When Soviet style “Communism” collapsed in Russia in the early 1990’s (but not in China), a historian (Francis Fukuyama), made a few bucks, with a statement (pamphlet and later a book), claiming that history had ended, and that Liberal Democratic Capitalism had won.
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| The End Of History Was Wrong |
He further stated that from then on, Democracy and Free Trading would spread round the globe, and all our problems would be over.
His theory is summed up in this paragraph: "What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing 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 universalization of Western Liberal Democracy as the final form of human government." (Quoted from "The End of History?").
Well, we are all now aware that what this historian had forgotten was, that the polar caps that the cold war had buried, but not suppressed, i.e the earlier historical ethnic, religious and cultural struggles, would surely re-emerge now that the dead hands of the two main ideologies had been lifted.
First, we had the emergence of small nationalist wars, where minorities that had been first subjugated under the old empires, and then by the Soviets or Western supported regimes, now claimed a chance at freedom or self rule. I am not referring to the end of the Eastern block per se, but rather the forgotten states of history, those that had been suppressed because they were troublesome or just not viable.
Just to list a few: The Georgians, The Armenians, the Turcoman, the Serbs, The Croats, The Slovaks, Azerbaijanis, The Kurds, The Moldavians, The Bosnians, The Ukrainians etc. The list is huge, and for everyone I could list, there are also sub groups, such as the Assyrians who have barely a modern history, but who have all now aspired to independence.
These groups can largely be classed as either “European” or “Islamic” and therein lies the point that Mr Fukuyama missed. Those coming from a homogeneous culture such as Japan, would find it easy to miss the fact that this involves groups and forces under the surface who have to be accounted for, in any assessment of history. E.g. The hatred between the Sunni & the Shia’s which is only slightly less than their dislike of the West.
The “European” states from this list, re-fought the “Balkan wars” of an earlier century, but thanks to US intervention, have at least stopped fighting, even if the causes are still there. The Europeans showed why they can never fight external wars, when the pacifists such as the Germans, or the opportunists like the French (who had a foot in the Serb camp), stalled any military intervention to stop the fighting early on. The fact that all these mostly mini European states, aspire to subsidy heaven in the European Union, means that they have not resumed armed hostilities, so that phase of the “End of History” could be said to be over (for now).
There were also a couple of Christian v Islam wars e.g. Armenia v Azerbaijan and part of the Balkan conflicts involved Muslim Bosnians or Albanians (in Kosovo) but not as many as might have been predicted.
The Muslim majority ‘new’ states in Soviet Asia, went to independence rather more peacefully, mainly because they retained the same communist leaders as before, and have not had a bout of Islamic extremism, because radical Islam has remained suppressed. It’s a certainty that some of these will end up with Islamic governments in the future, hence the fact that “Western” governments are hardly pressing democracy on any of them.
This brings us to the formation of a “New World Order” that many ‘Neo Cons’ proposed when President Bush took office. The basic idea was an extension of Mr Fukujama’s ideas and those of Positive and Negative freedoms that Isaiah Berlin expounded. They looked around, and determined that a form of “democracy” should be exported to various areas of the world, by force if necessary via military interventions. From their point of view, communism was dead or abandoned by its adherents, and Islam was just another religion.
So they also made the same mistake that Mr Fukujama had made, in that they didn’t realise that Islam is not merely a religion, but also a ‘political’ ideal, that to misquote Churchill (who was talking about the ‘Hun’) was either “…at your feet, or at your throat”.
The current problems stem from the US’s responses to Communism, and its spread, or more accurately the fear of its spread in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The “Realpolitik” policies of Kissenger, and which subsequent US administrations also followed, was that of the army junta's, death squads or sponsored tyrants. He believed, and I think wrongly, that the “Ends always justified the means,” when it came to fighting communism.
Don't get me wrong, I am pro US in the maIn, but in this instance I think the "Better dead than Red" theory was always a shaky response to Communism, as it embraced so many terrible regimes, that were, in all practical terms on the ground, at least as damaging to their own countries, as any left wing regime they prevented.
I also believe that supporting every regime that claimed it was a "bulwark against communism", caused long term and incalculable damage to the very values the US were promoting i.e. Liberal Democracy, and are still affecting the world today. Ironically the "War against terror" has some strange bedfellows as well, with Russia, China and various post communist Asian regimes invoking this mantra as they crack down on local dissidents.... history repeats itself?
