Une parole franche

Francis Fukuyama, from The End of History to After the Neocons

 

by Gilbert Doctorow, Ph.D.

 

 

 

Published in the year which saw the collapse of the Soviet Union and the apparent worldwide triumph of liberal democracy and free markets championed by the United States, Francis Fukuyama’s seminal work The End of History and the Last Man (1992) was the stone tossed into the water which created ripples of debate over what sense to make of the end of the Cold War which reverberate to our day.

 

In light of his remarkably good timing, which foreordained high interest among the general reading public as well as among foreign policy professionals, it is easy to overlook the fact that the author’s underlying thesis came out still earlier, in 1989, somewhat in advance of the most dramatic events it eventually explained, in the form of an essay entitled “The End of History?” The article appeared in the low circulation foreign policy magazine The National Interest published by a founder of the Neoconservative movement, Irving Kristol.

 

The positioning of the article for publication was by no means accidental since Fukuyama at the time held similar political views to his editor and his argument that history had reached its final resting place not in Socialism but in the democratic capitalism created by the French and American revolutions was highly supportive of the Neoconservative world view. The fact that his contention was at the time of its writing in 1989 still more tentative than demonstrable (hence the question mark) was no handicap in the mind of the ideologically driven publishers.

 

By contrast, the book rode a wave of events proving its thesis and came to play a major role in bringing Neoconservative ideas into the mainstream of American political thinking during the 1990s.

 

Thesis

 

There is a compelling logic to the composition of The End of History which must command respect. The book opens with a description of the liberation wave spreading around the world in the previous two decades as authoritarian regimes of the Right and totalitarian regimes of the Left gave way to liberal democracies. This started in Southern Europe, moved to Asia and Latin America and culminated in Central and Eastern Europe with the collapse of Soviet Communism.

 

Fukuyama presents a table showing the rise and fall in the number of democratic states around the world at regular intervals since 1790. The current wave marks a high point in the trend. The fact that it has occurred in so many different countries with very different traditions suggests that we are witnessing the operation of universal laws and that perhaps the 19^th century Positivists were right, that history is moving in a directional manner towards liberal democracy as the highest form of human society.

 

Fukuyama is challenging the mood of pessimism over the human condition which dominated the 20^th century under the impact of its tragic cataclysms, the Holocaust and the Stalinist Gulag. In light of the new dawn of liberty now rising, he tells us that these were aberrations of irrationalism which must not deter us from seeing the dominant trend which has moved once again to the foreground.

 

The task he sets for himself in the book is to explain the march of humanity towards liberal democracy and free markets. For this he relies mostly on abstract argumentation, reasoning with his reader, walking him through a variety of possible causal factors before settling on those with greatest persuasiveness. Indeed we are treated to a masterly exegesis of 2,000 years of political philosophy beginning with Plato and pausing to reflect on Hobbes, Locke and Hume, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Kant, Hegel and Marx, among others.

 

As Fukuyama tells us, liberal democracy and free markets have two chief causal factors propelling them. They are intertwined in what might be likened to the DNA double-helix.

 

First there is natural science, which advances in a unidirectional manner and brings progressively greater material wellbeing to mankind. It is rational and as it advances leads to industrialization, urbanization, bureaucratization – in a word, a modernization that spells convergence in the economic organization of societies across the globe. The most productive expression of this economic mechanism pushing history is liberal capitalism, which brings in its wake the creation of an educated population and relatively prosperous middle classes, the agents of political liberalization.

 

However, the economic causal factor is not in itself sufficient to explain the shift to rule of law, recognition of freedoms and participation in political life which characterize liberal democracy. The driver here is an irrational component, the universal human yearning for recognition, as was described by Hegel in his dialectics.

 

Drawing further on points in Kantian and Hegelian theory, Fukuyama tells us that it is in the nature of liberal democracies to get along with one another peaceably. The closest possible approximation of satisfying human yearnings, material and immaterial, has been achieved and with this war and revolution have been vanquished

 

The antagonisms and conflict assumed to drive relations between states by the Realist school of international affairs that goes back to Macchiavelli is not relevant to relations between liberal democracies. Its only remaining application is to relations among non-liberal states and between them and the community of liberal democratic states. Here military power is the decisive determinant.

