Week 03 fukuyama and histor

Poland recognises Solidarity, pavingway for end of Communist rule

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 RonaldReagan as US President

Sky Television launched in UK & Europe

1989: A Key Year

First GPS satellites launched

First full-‐length episode of theSimpsons

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

1989: A Key Year

The end of the Iron Curtain: the checkpoints between East and West Germany areopened, allowing Germans to travel freely between the two naQons for the first Qmesince 1961. The Berlin Wall falls; Germany is rapidly reunited.

1989: A Key Year

“Velvet RevoluQon” in Prague as Communist Party gives up power and Vaclav Havel iselected 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 Fukuyama

American poliQcal theorist Francis Fukuyama: “The End of History” The Na'onal Interest, 1989

The triumph of the West, of theWestern idea, is evident first of all inthe total exhaustion of viablesystematic alternatives to Westernliberalism. In the past decade, therehave been unmistakable changes inthe intellectual climate of the world'stwo largest communist countries, andthe beginnings of significant reformmovements in both. But thisphenomenon extends beyond highpolitics and it can be seen also in theineluctable spread of consumeristWestern culture in such diversecontexts as the peasants' markets andcolor television sets now omnipresentthroughout China

The End of History?


What we may be witnessing is not justthe end of the Cold War, or thepassing of a particular period ofpostwar history, but the end of historyas such: that is, the end point ofmankind's ideological evolution andthe universalization of Western liberaldemocracy as the final form of humangovernment.

The concept of history as a dialecticalprocess with a beginning, a middle, andan end was borrowed by Marx from hisgreat German predecessor, GeorgWilhelm Friedrich Hegel.Hegel believed that history culminated inan absolute moment - a moment inwhich a final, rational form of society andstate became victorious.

The End of History?


Liberal democracy was imposed on Japan by avictorious United States. Western capitalismand poliQcal liberalism when transplanted toJapan were adapted and transformed by theJapanese in such a way as to be scarcelyrecognisable. [The governing "LiberalDemocraQc Party is far from "democraQc"]

Nonetheless, the very fact that the essenQalelements of economic and poliQcal liberalismhave been so successfully grahed ontouniquely Japanese tradiQons and insQtuQonsguarantees their survival in the long run.More important is the contribuQon that Japanhas made in turn to world history by followingin the footsteps of the United States to createa truly universal consumer culture that hasbecome both a symbol and an underpinningof the universal homogenous state.

The End of History?American poliQcal theorist Francis Fukuyama: “The End of History” The Na'onal Interest, 1989

The Soviet Union could in no way bedescribed as a liberal or democraticcountry now, nor do I think that it is terriblylikely that perestroika will succeed suchthat the label will be thinkable any time inthe near future. But at the end of history itis not necessary that all societies becomesuccessful liberal societies, merely thatthey end their ideological pretensions ofrepresenting different and higher forms ofhuman society. And in this respect Ibelieve that something very important hashappened in the Soviet Union in the pastfew years: the criticisms of the Sovietsystem sanctioned by Gorbachev havebeen so thorough and devastating thatthere is very little chance of going back toeither Stalinism or Brezhnevism in anysimple 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 communistempire 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, threateningthe continued existence of the USSR. In August of 1991, a group of Communist Party hardliners frustrated by theseparatist 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 overpower to Russian president Boris Yeltsin, ending the USSR.

The End of YugoslaviaThe 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

Fukuyama’s posiJon -‐ neo-‐conservaJsm

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

The lecture was funded, indirectly, by the ideologically committed, conservativeJohn M Olin Foundation. Fukuyama wrote it while on leave from the RANDCorporation in Santa Monica, a research institution closely associated with theUS air force, where he had worked almost continuously since earning hisdoctorate in political science from Harvard. He had also been a member of theState Department's policy planning staff during the first Bush administration. Itwas therefore a product of the conservative establishment that had, by the1980s, succeeded in Kristol's dream of displacing liberalism as the prevailingAmerican public philosophy.

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


Godfrey Hodgson - New Statesman - 22nd April 2002

The End of History was an almost comically overrated book. It was successfulbecause it spoke to a particular mood in the US, a mood not so much ofaggressive triumphalism as of relief. Not only was the cold war over, butAmericans could take legitimate pride in the growing acceptance of ideals theyliked to think were their own - though, in truth, democracy and capitalism arescarcely American inventions. One of the basic contradictions in neo-conservative doctrine was between chauvinism and pessimism. If everythingwas so right with US society, as the neo-conservatives insisted, why did theyconstantly predict the end of civilisation as we knew it?

Fukuyama turns his back on theneoconservaJves aMer 2004

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

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

Fukuyama turns his back on theneoconservaJves aMer 2004

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

I suggest that a very familiar form of hubris was present among Bushadministration policymakers and their advisers in early 2003: the idea thatstatesman throughout history have had that History itself is on their side, andthat their success is therefore nearly inevitable. This has proven to be one ofthe 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 BushAdministration's hubris in just this way. It seems fair, then, to lay somesignificant 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 dobetter 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 becausethe 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 anauthoritarian state doesn’t recognise the dignity of its citizens. That makes medislike the system but, more importantly, it’s the weakness of the systembecause, at a certain point, the anger of people at being treated in this fashion willspill over.”

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

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 ofauthoritarianism is that they concluded after Mao that they would neveragain allow a single individual to exert that kind of domination over theirsystem, and that’s why they have term limits. That’s why all of the decisionshave to be taken collectively. But, in the end, that system is also going tohave its inefficiencies.”

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

Fukuyama todayTime Magazine Oct 21st2011: “Top 10 FailedPredictions”

A Short History of Power -‐ Simon Heffer

From Macaulay in the 19th century toFukuyama in the late 20th, historianshave often been lulled into thinking thatthings can only get better. Such belief inprogress, argues leading politicalcommentator Simon Heffer, may betypical of times of plenty, but it ignores aless palatable truth: that, since thebeginnings of recorded history, themajor events in international relationscan be attributed to a single cause, thedesire by rulers to assert or protect theirpower. Taking a panoramic view fromthe days of Thucydides up to thepresent, Heffer offers a fourfold analysisof the motive forces behind the pursuitof power: land, wealth, God and minds.If we understand these forces, hecontends, we can more clearlyunderstand why history is destined torepeat itself.

Week 03 fukuyama and histor

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