‘In
recently democratised countries
I’m
still a rock star’
The world-renowned
political thinker on what’s left of ‘The End of History’, the crimes of the
neocons and having the ear of the Chinese leadership
An 'unlikely intellectual celebrity'
Wesley Yang
The first volume of Francis
Fukuyama’s history of political development has been one of only a handful
of books by a foreigner to make a profit in China. As Fukuyama explains
when we meet near his home in Palo Alto, California, foreign books in China are
usually pirated. But The Origins
of Political Order, which narrates the emergence and growth
of the state “From Pre-Human Times to the French Revolution”, engages
respectfully with Chinese history and culture, and features an overarching
version of national history that the Chinese themselves no longer teach
or learn. Enough of his account of the country’s enormous historic
strengths and equally enormous historic weaknesses survived the censor’s
scalpel to make the work valuable to the Chinese reading public.
Fukuyama goes on to say that a friend in Beijing
had learned that the Communist party would translate that book’s recently
published companion volume, Political
Order and Political Decay for publication in a
private edition for its senior leadership. “They take the analysis seriously,”
he said. The two volumes set out to compare and contrast the progression of
various societies across time, in pursuit of a goal he calls “Getting to
Denmark”. The proverbial Denmark, like the actual state, is a robust
liberal democracy with an effective state constrained by the rule of law – a
package “so powerful, legitimate, and favourable to economic growth that it
became a model to be applied throughout the world”.
As he describes his reception in China, Fukuyama beams with pride
that the authorities regard him as sufficiently impartial to take notice
of, especially as he is perhaps the person most closely identified with the
espousal of the victory of western liberal democracy over all its ideological
competitors. Fukuyama became an unlikely intellectual celebrity back in 1989
when he declared that the defeat of the USSR in the cold war represented
not “the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of
history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution
and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of
human government.” To have written a book 25 years later that the
Communist party elite in Beijing feels compelled to make compulsory reading
is a feat plainly gratifying to its author and ensures that his stern and
chastening message will have been received by at least one of the audiences to
whom it is addressed.
His book makes clear the fundamental debility of a
political system lacking upward accountability, as the still nominally
communist Chinese system does. But it also emphasises the dangers of the
improper sequencing of different elements of political development: too much
rule of law too soon can constrain the development of an effective state, as
happened in India; electoral democracy introduced in the absence of an
autonomous administrative bureaucracy can lead to clientelism and pervasive
corruption, as happened in Greece. Even the societies in which a proper balance
of democracy, rule of law and an effective state has been struck in the past
are susceptible to political decay when rent-seeking extractive elite
coalitions capture the state, as has happened in the US. The failure of
democratic institutions to function properly can delegitimise democracy itself
and lead to authoritarian reaction, as happened in the former Soviet Union.
“They understand that their system needs
fundamental political reform,” Fukuyama says of the Chinese. “But they don’t
know how far they can go. They won’t do what Gorbachev did, which was take the lid
off and see what happens. But whether it will be possible to spread a rule of
law to constrain state power at a pace that will satisfy the growing demands of
the rising middle class is also unclear. There are 300 to 400 million Chinese
in the middle class; that number will rise to 600 million in a decade. I had a
debate a few years ago with an apologist for the regime. I pointed
out that in many regions of the world when you develop a sufficiently large
middle class, the pressure for increased political participation becomes
irresistible. And the big question for China is whether there will be
a point at which its people will push for greater participation, and
he said: ‘No, we’re just culturally different.’”
Pro-democracy supporters occupy the streets
surrounding Hong Kong’s financial district, October 2014. Photograph: Paula
Bronstein/Getty Images
It was, in effect, a rehash of the old “Asian
values” argument concerning the hierarchical and deferential social ethic
that goes by the name ofConfucianism in east Asia – allegedly
the reason that Asians lacked the impulse to individual self-assertion that
resulted in the demand for self-government in other parts of the world. The
democratic transitions in South Korea and Indonesia put an end to that argument
decades ago, Fukuyama says, just as the Arab spring debunked a parallel
claim regarding Arabs. This is the part of Fukuyama’s argument about the
end of history that he still stands behind without reservation or
qualification – the Hegelian philosophical anthropology that saw history as the
working out of the struggle between masters and slaves for recognition.
“I really believe that the desire for recognition of one’s dignity and
worth is a human characteristic. You can see manifestations of this in
all aspects of human behaviour cross-culturally and through time.”
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The relevant historical analogue for the
Chinese rulers, Fukuyama says, is probably Prussia under a series of
enlightened monarchs, which allowed a rule of law to spread gradually without
extending democratic participation to the people. But, of course, Germany
came to the “end of history” after initiating and fighting two of the most
brutal wars the world had ever seen.
Would the next rising power be able to control the
titanic energies of its people and manage a transition that avoids the
blood-letting Europeans had to endure?Political Order and Political
Decay emphasises the enormous
difficulty of implanting democratic political institutions in places where the
state has collapsed, or where it never really took root in the first place. For
Fukuyama, the great challenge of state-building is creating and sustaining an
institution of collective rule that cuts against the grain of human nature:
we are designed to favour friends and family, and a patrimonial tribal
order is “hard-wired”, he argues, into our neural circuitry. Though the
right set of institutions can allow us to override these instincts, we
naturally revert to them whenever political order breaks down. The first volume
of his book recounts the expedients to which the first modern states resorted
to overcome tribalism – it discusses the eunuchs who administered the
Chinese state, the kidnapped Christian slaves who ran the Egyptian state – and
the historical accidents that allowed state, society and rule of law to reach
an equilibrium favourable to modern political order in western Europe. The
second volume demonstrates how vulnerable even the best-developed modern state
apparatus is to “repatrimonialisation”. Both volumes emphasise that the state
is an institution that feeds on war, one whose national stability has often
been buttressed by ethnic cleansing; and that the European Union after 1945,
for instance, was built atop a pile of mass graves.