 

Given that liberal democracy is advancing around the world, that history is indeed directional and all states are set on the same road, some ahead, some behind, the future will ultimately be one in which conflict between nations entirely disappears.

 

Methodology

 

 

In this essay I will not challenge Fukuyama’s thesis that we are at the dawn of a golden age. That has been done by a succession of his peers and several of the outstanding works in this genre will be examined separately in later chapters.

 

I must say, however, that the line of attack on Fukuyama’s book is typically focused on his reading of empirical data on the world we presently live in rather than the correctness of his abstract reasoning and his interpretation of the writings of the classics of political philosophy.

 

It seems appropriate to me to set out below what none of Fukuyama’s sparring partners has bothered to call attention to: the author’s very particular methodology in The End of History and how it drew upon his education and personal strengths.

 

 

How do you provide a new paradigm to a drastically changing world in a matter of months or even a few years? This is something which Fukuyama did and he achieved it the only way it can be approached – by synthesis of pre-existing models to match approximately what he saw around him. His achievement was that of a magnificent synthesizer rather than original thinker. He must be complimented for the boldness to take his audience straight where his discoveries led him, to reason with his readers and not lecture them in the manner of a senior professor. This is the sign of a young mind who still takes the world of ideas very seriously.

 

The principle source of Fukuyama’s ideas on the causal factor driving liberal democracy is Hegel as interpreted and popularized in the 1930s by the French-Russian philosopher Alexandre Kojève. The very notion of an ‘end of history’ - a global, universal social and political order towards which all humanity is striving - was posed precisely by Hegel and so frames the intellectual investigation Fukuyama pursues in his best-selling opus.

 

While getting his undergraduate degree in philosophy at Cornell, Fukuyama was a student of Allan Bloom, who in turn had studied under Kojève. It bears mention that these gurus also helped to shape the thinking of another iconic figure of the Neoconservative movement, Paul Wolfowitz, who was Fukuyama’s boss in a number of his government posts, as I note below.

 

Although it is common practice among scholars writing in the field of international affairs as well as other sub-fields of political science to show off their knowledge of the classics en passant, it is remarkable that a book intended to give immediate and practical meaning to the dramatic events shaping the global political landscape and to inform decisions of policy-makers in foreign and military affairs is argued almost entirely by abstract reasoning drawing on the classics of political philosophy. It is still more remarkable that the young author with such striking intellectual credentials as philosopher was at the time making his living in policy analysis within the State Department and in the country’s leading think tank, the RAND Corporation, dealing with regional security issues in the Middle East, European military-political affairs and other nitty-gritty.

 

Fukuyama took his undergraduate degree in the classics at Cornell in 1974, then spent a year at Yale in the department of Comparative Literature, and finally earned his doctorate from Harvard in political science, where one of his advisers was Professor Sam Huntington, the doyen of American political scientists whose own best known work, The Clash of Civilizations, was in many respects a riposte to Fukuyama’s End of History.

 

Fukuyama’s Ph.D. dissertation was on Soviet foreign policy. Sovietology was considered a very solid preparation for U.S. government service in the intelligence and foreign policy areas during the Cold War. His first career positions were in foreign policy analysis – in the RAND Corporation, a private contractor to the U.S. government in security matters, and in the State Department’s policy planning departments.

 

Success breeds complacency

 

The End of History was enormously successful with the general public and went through numerous print runs and translations into foreign editions. Foreign policy professionals could not ignore it. Whether they acknowledged Fukuyama’s challenge by name or not, the heavy hitters in the foreign affairs Establishment felt compelled to respond to his well reasoned prediction of calmer international waters ahead now that the ideological divisions over social and political systems had been resolved in favor of free markets and liberal democracy. Articles and volumes were published attempting to disprove this optimistic scenario and to justify hyper-active American leadership in what was said to be a still very dangerous world.

