Apart from some of the real classics—excerpts from Aristotle’s Ethics or Augustine’s Confessions, from Vergil’s Aeneid or Hobbes’s Leviathan—there are probably not a lot of texts I have taught more often over the past decade or so than a pair of rival essays on international relations: “The End of History?” by Francis Fukuyama, and “The Clash of Civilizations?” by Samuel Huntington. (I always find it humorous that both authors hedged their bets with those question marks—one feels tempted to read the titles with an exaggerated rising intonation at their end.) The essays are well written and provocatively argued, and they remain timely even after a few decades. They lend themselves to many contexts and, what is especially useful for my classroom purposes, force students to attempt an analytical task at which they generally have little experience: weighing competing causal explanations of a phenomenon (in this case, international war or peace) by running them up against whatever real-world examples and counter-examples they can generate.
Both article titles have become cultural catchphrases, shorthand for their respective arguments, so that they hardly need introduction. Still, a brief summary may be in order for those who are not political scientists or students of foreign policy. As the Cold War ended, and with it the frightening but predictable bipolar situation of nuclear rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, it became unclear how the world of international politics would now be structured. What principles would replace the old face-off between the democratic and communist superpowers?
Fukuyama was the first to attempt a bold prediction, announcing that with the triumph of liberal democracy over its ideological rival, history had ended. Not in the sense that nothing more would happen, or even that nothing important—wars, famines, pandemics—would happen. But in the sense that ideological conflict was over. Liberal democracy had won the battle of ideas because, as Fukuyama put it, people could no longer imagine any alternative to it that was both fundamentally different (rather than mere reform or tinkering around the edges) and also better. The process would be slow and gradual, occurring in fits and starts and at different speeds in different places, but over time the world would converge on the combination of liberal democracy and market capitalism, because no other system is similarly capable of meeting the human desires for material prosperity and, far more fundamentally, equal recognition.
To which Huntington replied: Don’t you believe it. The victory of liberal democracy in the Cold War might have meant the end of ideological conflict. But not of all conflict. Instead, a new basis for competition was emerging: culture, in particular deep-seated factors of great importance, such as religion, language, and ethnicity. Dividing the world into about a dozen large, long-run-of-history “civilizations,” Huntington argued that with the disappearance of the US-USSR rivalry, these basic differences in cultural outlook, previously constrained by the superpower face-off, were again beginning to drive state behavior. He rejected Fukuyama’s universalism: far from simply embracing the Western liberal democratic model, other cultures would seek to modernize, but without also westernizing. Instead of an increasingly peaceful world at the end of history, he foresaw a resurgence of international conflict along civilizational borders.
Fukuyama’s thesis has taken a beating in the last few years in light of the rise of China, the spread of populist nationalism more generally, and especially the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Nevertheless, even after years of teaching both essays, I still find myself torn over who ultimately wins the debate. One can look back over the past two and a half centuries and tell a pretty good Fukuyamian story, albeit always of a two-steps-forward, one-step-backward nature: liberal democracy erupts on the scene with the American and French Revolutions; the latter’s failure and Napoleon’s rise to power check its growth; the revolutions of 1830 and 1848 nudge it forward again, as does increasing American prosperity over the 19th century; World War I is a massive setback but gives rise to the League of Nations; World War II is another setback but produces the United Nations; the colonial empires dissolve, creating potential new democracies, some of which are more successful than others; the Cold War again seems to reverse liberalism’s spread, but then the Soviet Union falls…. We are clearly in another period of retrenchment, but perhaps it will be merely a prelude to another wave of liberal democratic growth. As when Fukuyama wrote, there is no real ideological competitor in the wings that seems both fundamentally different, and better. (Islamic fundamentalism? Chinese-style pseudo-capitalist nationalist autocracy? Western postliberalism? Nah.)
On the other hand, Huntington’s “clash” thesis certainly does much more to describe the multipolar great power world that is emerging, with at least the United States, the European Union, Russia, China, and India representing competing civilizational poles, as well as other countries like Japan, Iran, Brazil, and Turkey also playing important roles. No other ideological current is as powerful around the globe today as nationalism, which is driving (or reflecting) a wave of resurgent pride in particularist cultural identities in country after country, reshaping politics even in the more established liberal democracies. The world today certainly does not feel as though it is converging on a single ideological model.
So I’m torn. Perhaps one could say that Fukuyama’s thesis captures, correctly, a certain trajectory within modern history. And it highlights with challenging clarity liberal democracy’s frontrunner status. Fukuyama is right that no other available ideological model seems equally capable of satisfying our material needs and of recognizing the equal moral dignity of every human person. History ought to be moving in liberal democracy’s direction.
Ought to be. But of course humans do not always do what is good for them. We may be motivated by material desire and the longing for moral recognition. But we are also driven by the desire for honor, by faith, by the wish for revenge, by passion. So we are always capable of setting history back and starting all over again. And again.
I wish I’d said that
I’ve just started teaching a little one-hour-a-week honors seminar on George Orwell’s journalism. We’re reading our way through the standard 4-volume edition of his Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters—reading the essays and journalism, skipping the letters. You’ll no doubt be hearing more about this.
I met the students for our first discussion yesterday evening. Our readings contained a wonderful put-down. In a review, Orwell first quotes a line from a Freud-influenced, overly speculative, psychological interpretation of Hamlet. And he follows the quote with this gem: “Very ingenious, one feels, but how much better not to have said it!”
I wish I’d written that. I may look for an occasion to steal it.
Briefly noted in the “ones that got away” department:
Last time I mentioned my regret at not having gotten to Charles Portis’s Masters of Atlantis this summer. Another one I’d hoped to read but didn’t: This Little Art, by Kate Briggs. It’s a book-length essay about the art of literary translation, widely praised, though I’m not sure where I first heard of it. I’ve actually been wanting to read it for a couple of years now, after becoming somewhat interested in the intellectual and even philosophical challenges posed by translation.
It’s starts off by puzzling over an odd fact about translations, which Briggs is prompted to reflect upon while reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain (another book I haven’t read, but should). At one point a man and a woman are conversing. He, a German speaker, attempts to speak French with her. She finally says to him, “Parlez allemand s’il vous plait!” — “Speak German, please!” And he replies… in English. At least, that’s how it comes out in the English translation that Briggs is reading. “Clavdia Chauchat has asked him, pointedly, in French, to address her in German, and his reply is written for me in English.”
And we, reading a translation, accept that without any problem. How does that work, exactly? And off Briggs goes for another 350 pages. If anyone has read it, I’d love to hear what you thought.
And that’s all for today. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time for another installment From My Bookshelf.
It's not my area, but I just downloaded both essays from JSTOR, and will look into them soon. I'll be interested in knowing what Fukuyama thinks constitutes the /beginning/ of history. I'm showing my ignorance here, but isn't it a bit narrow to define history as ideological conflict? Wouldn't that make history by definition only start in the Enlightenment?