The End of History?*
Francis Fukuyama**
IN WATCHING the flow of events over the past decade or so, it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental
has happened in world history. The past year has seen a flood of articles commemorating the end of the Cold War, and the fact
that "peace" seems to be breaking out in many regions of the world. Most of these analyses lack any larger conceptual
framework for distinguishing between what is essential and what is contingent or accidental in world history, and are predictably
superficial. If Mr. Gorbachev were ousted from the Kremlin or a new Ayatollah proclaimed the millennium from a desolate Middle
Eastern capital, these same commentators would scramble to announce the rebirth of a new era of conflict.
And yet, all of these people sense dimly that there is some larger process at work, a process that gives coherence and
order to the daily headlines. The twentieth century saw the developed world descend into a paroxysm of ideological violence,
as liberalism contended first with the remnants of absolutism, then bolshevism and fascism, and finally an updated Marxism
that threatened to lead to the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war. But the century that began full of self-confidence in the
ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to where it started: not to an
"end of ideology" or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as earlier predicted, but to an unabashed victory
of economic and political liberalism.
The triumph of the West, of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives
to Western liberalism. In the past decade, there have been unmistakable changes in the intellectual climate of the world's
two largest communist countries, and the beginnings of significant reform movements in both. But this phenomenon extends beyond
high politics and it can be seen also in the ineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture in such diverse contexts as
the peasants' markets and color television sets now omnipresent throughout China, the cooperative restaurants and clothing
stores opened in the past year in Moscow, the Beethoven piped into Japanese department stores, and the rock music enjoyed
alike in Prague, Rangoon, and Tehran.
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar 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. This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the
pages of Foreign Affair's yearly summaries of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily
in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in. the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons
for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run. To understand how this is so, we must
first consider some theoretical issues concerning the nature of historical change.
I
THE NOTION of the end of history is not an original one. Its best known propagator was Karl Marx, who believed that the
direction of historical development was a purposeful one determined by the interplay of material forces, and would come to
an end only with the achievement of a communist utopia that would finally resolve all prior contradictions. But the concept
of history as a dialectical process with a beginning, a middle, and an end was borrowed by Marx from his great German predecessor,
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
For better or worse, much of Hegel's historicism has become part of our contemporary intellectual baggage. The notion
that mankind has progressed through a series of primitive stages of consciousness on his path to the present, and that these
stages corresponded to concrete forms of social organization, such as tribal, slave-owning, theocratic, and finally democratic-egalitarian
societies, has become inseparable from the modern understanding of man. Hegel was the first philosopher to speak the language
of modern social science, insofar as man for him was the product of his concrete historical and social environment and not,
as earlier natural right theorists would have it, a collection of more or less fixed "natural" attributes. The mastery
and transformation of man's natural environment through the application of science and technology was originally not a Marxist
concept, but a Hegelian one. Unlike later historicists whose historical relativism degenerated into relativism tout court,
however, Hegel believed that history culminated in an absolute moment - a moment in which a final, rational form of society
and state became victorious.
It is Hegel's misfortune to be known now primarily as Marx's precursor; and it is our misfortune that few of us are familiar
with Hegel's work from direct study, but only as it has been filtered through the distorting lens of Marxism. In France, however,
there has been an effort to save Hegel from his Marxist interpreters and to resurrect him as the philosopher who most correctly
speaks to our time. Among those modern French interpreters of Hegel, the greatest was certainly Alexandre Kojève, a brilliant
Russian émigré who taught a highly influential series of seminars in Paris in the 1930s at the Ecole Practique des Hautes
Etudes.[1] While largely unknown in the United States, Kojève had a major impact on the intellectual life of the continent.
Among his students ranged such future luminaries as Jean-Paul Sartre on the Left and Raymond Aron on the Right; postwar existentialism
borrowed many of its basic categories from Hegel via Kojève.