 

Within the narrower world of Neoconservatives, Fukuyama’s book was taken up as a key scholarly justification of their convictions and for stepped-up political activism to serve as history’s own agents of change in the ever expanding march of democracy. He became a paid-up member in good standing and proceeded to take his place in the New American Century think tank. Beginning in 1997, he was among those calling for the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

 

Fukuyama’s new celebrity status propelled his academic career. From 1996-2000, he held a professorship of public policy at George Mason University just outside Washington, D.C.. He was then recruited by Neoconservative leader and senior statesman Paul Wolfowitz, for whom he had worked at the US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency and later at State Department to join the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore where Wolfowitz was tenured professor and dean at the time. Fukuyama became the Bernard L. Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and in due course was made director of the International Development Program within SAIS.

 

It goes without saying that Fukuyama was inducted into the mainstream Council on Foreign Relations. In addition, among many honorific and advisory positions in the American scholarly community, he assumed a position on the Board of Trustees of the RAND Corporation and on the Board of Governors of the Pardee RAND Graduate School co-located with RAND Corporation headquarters in Santa Monica, California which confers doctoral degrees in public policy analysis.

 

In rapid order, Fukuyama published a succession of books as well as numerous articles. A sort of cult developed around his name and he was engaged in public exchanges with challengers from all quarters

 

In considering Fukuyama’s career and writings in the 17 years since the publication of his seminal work The End of History, what we see is a demonstration of how brilliant youth becomes complacent, empty but enormously successful middle age. Fukuyama moved out of his field of core competence, political philosophy. Exploiting his guru status and drawing upon his talent as synthesizer and popularizer, he has written extensively in domains where he is merely summarizing the works of others, with greater or lesser understanding, and adding little or no value.

 

Whereas one might view his 1995 opus Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity (1995) as dealing with economic and philosophical issues abutting those his End of History, that hardly can be said for later works including Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution (2002) about how biotech advances could threaten human dignity or State Building: Governance and World Order in the 21^st Century (2004) where Fukuyama brings no great expertise or new ideas to justify taking his reader’s time.

 

Meanwhile, early in the first term of President George W. Bush, Fukuyama’s political allegiances underwent a marked transformation as he witnessed to his dismay the brutal implementation of Neoconservative principles he had long supported in the abstract.

As from 2002 he became increasingly disillusioned with unilateral armed intervention. In 2003 he voiced his opposition to the Iraq War and he called for the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. Going into the 2004 presidential elections, he said he could no longer support George W. Bush and made a break with the Neoconservatives.

 

Once a Neoconservative, always a Neoconservative.

 

 

Fukuyama gathered his thoughts on where the Bush administration had gone wrong in its foreign policy and published a new major work in 2006 entitled After the Neocons. America at the Crossroads (2006). Here he sought to sketch a way forward for those who, like himself, understood that the term Neoconservative would be forever linked with the failed policies of the Bush administration and yet who were unsympathetic to the alternative approaches of Realpolitik in the Kissinger tradition or to liberal multilateralism, the belief that international law and institutions could ensure order in our turbulent world. He described his new path as “realistic Wilsonianism” and offered readers a foretaste of what it would comprise.

 

This is all a credit to Fukuyama’s ability and willingness to face up to unpleasant realities, to revise his political affiliation accordingly and to risk the wrath of his intellectual comrades in arms by venturing into apostasy. But what he managed to produce in After the Neocons is not necessarily a credit to his standing as creative thinker. Indeed, the book rings hollow.

 

In After the Neocons,Fukuyama once again leaves the area of his core expertise of political philosophy. Here he presents himself as an expert on nation-building and institutional development. He spends more than half of the book summarizing the findings of genuine specialists in these fields and adds virtually nothing original of his own.

 

The main contribution of the book is precisely his account of the history of the Neoconservative movement and his lengthy explanation of why he parted company with it. This accounts for perhaps a third of the text.

 

Fukuyama spells out the fundamental ideas of Neoconservatism which attracted him and traces how their practitioners started going astray after the victory over Communism in 1992 which vindicated their thinking, pushed them into the mainstream and gave them new authority to take charge of American foreign policy. At a time when others were seeking to move America from a war footing to peace-time economy to reap the benefits of the victory over Soviet Communism, the Neoconservatives were calling for a more militarized American posture abroad and for using the country’s position as the sole remaining super-power with ever less constraint to pursue their transformational agenda.

