In 1993, in the flush of the fall of Communism in Russia, Francis Fukuyama wrote an influential book entitled The End of History and the Last Man which advanced the thesis that history was the story of the evolution of political power, that liberal democracy was the end state of that evolution, and that the world was rapidly approaching an era when everyone would live under such enlightened democracies. Hence, we were at ”the end of history”.
Robert Kagan’s message, writing 15 years later, is “I don’t think so….”. He points out that the world is currently divided between the great democracies (America, Europe, Japan, India, Brazil) and the great autocracies (Russia, China, Iran, some middle East countries like Saudi Arabia), and that there are very 19th century geopolitical games being played between these groups, as the autocracies try to preserve their power and the democracies try to undermine it. And as he points out, the autocratic rulers, and often their people as well, have different worldviews than ours, worldviews in which actions which we view as supporting democracy often appear to them instead as actions designed to keep their nations in second place.
As he says in the conclusion
” The great fallacy of our era has been the belief that a liberal international order rests on the triumph of ideas and the natural unfolding of human progress. It is an immensely attractive idea, deeply rooted in the Enlightenment worldview of which all of us in the liberal world are the product……Such illusions are just true enough to be dangerous…. But a little more skepticism was in order. After all, had mankind really progressed so far? The most destructive century in all the millennia of human history was only just concluding; it was not buried back in some deep, dark, ancient past.”
This is a short little book well worth reading and pondering (see the booklist on the sidebar for the ISBN number and other details).
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