Kojève sought to resurrect the Hegel of the Phenomenology of Mind, the Hegel who proclaimed history to be at an end in
1806. For as early as this 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 universalization 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.[2] The Battle of Jena marked the end of history because it was at that point that
the vanguard of humanity (a term quite familiar to Marxists) actualized the principles of the French Revolution. While there
was considerable work to be done after 1806 - abolishing slavery and the slave trade, extending the franchise to workers,
women, blacks, and other racial minorities, etc. - the basic principles of the liberal democratic state could not be improved
upon. The two world wars in this century and their attendant revolutions and upheavals simply had the effect of extending
those principles spatially, such that the various provinces of human civilization were brought up to the level of its most
advanced outposts, and of forcing those societies in Europe and North America at the vanguard of civilization to implement
their liberalism more fully.
The state that emerges at the end of history is liberal insofar as it recognizes and protects through a system of law
man's universal right to freedom, and democratic insofar as it exists only with the consent of the governed. For Kojève, this
so-called "universal homogenous state" found real-life embodiment in the countries of postwar Western Europe - precisely
those flabby, prosperous, self-satisfied, inward-looking, weak-willed states whose grandest project was nothing more heroic
than the creation of the Common Market.[3] But this was only to be expected. For human history and the conflict that characterized
it was based on the existence of "contradictions": primitive man's quest for mutual recognition, the dialectic of
the master and slave, the transformation and mastery of nature, the struggle for the universal recognition of rights, and
the dichotomy between proletarian and capitalist. But in the universal homogenous state, all prior contradictions are resolved
and all human needs are satisfied. There is no struggle or conflict over "large" issues, and consequently no need
for generals or statesmen; what remains is primarily economic activity. And indeed, Kojève's life was consistent with his
teaching. Believing that there was no more work for philosophers as well, since Hegel (correctly understood) had already achieved
absolute knowledge, Kojève left teaching after the war and spent the remainder of his life working as a bureaucrat in the
European Economic Community, until his death in 1968.
To his contemporaries at mid-century, Kojève's proclamation of the end of history must have seemed like the typical eccentric
solipsism of a French intellectual, coming as it did on the heels of World War II and at the very height of the Cold War.
To comprehend how Kojève could have been so audacious as to assert that history has ended, we must first of all understand
the meaning of Hegelian idealism.
II
FOR HEGEL, the contradictions that drive history exist first of all in the realm of human consciousness, i.e. on the level
of ideas[4] - not the trivial election year proposals of American politicians, but ideas in the sense of large unifying world
views that might best be understood under the rubric of ideology. Ideology in this sense is not restricted to the secular
and explicit political doctrines we usually associate with the term, but can include religion, culture, and the complex of
moral values underlying any society as well.
Hegel's view of the relationship between the ideal and the real or material worlds was an extremely complicated one, beginning
with the fact that for him the distinction between the two was only apparent.[5] He did not believe that the real world conformed
or could be made to conform to ideological preconceptions of philosophy professors in any simpleminded way, or that the "material"
world could not impinge on the ideal. Indeed, Hegel the professor was temporarily thrown out of work as a result of a very
material event, the Battle of Jena. But while Hegel's writing and thinking could be stopped by a bullet from the material
world, the hand on the trigger of the gun was motivated in turn by the ideas of liberty and equality that had driven the French
Revolution.
For Hegel, all human behavior in the material world, and hence all human history, is rooted in a prior state of consciousness
- an idea similar to the one expressed by John Maynard Keynes when he said that the views of men of affairs were usually derived
from defunct economists and academic scribblers of earlier generations. This consciousness may not be explicit and self-aware,
as are modern political doctrines, but may rather take the form of religion or simple cultural or moral habits. And yet this
realm of consciousness in the long run necessarily becomes manifest in the material world, indeed creates the material world
in its own image. Consciousness is cause and not effect, and can develop autonomously from the material world; hence the real
subtext underlying the apparent jumble of current events is the history of ideology.
Hegel's idealism has fared poorly at the hands of later thinkers. Marx reversed the priority of the real and the ideal
completely, relegating the entire realm of consciousness - religion, art, culture, philosophy itself - to a "superstructure"
that was determined entirely by the prevailing material mode of production. Yet another unfortunate legacy of Marxism is our
tendency to retreat into materialist or utilitarian explanations of political or historical phenomena, and our disinclination
to believe in the autonomous power of ideas. A recent example of this is Paul Kennedy's hugely successful The Rise and Fall
of the Great Powers, which ascribes the decline of great powers to simple economic overextension. Obviously, this is true
on some level: an empire whose economy is barely above the level of subsistence cannot bankrupt its treasury indefinitely.
