I am a member of Generation Fukuyama. Well, how could I not be? I turned 21 in 1989, the year that the Berlin Wall fell, triggering the implosion of the Soviet bloc and the end of the Cold War. It was an astonishing moment of emancipation, a colossal release of human energy and a real-time drama of geopolitical realignment on a grand scale.
In the summer of that year, a US State Department official, Francis Fukuyama, published an article in policy journal The National Interest entitled The End of History? — expanded in 1992 into the book, The End of History and the Last Man. Liberal democracy, he argued, had revealed itself as the “final form of human government”. In this transformative phase, we were seeing “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy”.
Serendipitously, this unassuming scholar and policy analyst had provided a historic moment with its key text. I would hazard that a great many more people quoted Fukuyama than had read his work, with all its nuances and subtleties. Indeed, when I interviewed him in Washington DC in 1995 about his second book — a study of the importance of trust to successful societies — I found him still bemused by the whole business.
The truth is that if Fukuyama had not existed, someone would have had to invent him. Without really meaning to, he had provided a slogan for a mood, a moment and, as the millennium approached, a spirit of hope about the prospects for global peace and prosperity.
This week, he publishes his latest book, Liberalism and its Discontents: a fine extended essay on the various contemporary critiques levelled at liberal democracy, and the need, in particular, for “a positive vision of liberal national identity”. In 1989, could Fukuyama have possibly imagined that, 33 years later, he would be advancing a defensive thesis of this sort, against the bloody backdrop of an authoritarian Russian leader wreaking mayhem in Ukraine?
Actually, yes. First, he was never the triumphalist of caricature, and certainly never claimed that “the end of history” meant the end of struggle or conflict. Those who claim that his argument was rendered null and void by the war in the Balkans, 9/11, the Crash, or the rise of Right-wing populism were not paying attention.
From the start, he fretted that there was an “emptiness at the core of liberalism” that did not address “the higher ends of man”. There was always a risk of backsliding to authoritarianism, as charismatic leaders offered mythic dreams of religious, nationalist or moral redemption. For those who actually read his original book, the figure of Vladimir Putin should be no surprise. There would always be such human wrecking balls, he warned, driven by boredom, narcissism or tribal fervour to “struggle against…peace and prosperity, and against democracy.”
Second, Fukuyama’s argument in 1989 was not limited to the desirability of liberal democracy. In homage to Hegel, it also focused on the fundamental human need for status and recognition — a biologically-rooted craving that, he warned, could have terrible consequences. Again, it is hard to think of a clearer example of that basic impulse, distorted into a horrific pathology, than the war leadership of Putin.
As it happens, Fukuyama is cautiously optimistic about the likely repercussions of the conflict. “It may turn out to be a blessing in disguise for the West,” he told the Sunday Times. “It could be that the Ukrainians by their bravery are going to kind of save the idea of liberal democracy, by resisting the Russians and showing everybody what the cost of dictatorship is.”
But for that idea to flourish, of course, it needs to be nurtured and strengthened; valued as a hard-won system of social, economic and political organisation that, for all its flaws, has yet to be bettered. As Fukuyama observes in his new book, “liberalism is the worst form of government, except for all the others”. But it needs to be more than that.
To be fair to the scholar himself, that was always his point. He saw the so-called “end of history” as a moment of huge risk as well as a cause of thoughtful optimism.
Of course, back in the heady days of 1989, there was a strictly limited appetite for the nuance, the caution and the tone of warning. Maybe now, as Europe sees its most brutal war since 1945, we are ready to heed what Fukuyama was trying to tell us all along.