In some ways, Fukuyama says, he has been “trapped”
by the ideological cul-de-sac in which his claims regarding the “End of
History” have placed him. Though he still stands behind the assertion that
liberal democracy is the eventual destination of history, he has qualified his
argument and narrowed the scope of his ideological triumphalism, postponing the
arrival of liberal democracy to the indefinite “long run”. He would not, he
tells me, use the same heightened rhetoric today that he used in 1989 to
describe what he now calls a “historically contingent demand for greater
political participation” that ensues as people become more prosperous and
educated.
Fukuyama’s career as a public intellectual began
with an essay that promised to distinguish between “what is essential and what
is contingent or accidental in world history”. His own career, as he makes
clear to me, was almost entirely a series of accidents. He took up ancient
Greek under the influence of his charismatic freshman year teacher Allan
Bloom, who inculcated him into the ideas of the emigre German
philosopher Leo Strauss, and to a network of
aspiring young intellectuals that included men who would figure prominently in
his later career, Paul Wolfowitz and I Lewis “Scooter”
Libby. There was a detour into the modish French philosophers of
the day, as part of which he made a pilgrimage to Paris (where he
also wrote a novel) to study with Jacques
Derrida, Jacques
Lacanand Roland
Barthes. But he soon concluded, while enduring an interminable session in which
Barthes would riff, pun and free associate over random sequences of words
pulled from the dictionary, that “this was total bullshit, and why was
I wasting my time doing it?”
He applied to Harvard’s Kennedy School of
Government to study national security. While the French post-structuralists and
their epigones would go on to dominate American literature departments in the
1980s, his new cohort at the Kennedy School would populate the State Department
and Pentagon. And in a remarkable turn of events, Fukuyama’s old mentor Bloom
would become a bestselling intellectual celebrity with The Closing of
the American Mind, two years before Fukuyama’s own ascent
to global fame.
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Fukuyama says the armed intervention in Iraq was a
bloody fiasco. Photograph: Ken
Jarecke/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image
“The End of History?” began as something of a
recondite joke. Fukuyama was at the time a mid-level figure in the Reagan State
Department witnessing the rapid unravelling of the Soviet mystique.
“I remember there was a moment when Gorbachev said that the essence of
communism was competition, and that’s when I picked up the phone, called
my friend and said, ‘If he’s saying that, then it’s the end of history.’”
Fukuyama is careful to point out that the coinage was not of his own
making, but instead that of a Russian émigré professor named
Alexander Kojève whose seminars on Hegel influenced postwar French
existentialism.
But the triumphal eulogist of America at its world
historical apogee never fell victim to the crude simplification of his own
argument to which his neoconservative friends fell prey – and which his own
rhetoric had done so much to invite. As he would later write in a 2006
book repudiating the neoconservativism of his youth, the misreading of the
events of the 1989 led directly to the calamities of the early 21st century
that, in his view, have forever discredited the neocon approach to the world.
“There was a fundamental misreading of that event and an ensuing belief
that if America just did what Reagan had done, and stood firm, and boosted
military spending, and used American hard power to stand up to the bad people
of the world, we could expect the same moral collapse of our enemies in
all instances.” Fukuyama continues to credit Bloom and Strauss with broadening
his intellectual horizons, but the adventure the adherents of those neocon
thinkers embarked on, culminating in armed intervention in Baghdad, was,
Fukuyama says, a bloody fiasco. “I don’t know how they can live with the
consequences of their actions.”
Fukuyama has always been an intellectual
comfortable with his proximity to power, conceiving of his role as offering
guidance to the organs of the American national security state, starting with
his first job at the Rand corporation in the late 1970s. He has never indulged
the romance of the adversary intellectual who sees the working of that system
as irremediably corrupted. He showed me the cover of a recent issue of Foreign
Affairs carrying an excerpt of Political Order and Political Decay whose headline announces
“America in Decay”, and indicated his discomfort with broadcasting a message
that would give comfort to America’s geopolitical adversaries.
It is one index of the state of American politics when
a man of such impeccably centrist instincts feels impelled to assert, as
Fukuyama has done, that the US has become an oligarchy, and to lament the
absence of a leftwing popular movement able to check the
excesses of that oligarchy. He insists that he was right in the 1970s and 1980s
to oppose the expansion of the welfare state, and to support
the muscular use of American power around the globe during a time of
retrenchment. But the pendulum has swung far in the other direction. “What I
don’t understand is my friends on the right who don’t think it’s necessary to
rethink their ideas in light of subsequent events.”
“I think where I’ve had my biggest and most
positive audience is in recently democratised countries – Ukraine, Poland,
Burma and Indonesia,” he says. “In places like that, I’m still a rock
star. In places like that, the End of History writings allowed people to see
themselves as a broad historical movement. It wasn’t just their local
little disputes, there were deeper principles involved. And to be able
to go to those places and tell them that they are on the right side of
history with regard to political change – to this day I’m touched by it.
To be able to go to Kiev and tell people there that democracy still
remains the wave of the future – it’s in those moments that I feel most
fully that I’ve made and am making a lasting contribution.”
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