But whether a highly productive modern industrial society chooses to spend 3 or 7 percent of its GNP on defense rather than
consumption is entirely a matter of that society's political priorities, which are in turn determined in the realm of consciousness.
The materialist bias of modern thought is characteristic not only of people on the Left who may be sympathetic to Marxism,
but of many passionate anti-Marxists as well. Indeed, there is on the Right what one might label the Wall Street Journal school
of deterministic materialism that discounts the importance of ideology and culture and sees man as essentially a rational,
profit-maximizing individual. It is precisely this kind of individual and his pursuit of material incentives that is posited
as the basis for economic life as such in economic textbooks.[6] One small example will illustrate the problematic character
of such materialist views.
Max Weber begins his famous book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, by noting the different economic
performance of Protestant and Catholic communities throughout Europe and America, summed up in the proverb that Protestants
eat well while Catholics sleep well. Weber notes that according to any economic theory that posited man as a rational profit-maximizer,
raising the piece-work rate should increase labor productivity. But in fact, in many traditional peasant communities, raising
the piece-work rate actually had the opposite effect of lowering labor productivity: at the higher rate, a peasant accustomed
to earning two and one-half marks per day found he could earn the same amount by working less, and did so because he valued
leisure more than income. The choices of leisure over income, or of the militaristic life of the Spartan hoplite over the
wealth of the Athenian trader, or even the ascetic life of the early capitalist entrepreneur over that of a traditional leisured
aristocrat, cannot possibly be explained by the impersonal working of material forces, but come preeminently out of the sphere
of consciousness - what we have labeled here broadly as ideology. And indeed, a central theme of Weber's work was to prove
that contrary to Marx, the material mode of production, far from being the "base," was itself a "superstructure"
with roots in religion and culture, and that to understand the emergence of modern capitalism and the profit motive one had
to study their antecedents in the realm of the spirit.
As we look around the contemporary world, the poverty of materialist theories of economic development is all too apparent.
The Wall Street Journal school of deterministic materialism habitually points to the stunning economic success of Asia in
the past few decades as evidence of the viability of free market economics, with the implication that all societies would
see similar development were they simply to allow their populations to pursue their material self-interest freely. Surely
free markets and stable political systems are a necessary precondition to capitalist economic growth. But just as surely the
cultural heritage of those Far Eastern societies, the ethic of work and saving and family, a religious heritage that does
not, like Islam, place restrictions on certain forms of economic behavior, and other deeply ingrained moral qualities, are
equally important in explaining their economic performance.[7] And yet the intellectual weight of materialism is such that
not a single respectable contemporary theory of economic development addresses consciousness and culture seriously as the
matrix within which economic behavior is formed.
FAILURE to understand that the roots of economic behavior lie in the realm of consciousness and culture leads to the common
mistake of attributing material causes to phenomena that are essentially ideal in nature. For example, it is commonplace in
the West to interpret the reform movements first in China and most recently in the Soviet Union as the victory of the material
over the ideal - that is, a recognition that ideological incentives could not replace material ones in stimulating a highly
productive modern economy, and that if one wanted to prosper one had to appeal to baser forms of self-interest. But the deep
defects of socialist economies were evident thirty or forty years ago to anyone who chose to look. Why was it that these countries
moved away from central planning only in the 1980s' The answer must be found in the consciousness of the elites and leaders
ruling them, who decided to opt for the "Protestant" life of wealth and risk over the "Catholic" path
of poverty and security.[8] That change was in no way made inevitable by the material conditions in which either country found
itself on the eve of the reform, but instead came about as the result of the victory of one idea over another.[9]
For Kojève, as for all good Hegelians, understanding the underlying processes of history requires understanding developments
in the realm of consciousness or ideas, since consciousness will ultimately remake the material world in its own image. To
say that history ended in 1806 meant that mankind's ideological evolution ended in the ideals of the French or American Revolutions:
while particular regimes in the real world might not implement these ideals fully, their theoretical truth is absolute and
could not be improved upon. Hence it did not matter to Kojève that the consciousness of the postwar generation of Europeans
had not been universalized throughout the world; if ideological development had in fact ended, the homogenous state would
eventually become victorious throughout the material world.
