CHINA / REVIEW
It's not
over till
it's over
WHEN Francis Fukuyama, a former US State Department foreign policy advisor, published his article "The End of History" in 1989, he achieved the kind of instant celebrity status accorded to few intellectuals in the Anglo-Saxon world. Despite being published in an obscure right wing magazine, The National Interest, his article caught the mood by theorizing the defeat of Stalinism as the final victory of liberal democracy and free market economics.
### PHIL HEARSE
H IS new book, The End of Histo-
Try and the Last Man, deepens and modifies his analysis, and is itself becoming the subject of intense controversy. Fukuyama's thesis can be briefly summarized as follows: firstly, contrary to what is widely alleged, history is comprehensible and has a direction and logic; on this Marx, and above all Hegel, were right. The direction of history is towards the final establishment of the liberal democratic state and the free market economy as the most perfect form of human society available. As Fukuyama puts it:
"As mankind approaches the end of the millennium, the twin crises of authoritarianism and socialist central planning have left only one competitor standing in the ring as an ideology of potentially universal validity: liberal democracy, the doctrine of individual freedom and popular sovereign- 25 ty... But the fact that there will be setbacks
International Viewpoint # 225 • March 30, 1992
REVIEW
REVOLYCION
and disappointments, or the fact that not every market economy will prosper, should not distract us from the larger pattern which is emerging in world history.
"The apparent number of choices of how societies will organize themselves politically has been diminishing over time. Of the different types of regime which have emerged in the course of human history, from monarchies and aristocracies, the religious theocracies, to the fascist and communist dictatorships of this century, the only form of government which has survived intact is liberal democracy.
For Fukuyama, economic growth is dependent on the existence of the capitalist free market. Every Third World country can attain the status of a developed country if it abandons experiments in state planning and "mercantilism".
For example, the dependent status of Latin American economies is put down to the history of state intervention in the economy, experiments like Peronism and the regime of the Peruvian generals, and the failure to properly implement the free mar-
By contrast, the success of the Asian new-industrializing countries, like Taiwan, Singapore, Korea and Hong Kong is attainable by all who would liberate their economies from the chains of state intervention.
### Free market favours democracy
Fukuyama advances a complex argument why free market economies normally tend towards liberal democracy. Economic efficiency and innovation are promoted by democratic freedoms. 26 More advanced economies with a higher level of formal education tend to promote
TETANEN
dense civil societies and thus a greater potential for the organization of oppositional pressure groups.
But, more important, capitalist free market economies will be the site for the expression of a fundamental mechanism of human history - the individual's struggle for recognition and status. Totalitarian societies naturally crush such individual
In truth, there is not much new in Fukuyama's ideas. Seymour Martin Lipset popularized the "capitalism and democracy" thesis in the 1950s, establishing a permanent trend in sociological thought which sees democracy as a semi-automatio product of advanced capitalism. ma's philosophy of history, what he calls the Universal History of Mankind, is taken over wholesale from Hegel.
In this account the End of History is the collapse of the Berlin Wall, but the beginning was the French Revolution, culminating at the Battle of Jena in 1806, when Napoleon's republican army crushed crushed the Prussian Junkers.
Obviously Fukuyama's celebrity status is based on the apparently greater plausibility of his ideas after the collapse of the USSR, rather than the originality of his
Despite rave reviews in the United States, Fukuyama has had a universally bad press in Britain.
Part of that is because of the empiricist bent of the intellectual establishment, which rejects theories of history wholesale. But it is also because of the strength of the left and Marxist influenced intelligentsia.
But it has to be said that Fukuyama's ideas represents a serious and sustained challenge to Marxism which has to be ans-
Unlike weak-minded post-modernists, who view history as unintelligible, Fukuyama has the merit of providing an internally coherent explanation of human history which, potentially at least, can explain contemporary developments in world politics and place them in an historical Fukuyama is correct in seeing history as cumulative and having a direction. For his temerity in asserting this, Fukuyama has been denounced by the French "new philosopher" Bernard Henri-Levi as "the Last Marxist". Rejecting cyclical or accidental theories of history, Fukuyama sees the development of science as central to the increase in What, from a Marxist viewpoint, is obviously missing is an account of the relationship between science and production, between the growth of human knowledge and the development of the productive forces.
### Marxism rendered redundant
But at the heart of his theory is a stark proposition, which if true, renders Marxism redundant. That is that contemporary capitalism is capable of fulfilling the slogans of the French revolution -liberty, (relative) equality, and (maybe) fraternity.
We are not, as the post-modernist philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard claims, in the period of the "end of the grand narratives"
On the contrary, now that the historical detour of totalitarianism (fascism and the October revolution) is over, the grand narrative of the French revolution can go forward to fulfillment.
Its result will be a society where history as a succession of events does not end, but where the titanic clash of classes and social systems is over.
The End of History thesis is based on a number of crucial assumptions. First, that democracy, if not the automatic product of capitalism, is in any case the usual product of advanced capitalist societies.
Second, that international capitalism is more-or-less stabilized and has the potential for infinite future growth. Third, as we saw above, that every country can in time successfully take the road to becoming an advanced capitalist country, and consequently a democratic country.
The idea that every Third World country can take the route to economic advancement if it gets its free market act together is among the more preposterous ideas in the book.
Fukuyama goes out of his way to extra-
Tunisian Marxists sentenced
TEN supporters of the Revolutionary Communist Organization (OCR —
Tunisian section of the Fourth International) who were arrested in January of this year (see International Viewpoint 221, February 3, 1992) have just
March 30, 1992• # 225 International Viewpoint vagantly attack theories of imperialism and dependency, especially those which became popular in Latin America after the
Cuban revolution (Cuba is dismissed as an
"ugly little dictatorship").