April 28, 2002

FRANCIS Fukuyama was not the first to announce the End of history in his famous book. Others, who desired the perpetuation of the status quo — because it suited them — had made similar declarations in the past.

According to Toynbee, “As they [the middle class English in 1897] saw it, history ...... had come to an end in foreign affairs in 1815, with the Battle of Waterloo; in home affairs in 1832, with the Great Reform Bill; and in imperial affairs in 1859, with the suppression of the Indian Mutiny. And they had every reason to congratulate themselves on the permanent state of felicity which this ending of history had conferred on them. ... In Prussia, for the same class, the same permanent consummation had been reached with the overthrow of France and the foundation of the Second Reich in 1871... In the United States, with the winning of the West and the Federal victory in the Civil War, God’s work of creation was completed.”

In essence, then, Fukuyama’s thesis is no different because, appearing after the collapse of communism and the victory of the “capitalist-democratic” systems, it is also a piece of “triumphalist” literature.

The gist of his argument is: “If we are now at a point where we cannot imagine a world substantially different from our own...there is no apparent or obvious way in which the future will represent a fundamental improvement over our current order, then we must also take into consideration the possibility that history itself might be at an end.”

Derrida has derided this “neo-evangelizing” in the name of “a liberal democracy” when “never have violence, inequality, exclusion, famine, and thus economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity”.

Leaving aside the matter of an impoverished imagination that can conceive nothing better, the assertion that since “liberal democracy” and “capitalist economics” have no challengers in the field today, so there cannot be any in the future, is a peculiar one. As Karl Popper puts it, “We cannot know today what we will only know tomorrow.”

Fukuyama admits as much, “History teaches us that there have been horizons beyond number in the past ... the people who lived under them, lacking our modern awareness of history, believed that their horizon was the only one possible. Those who come later in this process ... realize that their horizon is merely a horizon, not solid land but a mirage that disappears as one draws closer, giving way to yet another horizon beyond.”

Despite our “modern awareness of history”, however, euphoric triumphalism will not be denied. The horizon is still seen as the end.

Nineteenth century British and German triumphalism conveyed the message that their dominance was permanent. Fukuyama brings us the same tidings. We live in the best of all possible worlds and, as Professor Stuart Sims says, “Anyone who dissents from this reading of events must be, at best, misguided; at worst, an enemy of humankind with decidedly ulterior motives.”

Whether or not this was Fukuyama’s conscious intention, it could not be avoided because it is inherent in the kind of historicism to which his book belongs. There is a hoary teleological tradition in theories of meta-history. St Augustine’s City of God is an early example. It discovered God’s directing hand in the events of the mundane world (however unlikely, even bizarre, it may have seemed on occasion) leading to the Second Coming and the establishment of God’s Kingdom on Earth — an end of history to end all ends.

Hegel’s philosophy of history, through which Fukuyama finds the justification for declaring “liberal democracy” to be the last development in political organization was another, secular, elaboration of an end-directed process of human history. Hegel’s theory of the desire for “recognition” which drove one man to risk his life to enslave another (in order to gain the recognition of his superior human worth from the vanquished) is the starting point in history which is then driven on by a dialectical process.

The recognition achieved by the master is defective because it is, after all, recognition by a slave, not by someone equal in status and worth. This, in time, leads to the liberation of the slave and the establishment of a democracy in which everyone gets equal recognition.

The problem with Fukuyama’s thesis, as with that of Hegel, is that it tries to describe an “ideal” situation (ignoring the question of whether Hegel’s speculation has anything whatever to do with reality or can form a genuine launching pad for his theory) whereas human beings have their existence in the real world. And in the real world, as Frantz Fanon pointed out, what the master wants from the slave is not recognition but his labour.

The battle for recognition was no contest for recognition but for exploitation. No wonder Marx found Hegel standing on his head and had the urge to turn him right side up. As for equality of status or recognition in “liberal democracy”, wedded to the “rational” economic organization of capitalism, any objective observer knows that the system actively militates against it.

This is another problem that Fukuyama has to deal with and does so by introducing the Platonic concept of thymos (spiritedness or, roughly, ego). While democracy tends to promote isothymia (or equality of all egos), it has to provide for those with megalothymia.

This it does through its marriage with capitalism by allowing individuals with such super-egos to obtain extraordinary recognition through success in the economic field. Everyone should, therefore, be happy with the perfect system that has been devised.

Unfortunately the megalothymic plutocrats have not been informed about the rules of the game. They do not rest content with driving around in stretch limousines (behind tinted glasses so that the poor and homeless are deprived even of the opportunity to “recognize” them) but trespass into isothymic territory and hire lobbyists, buy politicians and influence the political process so that in western democracies power flows from bank vaults — though on occasion it may also be closely allied with the barrels of guns.

Human beings may find all this less than satisfactory. That is why it has to be couched in terms of the determinism of universal history or meta-history. If humanity’s history-less future has already been determined, whether the fact be discovered through divine revelation or the working out of an inexorable logic based on questionable premises, it is no use resisting.

No action will change one’s fate, so one may as well accept whatever has been decreed — plutocracy masquerading as democracy. This consummation would be very satisfying to big business in the western world but there is still the danger that the misguided will take it into their heads to resist. It would be tragic if they thought that they could use international organizations to assert their autonomy from universal history.

Fukuyama, the former deputy director of the US State Department’s Policy Planning Staff, has a prescription for that too: “With the waning of the cold war and rise of reform movements in the Soviet Union and China, the UN has shed some of its former debility ... The Security Council is still vulnerable, however, to backsliding on the part of incompletely reformed powers like Russia and China, while the General Assembly remains populated by nations that are not free. It is reasonable to question whether the UN will become the basis for a ‘new world order’ in the next generation.”

So the end of history is in danger of not turning out to be the end after all. What, then, is to be done? “If one wanted to create a league of nations... that did not suffer from the fatal flaws of earlier international organizations, it is clear that it would have to look much more like NATO.” And that, of course, means that the power of the democratic West will ensure that the end is permanent.

This programmatic aspect of the work was not lost on Eduard Schevardnadze who wrote, “For me [the book] is an attempt to arm Western political thought with new fundamental theoretical arguments to reinforce its practical actions.”

Mr Fukuyama’s brave new post-historical world needs only an inscription on the gate, “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here!”

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