I have neither the space nor, frankly, the ability to defend in depth Hegel's radical idealist perspective. The issue
is not whether Hegel's system was right, but whether his perspective might uncover the problematic nature of many materialist
explanations we often take for granted. This is not to deny the role of material factors as such. To a literal-minded idealist,
human society can be built around any arbitrary set of principles regardless of their relationship to the material world.
And in fact men have proven themselves able to endure the most extreme material hardships in the name of ideas that exist
in the realm of the spirit alone, be it the divinity of cows or the nature of the Holy Trinity.[10]
But while man's very perception of the material world is shaped by his historical consciousness of it, the material world
can clearly affect in return the viability of a particular state of consciousness. In particular, the spectacular abundance
of advanced liberal economies and the infinitely diverse consumer culture made possible by them seem to both foster and preserve
liberalism in the political sphere. I want to avoid the materialist determinism that says that liberal economics inevitably
produces liberal politics, because I believe that both economics and politics presuppose an autonomous prior state of consciousness
that makes them possible. But that state of consciousness that permits the growth of liberalism seems to stabilize in the
way one would expect at the end of history if it is underwritten by the abundance of a modern free market economy. We might
summarize the content of the universal homogenous state as liberal democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access
to VCRs and stereos in the economic.
III
HAVE WE in fact reached the end of history? Are there, in other words, any fundamental "contradictions" in human
life that cannot be resolved in the context of modern liberalism, that would be resolvable by an alternative political-economic
structure? If we accept the idealist premises laid out above, we must seek an answer to this question in the realm of ideology
and consciousness. Our task is not to answer exhaustively the challenges to liberalism promoted by every crackpot messiah
around the world, but only those that are embodied in important social or political forces and movements, and which are therefore
part of world history. For our purposes, it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina
Faso, for we are interested in what one could in some sense call the common ideological heritage of mankind.
In the past century, there have been two major challenges to liberalism, those of fascism and of communism. The former[11]
saw the political weakness, materialism, anomie, and lack of community of the West as fundamental contradictions in liberal
societies that could only be resolved by a strong state that forged a new "people" on the basis of national exclusiveness.
Fascism was destroyed as a living ideology by World War II. This was a defeat, of course, on a very material level, but it
amounted to a defeat of the idea as well. What destroyed fascism as an idea was not universal moral revulsion against it,
since plenty of people were willing to endorse the idea as long as it seemed the wave of the future, but its lack of success.
After the war, it seemed to most people that German fascism as well as its other European and Asian variants were bound to
self-destruct. There was no material reason why new fascist movements could not have sprung up again after the war in other
locales, but for the fact that expansionist ultranationalism, with its promise of unending conflict leading to disastrous
military defeat, had completely lost its appeal. The ruins of the Reich chancellery as well as the atomic bombs dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed this ideology on the level of consciousness as well as materially, and all of the pro-fascist
movements spawned by the German and Japanese examples like the Peronist movement in Argentina or Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian
National Army withered after the war.
The ideological challenge mounted by the other great alternative to liberalism, communism, was far more serious. Marx,
speaking Hegel's language, asserted that liberal society contained a fundamental contradiction that could not be resolved
within its context, that between capital and labor, and this contradiction has constituted the chief accusation against liberalism
ever since. But surely, the class issue has actually been successfully resolved in the West. As Kojève (among others) noted,
the egalitarianism of modern America represents the essential achievement of the classless society envisioned by Marx. This
is not to say that there are not rich people and poor people in the United States, or that the gap between them has not grown
in recent years. But the root causes of economic inequality do not have to do with the underlying legal and social structure
of our society, which remains fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributionist, so much as with the cultural and
social characteristics of the groups that make it up, which are in turn the historical legacy of premodern conditions. Thus
black poverty in the United States is not the inherent product of liberalism, but is rather the "legacy of slavery and
racism" which persisted long after the formal abolition of slavery.
