Author: Francis Fukuyama
Publication: The Independent
Date: October 11, 2001
'I remain right: modernity is a
very powerful freight train that will not be derailed by recent events,
however painful'
A stream of commentators has been
asserting that the tragedy of 11 September proves that I was utterly wrong
to have said more than a decade ago that we had reached the end of history.
The chorus began almost immediately, with George Will asserting that history
had returned from vacation, and Fareed Zakaria declaring the end of the
end of history.
It is, on the face of it, nonsensical
and insulting to the memory of those who died on 11 September - as well
as to those who are now participating in military raids over Afghanistan
- to declare that this unprecedented attack did not rise to the level of
a historical event. But the way in which I used the word "history" was
different. It referred to the progress of mankind over the centuries toward
modernity, which is characterised by institutions like liberal democracy
and capitalism.
My observation, made back in 1989
on the eve of the collapse of communism, was that this evolutionary process
did seem to be bringing ever larger parts of the world toward modernity.
And if we looked beyond liberal democracy and markets, there was nothing
else towards which we could expect to evolve. Hence the end of history.
While there were retrograde areas that resisted that process, it was hard
to imagine an alternative civilisation in which people would genuinely
want to live - particularly after socialism, monarchy, fascism, and other
varieties of authoritarian rule had been discredited.
This view has been challenged by
many people, and perhaps most articulately by Samuel Huntington. He argued
that rather than progressing toward a single global system, the world remained
mired in a "clash of civilisations" where six or seven large cultural groups
coexist without converging and constitute the new fracture lines of global
conflict. Since the successful attack on the centre of global capitalism
was evidently perpetrated by Islamic extremists unhappy with the very existence
of Western civilisation, observers have been handicapping the Huntington
"clash" view over my own "end of history" hypothesis rather heavily.
I believe that in the end I remain
right. Modernity is a very powerful freight train that will not be derailed
by recent events, however painful and unprecedented. Democracy and free
markets will continue to expand over time as the dominant organising principles
for much of the world. But it is worthwhile thinking about what the true
scope of the present challenge is.
It has always been my belief that
modernity has a cultural basis. Liberal democracy and free markets do not
work at all times and everywhere. They work best in societies with certain
values, whose origins may not be entirely rational. It is not an accident
that modern liberal democracy emerged first in the Christian West, since
the universalism of democratic rights can be seen in many ways as a secular
form of Christian universalism.
The central question raised by Mr.
Huntington is whether institutions of modernity will work only in the West,
or whether there is something broader in their appeal that will allow them
to make headway in non-Western societies. I believe there is. The proof
lies in the progress that democracy and free markets have made in regions
like East Asia, Latin America, Orthodox Europe and South Asia. Proof is
also offered by the millions of Third World immigrants who vote with their
feet every year to live in Western societies and eventually assimilate
to Western values.
But there does seem to be something
about Islam, or at least fundamentalist Islam, that makes Muslim societies
particularly resistant to modernity. Of all contemporary cultural systems,
the Islamic world has the fewest democracies (Turkey alone qualifies),
and contains no countries that have made the transition from Third to First
World status in the manner of South Korea or Singapore.
There are plenty of non-Westerners
who prefer the economic and technological part of modernity and hope to
have it without having to accept democratic politics or Western cultural
values as well (for example, China or Singapore). There are others who
like both the economic and political versions, but just can't figure out
how to make it happen (Russia is an example). For them, transition to modernity
may be long and painful. But there are no insuperable cultural barriers
likely to prevent them from getting there.
Islam, by contrast, is the only
cultural system that regularly seems to produce people, like Osama bin
Laden or the Taliban, who reject modernity lock, stock and barrel. This
raises the question of how representative such people are of the larger
Muslim community. The answer that politicians East and West have been putting
out since 11 September is that those sympathetic with the terrorists are
a "tiny minority" of Muslims. It is important for them to say this, to
prevent Muslims as a group from becoming targets of hatred. The problem
is that dislike and hatred of America and what it stands for are clearly
much more widespread than that.
Certainly the number of people willing
to go on suicide missions and actively conspire against the US is tiny.
But sympathy for them - feelings of schadenfreude at collapsing towers,
an immediate sense of satisfaction that the US was getting what it deserved,
to be followed only later by pro forma expressions of disapproval - is
characteristic of much more than a "tiny minority" of Muslims. It extends
from the middle classes in countries like Egypt to immigrants in the West.
This broader dislike and hatred
would seem to represent something much deeper than mere opposition to American
policies like support for Israel, encompassing a hatred of the underlying
society. Perhaps, as many commentators have speculated, the hatred is born
out of a resentment of Western success and Muslim failure. But rather than
psychologise the Muslim world, it makes more sense to ask whether radical
Islam constitutes a serious alternative to Western liberal democracy.
Even for Muslims themselves, political
Islam has proven much more appealing in the abstract than in reality. After
23 years of rule by fundamentalist clerics, most Iranians, in particular
nearly everyone under 30, would like to live in a far more liberal society.
All of the anti-American hatred
that has been drummed up does not translate into a viable political programme
that Muslim societies will be able to follow in the years ahead.
We remain at the end of history
because there is only one system that will continue to dominate world politics
- that of the liberal-democratic West. This does not imply a world free
of conflict, or the disappearance of culture as a distinguishing characteristic
of societies. But the struggle we face is not the clash of several distinct
and equal cultures struggling amongst one another like the great powers
of 19th-century Europe. The clash consists of a series of rearguard actions
from societies whose traditional existence is indeed threatened by modernisation.
The strength of the backlash reflects the severity of this threat. But
time and resources are on the side of modernity, and I see no lack of a
will to prevail in the West today.
(The writer is a professor of international
political economy at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International
Studies. This article first appeared in the 'Wall Street Journal')