In the 1960's until the 1990's the US supported this type of right wing regime across the globe, from South America to the Middle East and beyond, in an attempt to “stem” communism, and these regimes are associated solely with the US. The mothers of boys killed or disappeared by death squads, don’t equate their loss with ‘communism’ but with the US and ‘democracy’, or rather the hypocritical democracy that says this is OK for us, but you get Generalissimo mustachio instead. Across the globe from Egypt to the Philippines, US support for ‘democracy’ had the taint of dictatorship.
If the US had adopted a policy of only supporting pluralistic democracies, of whatever political hue, from 1945 onwards, they might have got some bad regimes (including some democratic communists), but more importantly they would have established the ideas of “good” democracy in people’s minds, and the ‘bad’ regimes would have failed by now. President Eisenhower is said to have said that “the worse decision I ever made, was to back Nasser over the Suez crisis”, as it ushered in a set of nasty regimes across the Middle East, and effectively set the pattern for 40 years or more.
I accept that resisting communism had to be done, and that after WWII only the US had the funds to do so, the British and French were flat broke, and I even accept the argument that in supporting some bad regimes, they allowed some slightly better ones to be safe. However it seems a bit hard on those being sacrificed, with no certainty that their sacrifice made the world a better place.
Lee Kuan Yew, the former Prime Minister of Singapore, argued that, although the US lost Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, the fact that it was in the region for a long period meant that the other South East Asian countries had time to build up their economies to relieve the poverty of their populations, and thus resist communist infiltration, which they may not have been able to do had Indo-China quickly gone communist.
This view is good news for Singapore, and Thailand, but for the losers in this world view, it was decades of poverty and needless terror from firstly the US backed regimes, and then from the Communists who replaced them (a suppression of human rights that still goes on in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos). Also, even if you can square the morals of this argument, I am not convinced that it can be applied in every instance. Are the peoples of Central or South America better off now because of the endless wars against "communists" was fought by US proxies for 30 years in their countries?
You would have thought that these bright young things from preppy universities in the Bush administration, would have been aware that this negative association to nasty, brutish dictators across the world, and especially in the Middle East, meant that US sponsored democracy was now too tainted for export, especially at the end of a gun, and that the driving force against the US supported dictators was radical Islam.
The Mullahs of Iran had set the example of the forces at work in the Muslim world, as plainly and obviously as it could be, when they toppled a US installed and backed Shah, but still they, the Neo Cons did not see it, and decided after 9/11 that first Afghanistan (the least likely democracy on earth), and then Iraq (a country with all the components of a civil war – Sunni’s - Shia’s – Kurds and a myriad of minorities from Christians, Assyrians through to Armenians) would be the best places to start.
Frankly, any fool could see that the most promising area would have been Sub Saharan Africa, with its many nasty regimes, but importantly, its living memory of true democracy in most states. With the USSR out of the way, and China not yet on the scene, the US could have had a free hand in forcing transparent judicial democracy onto an aid dependent continent. A side benefit would have been a bulwark against Islam.
There is a “they only do it where there’s Oil” argument, that has wide support in some quarters, and that’s why Africa got no real US interest. Africa has no oil apart from a few places such as Nigeria (too big and messy to get involved in), and Equatorial Guinea (a real hell hole), but because of oil they involve themselves in the Middle East in the worst two places they could find. New oil deposits are now being found in Africa, and it will be interesting to see if that sparks a new resource grab in the area from the various power groups. Admittedly Afghanistan has no oil, but was the source of the 9/11 attack, otherwise it would have been Iran and Iraq.
This argument has some validity, but I suspect that the simple reason is that most US citizens dislike Muslims (for obvious reasons), and attacking Black states has political difficulties at home (despite the good it would do), so it had to be Muslim areas, and as discussed the Neo-Cons had not learnt the lessons of the last three decades.
I suspect that the West will have to live through 30 years or more of Islamic upheaval and threats, before there is a chance of taking real democracy to the Muslim world, but that oddly it may well be Iran where that chance comes if the mullah led regime fails to deliver. There are some signs that younger Iranians (mainly the young and the middle classes) are fed up of old men with beards ruling their lives. It’s possible that a coup may come about because they bring down the regime of their own accord, but not at the point of a US gun.
The US and the West in general, could take the opportunity, which the likely retreat from Baghdad will afford them, to review its support for any kind of despots and theocratic states, and change the future course of history, or just end up repeating the cycle of failures that turn chances into dust.