As a result of the receding of the class issue, the appeal of communism in the developed Western world, it is safe to
say, is lower today than any time since the end of the First World War. This can he measured in any number of ways: in the
declining membership and electoral pull of the major European communist parties, and their overtly revisionist programs; in
the corresponding electoral success of conservative parties from Britain and Germany to the United States and Japan, which
are unabashedly pro-market and anti-statist; and in an intellectual climate whose most "advanced" members no longer
believe that bourgeois society is something that ultimately needs to be overcome. This is not to say that the opinions of
progressive intellectuals in Western countries are not deeply pathological in any number of ways. But those who believe that
the future must inevitably be socialist tend to be very old, or very marginal to the real political discourse of their societies.
0NE MAY argue that the socialist alternative was never terribly plausible for the North Atlantic world, and was sustained
for the last several decades primarily by its success outside of this region. But it is precisely in the non-European world
that one is most struck by the occurrence of major ideological transformations. Surely the most remarkable changes have occurred
in Asia. Due to the strength and adaptability of the indigenous cultures there, Asia became a battleground for a variety of
imported Western ideologies early in this century. Liberalism in Asia was a very weak reed in the period after World War I;
it is easy today to forget how gloomy Asia's political future looked as recently as ten or fifteen years ago. It is easy to
forget as well how momentous the outcome of Asian ideological struggles seemed for world political development as a whole.
The first Asian alternative to liberalism to be decisively defeated was the fascist one represented by Imperial Japan.
Japanese fascism (like its German version) was defeated by the force of American arms in the Pacific war, and liberal democracy
was imposed on Japan by a victorious United States. Western capitalism and political liberalism when transplanted to Japan
were adapted and transformed by the Japanese in such a way as to be scarcely recognizable.[12] Many Americans are now aware
that Japanese industrial organization is very different from that prevailing in the United States or Europe, and it is questionable
what relationship the factional maneuvering that takes place with the governing Liberal Democratic Party bears to democracy.
Nonetheless, the very fact that the essential elements of economic and political liberalism have been so successfully grafted
onto uniquely Japanese traditions and institutions guarantees their survival in the long run. More important is the contribution
that Japan has made in turn to world history by following in the footsteps of the United States to create a truly universal
consumer culture that has become both a symbol and an underpinning of the universal homogenous state. V.S. Naipaul traveling
in Khomeini's Iran shortly after the revolution noted the omnipresent signs advertising the products of Sony, Hitachi, and
JVC, whose appeal remained virtually irresistible and gave the lie to the regime's pretensions of restoring a state based
on the rule of the Shariah. Desire for access to the consumer culture, created in large measure by Japan, has played a crucial
role in fostering the spread of economic liberalism throughout Asia, and hence in promoting political liberalism as well.
The economic success of the other newly industrializing countries (NICs) in Asia following on the example of Japan is
by now a familiar story. What is important from a Hegelian standpoint is that political liberalism has been following economic
liberalism, more slowly than many had hoped but with seeming inevitability. Here again we see the victory of the idea of the
universal homogenous state. South Korea had developed into a modern, urbanized society with an increasingly large and well-educated
middle class that could not possibly be isolated from the larger democratic trends around them. Under these circumstances
it seemed intolerable to a large part of this population that it should be ruled by an anachronistic military regime while
Japan, only a decade or so ahead in economic terms, had parliamentary institutions for over forty years. Even the former socialist
regime in Burma, which for so many decades existed in dismal isolation from the larger trends dominating Asia, was buffeted
in the past year by pressures to liberalize both its economy and political system. It is said that unhappiness with strongman
Ne Win began when a senior Burmese officer went to Singapore for medical treatment and broke down crying when he saw how far
socialist Burma had been left behind by its ASEAN neighbors.