 

The Neoconservative principles which set them apart from the traditional Right-Left divide of American politics were, firstly, priority concern for democracy, human rights and the belief that the internal policies of states matter because regimes which treat their own people badly cannot be trusted as partners by other states; secondly, the conviction that US power can be used for moral purposes; thirdly, skepticism about international law and institutions being able to maintain order in our unruly world; and lastly, an aversion to social engineering, which is what nation-building is all about.

 

During the first term of George W. Bush, after the September 11^th terrorist attacks caused a switch in priorities from domestic concerns to the ‘war on terror,’ these principles underpinned the writing of a new National Security Strategy in 2002 with its justification of preventive warfare and the will to proceed on a unilateral basis when international institutions refused to provide legitimacy for American actions. The result was a constellation of wrong-headed policy decisions made worse by the incompetence of the Administration in executing those policies. Thus, we had the exaggeration of the threat posed by Iraq’s alleged Weapons of Mass Destruction, the prosecution of war without cover of legitimacy from allies and the international institutions generally, the failure to foresee the needs of pacifying and reconstructing Iraq, and the resultant insurgency which made a mockery of the President’s early claims of success for the mission.

 

The net result of all the damage to America’s standing in the world coming from its alienation of traditional allies and from the misdeeds as well as inefficacy of its occupation forces was that the good name of Neoconservatives would be forever tarnished by the wrong-headed and inept actions of the Bush Administration.

 

In setting down all this, Fukuyama necessarily moved against people who had backed his intellectual development and his career, none more so than Paul Wolfowitz, who as Deputy Secretary of Defense was one of the leading architects of the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and a prominent defender of the policy of benevolent hegemony by the United States.

 

Fukuyama was shocked to see that his erstwhile comrades were in denial over the failures and called for staying the course in Iraq, stood by Israel when it pursued similar misguided military action in Lebanon and were calling loudly for solving the conflict with Iran by yet another military intervention.

 

Fukuyama decided that the excesses of Bush-ite Neoconservatism could be interred with its bones and the noble principles of the movement could and should be resuscitated under a new name and within certain clearly defined constraints dictated by pragmatism.

 

This ‘realistic Wilsonianism’ would carry forward the notion that regimes matter, that the United States must prioritize relations with fellow democracies and encourage respect for human rights and rule of law around the world. But it would be more pragmatic, and not seek mindlessly to impose democracy by destabilizing friendly but authoritarian governments or transforming unfriendly states at the point of a gun. It would appreciate the need to invest in institutions to facilitate nation building. It would curb U.S. unilateralism and seek legitimacy for U.S. engagement in world affairs through an assortment of multilateral organizations.

 

Based on the composition of its membership, which includes virtually all sovereign states without regard to the nature of their regimes, Fukuyama takes for a given that the United Nations is hopelessly flawed and irreparable. And he concludes that legitimacy for U.S. actions has to be sought elsewhere, with first attention given to NATO, the alliance of similarly minded democracies which had served just this purpose so admirably in the 1990s for intervention in the Balkans.

 

Of course, the dilemma of the Bush Administration as it prepared for its attack on Iraq was precisely the lack of unanimity within the NATO Council, where several of its closest allies, namely France and Germany, were unconvinced of the threat posed by Iraq and of the need for military action.

 

What Fukuyama proposes now is a key trade-off whereby the United States would in future abide by NATO resolutions and give up unilateralism. In exchange, NATO decision making would be streamlined, going from unanimity to weighted votes or to a smaller directorate.

 

With respect to decision-making procedures within NATO, Fukuyama’s proposal seems reasonable at first glance. He argues that unanimity is no longer justified in a coordinating body which at the time counted 26 member states (today 28). However, all this ignores the real dynamics of NATO deliberations, where the United States has traditionally dominated discussion and where European members typically submit to majority will and avoid conflict. In practice, if such unanimity is unachievable it is only because the motion under review is highly controversial and possibly fatally flawed. ‘Streamlining’ decision-making means consolidating an American Diktat over the organization and finally represents almost no concession by the United States to the views of its allies. Meanwhile, when push comes to shove, Fukuyama insists the U.S. must ‘keep on the table’ the option of acting unilaterally if absolutely necessary, however hard this is to reconcile with the aforementioned trade-off of freedom for legitimacy. .

