Fukuyama and the End of History

This week's post from The Archdruid Report concerned Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. This book came out in 1993 or so, shortly after the demise of the Soviet Union, when many of us who remember that time where scratching our heads and looking kind of dumb. We were looking kind of dumb because we were wondering what had just happened to the evil empire, the red menace, the greatest threat to world peace and prosperity at that time. The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics simply could not have just evaporated, as it apparently did. But it did just evaporate, like a puddle of water on hot Arizona asphalt. Moreover, it seemed to be that what the Russians really wanted all this time was democracy. Fukuyama's book was an attempt, and a good one I believe, to provide a framework for what had happened, and what we might expect in the future.

Now most people simply have not read Fukuyama's book, and the title has become an a very tempting straw man for those in the mood to take out straw men. After all, history has not ended, so let's make fun of this yahoo who claims that it has.

Well of course, history has not ended, and someone of Fukuyama's skill and talent could obviously not think so. So what did he mean by the "end of history". The way I explain this is to ask the following: "what is the biggest headline event to have happened on the North American continent in the last 300 years or so?" Well, there are certainly a number of candidates: World War II, the Great Depression, Mexican Independence, the creation of Canada as an independent nation, the American Revolution, etc. We've been busy. But I think that Fukuyama might say that the biggest headline event in the last 300 years has been the American Civil War. The repercussions of that event resonate even today, nearly 150 years since they have transpired. He might also have said the American Revolution, which happened over 230 years ago. So to Fukuyama, the really big things to have happened on the North American continent happened long before the living memories of anyone's grandparent. Nor is there is any expectation that the American, Canadian, or even Mexican systems of political economy will change in the next decade or so, which would constitute one of his headline events. So although we North Americans have been busy creating new nations, compared to the rest of the world, we are slackers. History, in terms of these big nation creating headlines, has for all intensive purposes on this continent stopped.

Now, we still have wars, recessions, depressions, technological breakthroughs, civil and social upheavals and so on. But we don't have new states popping up. What gives? Fukuyama asked this same question, and asked an even broader question. He made a list of nation-states, their age, and their type of political economy, and saw what fell out. His analysis was brilliant to my mind, because the longest lived political economies in the world are liberal democracies, and the United States, my country, was among the longest lived, if not oldest nation-state in the world. The United Kingdom, another liberal democracy, was also near the top. In fact, all of the top candidates are liberal democracies. None other comes close.

What makes this outcome so strange is that many people think of the US as a very young nation. It is not. It is in fact old. We have a tradition of legal precedences, we have been traipsing to the poles every other year, we have elected forty plus presidents, and we have a number of other political customs and traditions that are over two hundred years old. That is a remarkable achievement. The English tradition of politics is perhaps older than the American--I equivocate because I'm not exactly sure how the English system works, and when it can be said to have started. There are other nations as well with an old system of liberal democracy, mostly starting in the Anglosphere.

So Fukuyama's thesis is that when a nation catches liberal democracy, it tends to stick with it, and with it goes the "end of history". There are counterexamples, of course, such as Weimar Germany giving way to Nazi Germany, but there is some strong evidence for his conclusion.

The second half of Fukuyama's book "and the Last Man" is Fukuyama's attempt to explain the apparent stability of the liberal democratic system, and this I will address in my next post.