BUT THE power of the liberal idea would seem much less impressive if it had not infected the largest and oldest culture
in Asia, China. The simple existence of communist China created an alternative pole of ideological attraction, and as such
constituted a threat to liberalism. But the past fifteen years have seen an almost total discrediting of Marxism-Leninism
as an economic system. Beginning with the famous third plenum of the Tenth Central Committee in 1978, the Chinese Communist
party set about decollectivizing agriculture for the 800 million Chinese who still lived in the countryside. The role of the
state in agriculture was reduced to that of a tax collector, while production of consumer goods was sharply increased in order
to give peasants a taste of the universal homogenous state and thereby an incentive to work. The reform doubled Chinese grain
output in only five years, and in the process created for Deng Xiaoping a solid political base from which he was able to extend
the reform to other parts of the economy. Economic Statistics do not begin to describe the dynamism, initiative, and openness
evident in China since the reform began.
China could not now be described in any way as a liberal democracy. At present, no more than 20 percent of its economy
has been marketized, and most importantly it continues to be ruled by a self-appointed Communist party which has given no
hint of wanting to devolve power. Deng has made none of Gorbachev's promises regarding democratization of the political system
and there is no Chinese equivalent of ghost. The Chinese leadership has in fact been much more circumspect in criticizing
Mao and Maoism than Gorbachev with respect to Brezhnev and Stalin, and the regime continues to pay lip service to Marxism-Leninism
as its ideological underpinning. But anyone familiar with the outlook and behavior of the new technocratic elite now governing
China knows that Marxism and ideological principle have become virtually irrelevant as guides to policy, and that bourgeois
consumerism has a real meaning in that country for the first time since the revolution. The various slowdowns in the pace
of reform, the campaigns against "spiritual pollution" and crackdowns on political dissent are more properly seen
as tactical adjustments made in the process of managing what is an extraordinarily difficult political transition. By ducking
the question of political reform while putting the economy on a new footing, Deng has managed to avoid the breakdown of authority
that has accompanied Gorbachev's perestroika. Yet the pull of the liberal idea continues to be very strong as economic power
devolves and the economy becomes more open to the outside world. There are currently over 20,000 Chinese students studying
in the U.S. and other Western countries, almost all of them the children of the Chinese elite. It is hard to believe that
when they return home to run the country they will be content for China to be the only country in Asia unaffected by the larger
democratizing trend. The student demonstrations in Beijing that broke out first in December 1986 and recurred recently on
the occasion of Hu Yao-bang's death were only the beginning of what will inevitably be mounting pressure for change in the
political system as well.
What is important about China from the standpoint of world history is not the present state of the reform or even its
future prospects. The central issue is the fact that the People's Republic of China can no longer act as a beacon for illiberal
forces around the world, whether they be guerrillas in some Asian jungle or middle class students in Paris. Maoism, rather
than being the pattern for Asia's future, became an anachronism, and it was the mainland Chinese who in fact were decisively
influenced by the prosperity and dynamism of their overseas co-ethnics - the ironic ultimate victory of Taiwan.
Important as these changes in China have been, however, it is developments in the Soviet Union - the original "homeland
of the world proletariat" - that have put the final nail in the coffin of the Marxist-Leninist alternative to liberal
democracy. It should be clear that in terms of formal institutions, not much has changed in the four years since Gorbachev
has come to power: free markets and the cooperative movement represent only a small part of the Soviet economy, which remains
centrally planned; the political system is still dominated by the Communist party, which has only begun to democratize internally
and to share power with other groups; the regime continues to assert that it is seeking only to modernize socialism and that
its ideological basis remains Marxism-Leninism; and, finally, Gorbachev faces a potentially powerful conservative opposition
that could undo many of the changes that have taken place to date. Moreover, it is hard to be too sanguine about the chances
for success of Gorbachev's proposed reforms, either in the sphere of economics or politics. But my purpose here is not to
analyze events in the short-term, or to make predictions for policy purposes, but to look at underlying trends in the sphere
of ideology and consciousness. And in that respect, it is clear that an astounding transformation has occurred.
