Few intellectuals can boast that one of their ideas has appeared in one of the most popular science fiction films on the big or small screen. Francis Fukuyama is one of them.
In the 1991 film "Star Trek VI: The Uncharted World," the Captain of the starship "Enterprise," James T. Kirk, in a reflective state, addresses the Klingon leader: "Some people think the future means the end of history. Well, our history isn't over yet."
This theory, which Fukuyama, then 36, first outlined in 1989, in a 15-page essay titled "The End of History?" in the magazine "The National Interest," dominated during the 1990s and was what gave Fukuyama fame and career as a political scientist, philosopher, and analyst, specializing in foreign policy and political economy.
Three years later, this theory was further elaborated in a book titled "The End of History and the Last Man."
The Guardian's Jonathan Friedland has now asked him how he feels about that essay. Is he grateful that his idea got attention or tired of the constant repetition?
“Well, a little bit of both,” Fukuyama, now 73, admits in a video call from California. “I certainly think I wouldn’t have gotten the attention I did if I had used a different title. So that made a difference.”
Misunderstanding
However, as Fukuyama shows, this theory gave rise to a misunderstanding, which was reinforced by the publication of the essay. Thanks to that simple and memorable phrase "the end of history", the impression was created that Fukuyama was arguing that, with the Cold War coming to an end and the Berlin Wall falling, human conflicts, and even human events themselves, were approaching their end.
That all major conflicts had been resolved, that there would be no more wars, and that the entire world would live under the regime of American-style liberal democracy.
As he claims in his new book, “In the Kingdom of the Last Man,” the phrase was taken as an expression of “naive liberal triumphalism,” and for more than 30 years he was asked several times a week whether he wanted to retract his position. “I have written thousands of words and given dozens of interviews trying to answer that question.”
As he now admits to The Guardian newspaper, this was one of the reasons he wrote his memoirs: "To finally record in a very clear way what I wanted to say, where I was wrong and where I believe I am still right."
The point of Fukuyama's argument was not that liberal democracy was perfect or that it had been achieved everywhere and that all conflicts had ended. But that the evidence had become irrefutable that there was no better principle or system at the time. And Fukuyama still holds this view.
“For about the last 30 years, I have said that I am looking for an alternative system that offers greater human satisfaction than liberal democracy. And there have been a number of candidate systems. Some of them, I think, are quite impossible.”
For this he cites the Iranian-style theocracy as an example. The Chinese model is a more serious competitor. As an authoritarian system, Fukuyama explains, it can make decisions more effectively than liberal democracy.
“So the question for me is: is this also a sustainable system? Will we see it [repeated] in other countries in 30 years? And that remains an open question.”
If, over the next generation, China turns out to be much more successful than the United States, with an exportable model that meets human needs, then Fukuyama promises that he will be “absolutely happy to admit that he was wrong about the fundamental assumption.”
He also acknowledges that the social consensus on liberal democracy is far from being "universal" and that the "liberal" element of this idea (the belief in limits and checks on elected power) is particularly vulnerable.
He writes that this is partly because support for these restrictions often hinges on a collective memory of how dangerous the world can become without these bastions of security. As he notes, a younger generation that has known only peace and prosperity, and for whom the tyrannies of the 20th century are ancient history, has only a dim understanding of the dangers of unchecked, illiberal rule.
But how do we explain the American president's contempt for the institutional controls of liberal democracy?
"You know, that's one of the big psychological questions that future historians will have to answer. He had this strange attraction not only to today's Russia and Vladimir Putin, but, back in the 1980s, he had visited Moscow.
At that time, when we were still in the middle of the Cold War, he took out these full-page ads attacking NATO. I mean, it's about the lack of any kind of moral compass, beyond his own self-interest. Basically, he's concerned about whether he can make money. Even if he can make money in a tyranny, that's fine with him." ©Taken from "The Guardian", adapted into Albanian by LAPSI.al