"The past is always a rebuke to the present". Robert Penn Warren
"Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results." Machiavelli.
Well, we are all now aware that what this historian had forgotten was, that the polar caps that the cold war had buried, but not suppressed, i.e the earlier historical ethnic, religious and cultural struggles, would surely re-emerge now that the dead hands of the two main ideologies had been lifted.
First, we had the emergence of small nationalist wars, where minorities that had been first subjugated under the old empires, and then by the Soviets or Western supported regimes, now claimed a chance at freedom or self rule. I am not referring to the end of the Eastern block per se, but rather the forgotten states of history, those that had been suppressed because they were troublesome or just not viable.
Just to list a few: The Georgians, The Armenians, the Turcoman, the Serbs, The Croats, The Slovaks, Azerbaijanis, The Kurds, The Moldavians, The Bosnians, The Ukrainians etc. The list is huge, and for everyone I could list, there are also sub groups, such as the Assyrians who have barely a modern history, but who have all now aspired to independence.
These groups can largely be classed as either “European” or “Islamic” and therein lies the point that Mr Fukuyama missed. Those coming from a homogeneous culture such as Japan, would find it easy to miss the fact that this involves groups and forces under the surface who have to be accounted for, in any assessment of history. E.g. The hatred between the Sunni & the Shia’s which is only slightly less than their dislike of the West.
The “European” states from this list, re-fought the “Balkan wars” of an earlier century, but thanks to US intervention, have at least stopped fighting, even if the causes are still there. The Europeans showed why they can never fight external wars, when the pacifists such as the Germans, or the opportunists like the French (who had a foot in the Serb camp), stalled any military intervention to stop the fighting early on. The fact that all these mostly mini European states, aspire to subsidy heaven in the European Union, means that they have not resumed armed hostilities, so that phase of the “End of History” could be said to be over (for now).
There were also a couple of Christian v Islam wars e.g. Armenia v Azerbaijan and part of the Balkan conflicts involved Muslim Bosnians or Albanians (in Kosovo) but not as many as might have been predicted.
The Muslim majority ‘new’ states in Soviet Asia, went to independence rather more peacefully, mainly because they retained the same communist leaders as before, and have not had a bout of Islamic extremism, because radical Islam has remained suppressed. It’s a certainty that some of these will end up with Islamic governments in the future, hence the fact that “Western” governments are hardly pressing democracy on any of them.
This brings us to the formation of a “New World Order” that many ‘Neo Cons’ proposed when President Bush took office. The basic idea was an extension of Mr Fukujama’s ideas and those of Positive and Negative freedoms that Isaiah Berlin expounded. They looked around, and determined that a form of “democracy” should be exported to various areas of the world, by force if necessary via military interventions. From their point of view, communism was dead or abandoned by its adherents, and Islam was just another religion.
So they also made the same mistake that Mr Fukujama had made, in that they didn’t realise that Islam is not merely a religion, but also a ‘political’ ideal, that to misquote Churchill (who was talking about the ‘Hun’) was either “…at your feet, or at your throat”.
The current problems stem from the US’s responses to Communism, and its spread, or more accurately the fear of its spread in the 1960’s and 1970’s. The “Realpolitik” policies of Kissenger, and which subsequent US administrations also followed, was that of the army junta's, death squads or sponsored tyrants. He believed, and I think wrongly, that the “Ends always justified the means,” when it came to fighting communism.
Don't get me wrong, I am pro US in the maIn, but in this instance I think the "Better dead than Red" theory was always a shaky response to Communism, as it embraced so many terrible regimes, that were, in all practical terms on the ground, at least as damaging to their own countries, as any left wing regime they prevented.
I also believe that supporting every regime that claimed it was a "bulwark against communism", caused long term and incalculable damage to the very values the US were promoting i.e. Liberal Democracy, and are still affecting the world today. Ironically the "War against terror" has some strange bedfellows as well, with Russia, China and various post communist Asian regimes invoking this mantra as they crack down on local dissidents.... history repeats itself?
In the 1960's until the 1990's the US supported this type of right wing regime across the globe, from South America to the Middle East and beyond, in an attempt to “stem” communism, and these regimes are associated solely with the US. The mothers of boys killed or disappeared by death squads, don’t equate their loss with ‘communism’ but with the US and ‘democracy’, or rather the hypocritical democracy that says this is OK for us, but you get Generalissimo mustachio instead. Across the globe from Egypt to the Philippines, US support for ‘democracy’ had the taint of dictatorship.
