Is it the end of history?

Remember the announcement that history had finally come to an end? "What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War or the passing away of a particular period of post-war 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". These words first appeared in an article by Francis Fukuyama, then deputy director of the US State Department's policy planning staff, in the summer 1989 issue of The National Interest, the quarterly journal of foreign policy and international affairs (in the broadest sense of both notions) published by The Nixon Centre in Washington.

The End of History? (the question mark is not mine, it is an integral part of the title of the original article) appeared in the year that began with George Bush's inauguration as the 41st President of the United States of America on January 20. Also in January 1989, on the 4th, two US F-14 Tomcats downed two Libyan MiG-23 Flogger Es in an engagement over the Gulf of Sirte. On January 7, Japan's emperor Hirohito - head of a state defeated by the US 44 years before - died at the age of 87. On June 4, Ayatollah Ruhollah Mousavi Khomeini - ultimate symbol of fundamentalist Islamic antagonism towards the US - died at the age of 86. In the same year, Soviet troops completed their withdrawal from Afghanistan and the perestroika, the programme of restructuring of the Soviet political and economic system started by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1987, precipitated irreversible changes in Eastern Europe. In some cases it made such changes possible, in others it induced them. The fall of the Wall epitomised them.

The euphoria brought about by the fall of the Berlin wall in November 1989 contributed immensely to create just the right atmosphere needed for the success of the book that grew out of Mr Fukuyama's paper. The End of History And The Last Man hit the market just over two years later in 1992 and became a best-seller. The response of the best European intellectuals to Mr Fukuyama's proclamation of the "triumph of the West, of the Western idea", ranged from caution to scepticism to the hardly veiled suspicion that what we had here was nothing but intellectually presumptuous imperial apologetics.

Jacques Derrida's position is one of the most cited. In 1993, the French philosopher warned that "when some have the audacity to neo-evangelise in the name of the ideal of a liberal democracy that has finally realised itself as the ideal of human history (...) never have violence, inequality, exclusion and, thus, economic oppression affected as many human beings in the history of the earth and of humanity". Instead of "singing the advent of the ideal of liberal democracy and of the market in the euphoria of the end of history, instead of celebrating the 'end of ideologies' and the end of the great emancipatory discourses, let us never neglect this obvious macroscopic fact, made up of innumerable singular sites of suffering: no degree of progress allows one to ignore that, never before, in absolute figures, have so many men, women and children been subjugated, starved or exterminated on the earth".

To be fair to Mr Fukuyama, who has meanwhile modified his thesis in the light of what has happened in the world since he wrote his article as well as a response to critical evaluations of his earlier work, his original position was not as crude as some have portrayed it. Of course, he was aware of the Hegelian roots of his assertion that history came to end when the dominant institutions of society finally embody Reason, when power is Reason incarnate! He said as much himself. In the 1989 paper he laments that "it is our misfortune that few of us are familiar with Hegel's work from direct study". In the same paper he emphasises his link to Hegel through Alexander Kojève, the Russian-French philosopher and advocate of European integration, who, in Mr Fukuyama's words "sought to resurrect (...) the Hegel who proclaimed history to be at an end in 1806".

"For as early as this," Mr Fukuyama goes on to say, " Hegel saw in Napoleon's defeat of the Prussian monarchy at the Battle of Jena the victory of the ideals of the French Revolution and the imminent universalisation of the state incorporating the principles of liberty and equality. Kojève, far from rejecting Hegel in light of the turbulent events of the next century and a half, insisted that the latter had been essentially correct." In a sense, Mr Fukuyama, already in 1989, replied to his critics today. To those who, as I do, point out that today's conflicts disprove the end of history thesis, Mr Fukuyama already replied by saying that whatever conflicts may occur they are nothing but a postponement of the inevitable end of history.

In practice, Mr Fukuyama's thesis and approach do not help us find our way in the real world. I re-read his and his critics' work to prepare myself for an interesting discussion with Noel Buttigieg Scicluna on NET TV conducted by Roderick Agius last week. I will come back to that discussion next time on this column. I will also look at the way Mr Fukuyama was "used" in Malta in the early 1990s.

Dr Vella blogs on watersbroken.wordpress.com