Émigrés from the Soviet Union have been reporting for at least the last generation now that virtually nobody in that country
truly believed in Marxism-Leninism any longer, and that this was nowhere more true than in the Soviet elite, which continued
to mouth Marxist slogans out of sheer cynicism. The corruption and decadence of the late Brezhnev-era Soviet state seemed
to matter little, however, for as long as the state itself refused to throw into question any of the fundamental principles
underlying Soviet society, the system was capable of functioning adequately out of sheer inertia and could even muster some
dynamism in the realm of foreign and defense policy. Marxism-Leninism was like a magical incantation which, however absurd
and devoid of meaning, was the only common basis on which the elite could agree to rule Soviet society.
WHAT HAS happened in the four years since Gorbachev's coming to power is a revolutionary assault on the most fundamental
institutions and principles of Stalinism, and their replacement by other principles which do not amount to liberalism per
se but whose only connecting thread is liberalism. This is most evident in the economic sphere, where the reform economists
around Gorbachev have become steadily more radical in their support for free markets, to the point where some like Nikolai
Shmelev do not mind being compared in public to Milton Friedman. There is a virtual consensus among the currently dominant
school of Soviet economists now that central planning and the command system of allocation are the root cause of economic
inefficiency, and that if the Soviet system is ever to heal itself, it must permit free and decentralized decision-making
with respect to investment, labor, and prices. After a couple of initial years of ideological confusion, these principles
have finally been incorporated into policy with the promulgation of new laws on enterprise autonomy, cooperatives, and finally
in 1988 on lease arrangements and family farming. There are, of course, a number of fatal flaws in the current implementation
of the reform, most notably the absence of a thoroughgoing price reform. But the problem is no longer a conceptual one: Gorbachev
and his lieutenants seem to understand the economic logic of marketization well enough, but like the leaders of a Third World
country facing the IMF, are afraid of the social consequences of ending consumer subsidies and other forms of dependence on
the state sector.
In the political sphere, the proposed changes to the Soviet constitution, legal system, and party rules amount to much
less than the establishment of a liberal state. Gorbachev has spoken of democratization primarily in the sphere of internal
party affairs, and has shown little intention of ending the Communist party's monopoly of power; indeed, the political reform
seeks to legitimize and therefore strengthen the CPSU'S rule.[13] Nonetheless, the general principles underlying many of the
reforms - that the "people" should be truly responsible for their own affairs, that higher political bodies should
be answerable to lower ones, and not vice versa, that the rule of law should prevail over arbitrary police actions, with separation
of powers and an independent judiciary, that there should be legal protection for property rights, the need for open discussion
of public issues and the right of public dissent, the empowering of the Soviets as a forum in which the whole Soviet people
can participate, and of a political culture that is more tolerant and pluralistic - come from a source fundamentally alien
to the USSR's Marxist-Leninist tradition, even if they are incompletely articulated and poorly implemented in practice.
Gorbachev's repeated assertions that he is doing no more than trying to restore the original meaning of Leninism are themselves
a kind of Orwellian doublespeak. Gorbachev and his allies have consistently maintained that intraparty democracy was somehow
the essence of Leninism, and that the various lib era1 practices of open debate, secret ballot elections, and rule of law
were all part of the Leninist heritage, corrupted only later by Stalin. While almost anyone would look good compared to Stalin,
drawing so sharp a line between Lenin and his successor is questionable. The essence of Lenin's democratic centralism was
centralism, not democracy; that is, the absolutely rigid, monolithic, and disciplined dictatorship of a hierarchically organized
vanguard Communist party, speaking in the name of the demos. All of Lenin's vicious polemics against Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg,
and various other Menshevik and Social Democratic rivals, not to mention his contempt for "bourgeois legality" and
freedoms, centered around his profound conviction that a revolution could not be successfully made by a democratically run
organization.
Gorbachev's claim that he is seeking to return to the true Lenin is perfectly easy to understand: having fostered a thorough
denunciation of Stalinism and Brezhnevism as the root of the USSR's present predicament, he needs some point in Soviet history
on which to anchor the legitimacy of the CPSU'S continued rule. But Gorbachev's tactical requirements should not blind us
to the fact that the democratizing and decentralizing principles which he has enunciated in both the economic and political
spheres are highly subversive of some of the most fundamental precepts of both Marxism and Leninism. Indeed, if the bulk of
the present economic reform proposals were put into effect, it is hard to know how the Soviet economy would be more socialist
than those of other Western countries with large public sectors.
