama wrote it while on leave from the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica, a research institution closely associated with the US air force, where he had worked almost continuously since earning his doctorate in political science from Harvard. He had also been a member of the State Department's policy planning staff during the first Bush administration. It was therefore a product of the conservative establishment that had, by the 1980s, succeeded in Kristol's dream of displacing liberalism as the prevailing American public philosophy.

Fukuyama went on to expand his article into a book, The End of History and the Last Man, in which triumphalism for the American way was rather oddly linked to Hegelian and Nietzschean ideas. It was a smash hit.Godfrey Hodgson - New Statesman - 22nd April 2002

http://www.newstatesman.com/200204220011




Godfrey Hodgson - New Statesman - 22nd April 2002

The End of History was an almost comically overrated book. It was successful because it spoke to a particular mood in the US, a mood not so much of aggressive triumphalism as of relief. Not only was the cold war over, but Americans could take legitimate pride in the growing acceptance of ideals they liked to think were their own - though, in truth, democracy and capitalism are scarcely American inventions. One of the basic contradictions in neoconservative doctrine was between chauvinism and pessimism. If everything was so right with US society, as the neo-conservatives insisted, why did they constantly predict the end of civilisation as we knew it?

Fukuyama turns his back on the

neoconservatives after 2004

Larry De Witt - review of America at the Crossroads, 2006

In his new book, America at the Crossroads, the always thoughtful Francis Fukuyama has been forced into some fundamental rethinking of his own role in helping to make the case for the Bush Administration's policy in Iraq. The rethinking had to be fundamental because, as Fukuyama well understands, his support of the war was predicated on some very basic notions of his about the nature of democracy and of the neoconservative political tradition of which he views himself as an inheritor. To put it plainly: something went very wrong in Iraq, and in this book Fukuyama is struggling to figure out what it was, and to rationalize these failures in a way that does not cause him to abandon any of

his own basic ideological commitments.

Fukuyama turns his back on the

neoconservatives after 2004

Fukuyama is an author who sponsored a neo-Hegelian theory of the historical process such that the transition from dictatorship to liberal capitalist democracy in Iraq (and everywhere else) is to be expected. Thus arises an almost irresistible policy temptation: the notion that since history itself is bringing about regime change in Iraq, it seems only logical that as a matter of public policy democratic governments ought to lend a helping hand to this historical process. It can almost seem an obligation, an obligation to History itself. What greater temptation could a statesman have than the grand idea that he or she is serving as partner to History?

I suggest that a very familiar form of hubris was present among Bush administration policymakers and their advisers in early 2003: the idea that statesman throughout history have had that History itself is on their side, and that their success is therefore nearly inevitable. This has proven to be one of the most durable forms of historical folly of which human beings are capable. Fukuyama's theory of history was part of the intellectual foundation of the Bush Administration's hubris in just this way. It seems fair, then, to lay some significant portion of the blame for America's Iraq policy at his doorstep.

Larry De Witt - review of America at the Crossroads, 2006

Fukuyama today

“The way I feel right now is that it’s an open question which system is going to do better in the next while – a high quality authoritarian one or a deadlocked, paralysed, democratic one, with lots of checks and balances? Over the long run, it will be easier to sustain a system with checks and balances, precisely because the checks and balances permit adaptation. You can get rid of a bad leader.

“And, then I think that the normative dimension comes into play because an authoritarian state doesn’t recognise the dignity of its citizens. That makes me dislike the system but, more importantly, it’s the weakness of the system because, at a certain point, the anger of people at being treated in this fashion will spill over.”

Nevertheless, he goes on, “in many ways, Asian government, not just China, but Singapore and in an earlier day, Japan and South Korea, had governments that looked more like a corporate board of governance because there’s no downward accountability whatever. You don’t have to deal with constituents ... You run the whole country like a corporation, and I think that’s one of their advantages at the moment.”

Lunch with the FT: Francis Fukuyama - Martin Wolf - 27th May 2011

Fukuyama today

Lunch with the FT: Francis Fukuyama - Martin Wolf - 27th May 2011

Turning to China, Fukuyama says: “One of the advantages of their form of authoritarianism is that they concluded after Mao that they would never again allow a single individual to exert that kind of domination over their system, and that’s why they have term limits. That’s why all of the decisions have to be taken collectively. But, in the end, that system is also going to have its inefficiencies.”

Yet it soon becomes clear that he does not think much of the US political system either. “Just look at the way that interest groups in the United States have a veto on the simplest kinds of reforms,” he says. “We allow mortgage interest deduction regardless of how expensive the house is. Why is that the case? Because we have a real estate industry that says, ‘Don’t even think about changing this.’ ”

Fukuyama todayTime Magazine Oct 21st 2011: “Top 10 Failed Predictions”



A Short History of Power - Simon Heffer



From Macaulay in the 19th century to Fukuyama in the late 20th, historians have often been lulled into thinking that things can only get better. Such belief in progress, argues leading political commentator Simon Heffer, may be typical of times of plenty, but it ignores a less palatable truth: that, since the beginnings of recorded history, the major events in international relations can be attributed to a single cause, the desire by rulers to assert or protect their power. Taking a panoramic view from the days of Thucydides up to the present, Heffer offers a fourfold analysis of the motive forces behind the pursuit of power: land, wealth, God and minds. If we understand these forces, he contends, we can more clearly understand why history is destined to repeat itself.

Theory and Context Term 2, Week 3: fukuyama and history

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