 

In any case, Fukuyama sees a world order resting on much more than one or two key institutions. He gives favorable mention to Princeton professor John Ikenberry and the notion that the post-World War II world order framed by an array of US-dominated international institutions like the World Bank and the IMF has served admirably to prop up American world preeminence. He goes on to generalize from this to assert that still other less obvious international arrangements taken altogether ensure order in the world. These range from longstanding associations such as the WTU and the ISO to more recent entities like ICANN, which oversees the worldwide web. And moving still further out in the concentric circles of international structures, he points to the codes of multinational corporations as providing essential glue binding together our world order. It is in this realm that Fukuyama goes off the rails and shows a remarkable lack of judgment. To be blunt, his citing ICANN and similar non-state entities as model instruments of world order is frivolous. Moreover, the notion that conflict resolution can be based on ad hoc hobbling together of ‘coalitions of the willing’ is highly contentious.

 

While the theoretical framework for a new world order put up by Fukuyama is deeply flawed, the practical recommendations he makes for correcting U.S. foreign policy going forward are generally constructive. He calls for dramatic demilitarization of foreign policy and shift of attention to encouraging good governance and political accountability in problem areas around the world. This is all very welcome coming as it does from one of the fountainheads of Neoconservatism.

 

Unfortunately, as with the streamlining of NATO, Fukuyama lacks the courage of his convictions and admits exceptions which vitiate the rule. In this case, he tells us that preventive war and regime change via military intervention cannot be abjured entirely, that what is really needed is a much more strict definition of the circumstances in which they are permissible than the Administration’s definition set out in 2002..

 

My conclusion is that despite all his distancing himself from the odious policies and personalities of the Bush White House, Francis Fukuyama remains very much a Neoconservative. He and his erstwhile comrades in arms have exchanged mutual insults, to be sure. But to anyone standing to one side their rancorous debates are like brawling between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks once upon a time. Looking on from the outside, they all looked like Commies whose attempts at building their utopia cost great human suffering and were doomed to failure. Today Fukuyama and his opponents in the Neoconservative camp all look like values-based ideologues of the American empire.

 

In this book, Fukuyama speaks in favor of the continued U.S. hegemony and insists that American power is critical to world order. His greatest fear is that the rejection of Bush-ite Neoconservatism due to its excesses and incompetence will lead to America’s turning in on itself and failing to fulfill its necessary mission. Yet the requirements Fukuyama himself sets for success are as unachievable as the Soviet utopia - that the hegemony be directed at creating only public goods rather than serving narrow American interests and that it enjoy the enthusiastic support of a people who do not share the imperialist ardor of the Neoconservative avant-garde. All of this suggests that ultimately the ideals of his ‘realistic Wilsonianism’ will lead to tears.

 

In After the Neocons, Fukuyama announced he was launching a new international affairs journal to promote the cause of ‘realistic Wilsonianism.’ The eminent names listed on the editorial board of The American Interest include John Ikenberry and Zbigniew Brzezinski, showing that, like Neoconservatism, the movement Fukuyama is now promoting cuts across the Democratic-Republican divide in American politics. As publisher, he is to be congratulated for attracting very serious contributors and for framing debates on its pages from diametrically opposed positions. In this regard, the editorial oversight is more professional and less tendentious than that of Foreign Affairs magazine, for example. However, it is also clear that to get space in The American Interest it does not hurt to pay court to the vanity of the publisher as Philip Auerswald and Zoltan J. Acs did in the opening article “Defining Prosperity” in the May-June 2009 issue, framing their investigation into the impact of the worldwide economic meltdown on the principles set out in Fukuyama’s ‘classic essay’ of 1989, “The End of History?”

 

In saying all this, I am doing nothing more than bringing out the human foibles of a thinker who, as a young researcher, changed the landscape of American political science discourse by his remarkably well timed and well argued description of a new paradigm to inform foreign policy. That achievement ensured his renown for many years to come.

 

 

© Gilbert Doctorow 2009