If the US had adopted a policy of only supporting pluralistic democracies, of whatever political hue, from 1945 onwards, they might have got some bad regimes (including some democratic communists), but more importantly they would have established the ideas of “good” democracy in people’s minds, and the ‘bad’ regimes would have failed by now. President Eisenhower is said to have said that “the worse decision I ever made, was to back Nasser over the Suez crisis”, as it ushered in a set of nasty regimes across the Middle East, and effectively set the pattern for 40 years or more.
I accept that resisting communism had to be done, and that after WWII only the US had the funds to do so, the British and French were flat broke, and I even accept the argument that in supporting some bad regimes, they allowed some slightly better ones to be safe. However it seems a bit hard on those being sacrificed, with no certainty that their sacrifice made the world a better place.
Lee Kuan Yew, the former Prime Minister of Singapore, argued that, although the US lost Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, the fact that it was in the region for a long period meant that the other South East Asian countries had time to build up their economies to relieve the poverty of their populations, and thus resist communist infiltration, which they may not have been able to do had Indo-China quickly gone communist.
This view is good news for Singapore, and Thailand, but for the losers in this world view, it was decades of poverty and needless terror from firstly the US backed regimes, and then from the Communists who replaced them (a suppression of human rights that still goes on in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos). Also, even if you can square the morals of this argument, I am not convinced that it can be applied in every instance. Are the peoples of Central or South America better off now because of the endless wars against "communists" was fought by US proxies for 30 years in their countries?
You would have thought that these bright young things from preppy universities in the Bush administration, would have been aware that this negative association to nasty, brutish dictators across the world, and especially in the Middle East, meant that US sponsored democracy was now too tainted for export, especially at the end of a gun, and that the driving force against the US supported dictators was radical Islam.
The Mullahs of Iran had set the example of the forces at work in the Muslim world, as plainly and obviously as it could be, when they toppled a US installed and backed Shah, but still they, the Neo Cons did not see it, and decided after 9/11 that first Afghanistan (the least likely democracy on earth), and then Iraq (a country with all the components of a civil war – Sunni’s - Shia’s – Kurds and a myriad of minorities from Christians, Assyrians through to Armenians) would be the best places to start.
Frankly, any fool could see that the most promising area would have been Sub Saharan Africa, with its many nasty regimes, but importantly, its living memory of true democracy in most states. With the USSR out of the way, and China not yet on the scene, the US could have had a free hand in forcing transparent judicial democracy onto an aid dependent continent. A side benefit would have been a bulwark against Islam.
There is a “they only do it where there’s Oil” argument, that has wide support in some quarters, and that’s why Africa got no real US interest. Africa has no oil apart from a few places such as Nigeria (too big and messy to get involved in), and Equatorial Guinea (a real hell hole), but because of oil they involve themselves in the Middle East in the worst two places they could find. New oil deposits are now being found in Africa, and it will be interesting to see if that sparks a new resource grab in the area from the various power groups. Admittedly Afghanistan has no oil, but was the source of the 9/11 attack, otherwise it would have been Iran and Iraq.
This argument has some validity, but I suspect that the simple reason is that most US citizens dislike Muslims (for obvious reasons), and attacking Black states has political difficulties at home (despite the good it would do), so it had to be Muslim areas, and as discussed the Neo-Cons had not learnt the lessons of the last three decades.
I suspect that the West will have to live through 30 years or more of Islamic upheaval and threats, before there is a chance of taking real democracy to the Muslim world, but that oddly it may well be Iran where that chance comes if the mullah led regime fails to deliver. There are some signs that younger Iranians (mainly the young and the middle classes) are fed up of old men with beards ruling their lives. It’s possible that a coup may come about because they bring down the regime of their own accord, but not at the point of a US gun.
The US and the West in general, could take the opportunity, which the likely retreat from Baghdad will afford them, to review its support for any kind of despots and theocratic states, and change the future course of history, or just end up repeating the cycle of failures that turn chances into dust.
"The past is always a rebuke to the present". Robert Penn Warren
"Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who ever have been, and ever shall be, animated by the same passions, and thus they necessarily have the same results." Machiavelli.
Very insightful article - cant see anything wrong with the logic.
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