The Soviet Union could in no way be described as a liberal or democratic country now, nor do I think that it is terribly
likely that perestroika will succeed such that the label will be thinkable any time in the near future. But at the end of
history it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological
pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society. And in this respect I believe that something very
important has happened in the Soviet Union in the past few years: the criticisms of the Soviet system sanctioned by Gorbachev
have been so thorough and devastating that there is very little chance of going back to either Stalinism or Brezhnevism in
any simple way. Gorbachev has finally permitted people to say what they had privately understood for many years, namely, that
the magical incantations of Marxism-Leninism were nonsense, that Soviet socialism was not superior to the West in any respect
but was in fact a monumental failure. The conservative opposition in the USSR, consisting both of simple workers afraid of
unemployment and inflation and of party officials fearful of losing their jobs and privileges, is outspoken and may be strong
enough to force Gorbachev's ouster in the next few years. But what both groups desire is tradition, order, and authority;
they manifest no deep commitment to Marxism-Leninism, except insofar as they have invested much of their own lives in it.[14]
For authority to be restored in the Soviet Union after Gorbachev's demolition work, it must be on the basis of some new and
vigorous ideology which has not yet appeared on the horizon.
IF WE ADMIT for the moment that the fascist and communist challenges to liberalism are dead, are there any other ideological
competitors left? Or put another way, are there contradictions in liberal society beyond that of class that are not resolvable?
Two possibilities suggest themselves, those of religion and nationalism.
The rise of religious fundamentalism in recent years within the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions has been widely
noted. One is inclined to say that the revival of religion in some way attests to a broad unhappiness with the impersonality
and spiritual vacuity of liberal consumerist societies. Yet while the emptiness at the core of liberalism is most certainly
a defect in the ideology - indeed, a flaw that one does not need the perspective of religion to recognize[15] - it is not
at all clear that it is remediable through politics. Modern liberalism itself was historically a consequence of the weakness
of religiously-based societies which, failing to agree on the nature of the good life, could not provide even the minimal
preconditions of peace and stability. In the contemporary world only Islam has offered a theocratic state as a political alternative
to both liberalism and communism. But the doctrine has little appeal for non-Muslims, and it is hard to believe that the movement
will take on any universal significance. Other less organized religious impulses have been successfully satisfied within the
sphere of personal life that is permitted in liberal societies.
The other major "contradiction" potentially unresolvable by liberalism is the one posed by nationalism and other
forms of racial and ethnic consciousness. It is certainly true that a very large degree of conflict since the Battle of Jena
has had its roots in nationalism. Two cataclysmic world wars in this century have been spawned by the nationalism of the developed
world in various guises, and if those passions have been muted to a certain extent in postwar Europe, they are still extremely
powerful in the Third World. Nationalism has been a threat to liberalism historically in Germany, and continues to be one
in isolated parts of "post-historical" Europe like Northern Ireland.
But it is not clear that nationalism rep resents an irreconcilable contradiction in the heart of liberalism. In the first
place, nationalism is not one single phenomenon but several, ranging from mild cultural nostalgia to the highly organized
and elaborately articulated doctrine of National Socialism. Only systematic nationalisms of the latter sort can qualify as
a formal ideology on the level of liberalism or communism. The vast majority of the world's nationalist movements do not have
a political program beyond the negative desire of independence from some other group or people, and do not offer anything
like a comprehensive agenda for socio-economic organization. As such, they are compatible with doctrines and ideologies that
do offer such agendas. While they may constitute a source of conflict for liberal societies, this conflict does not arise
from liberalism itself so much as from the fact that the liberalism in question is incomplete. Certainly a great deal of the
world's ethnic and nationalist tension can be explained in terms of peoples who are forced to live in unrepresentative political
systems that they have not chosen.
While it is impossible to rule out the sudden appearance of new ideologies or previously unrecognized contradictions in
liberal societies, then, the present world seems to confirm that the fundamental principles of sociopolitical organization
have not advanced terribly far since 1806. Many of the wars and revolutions fought since that time have been undertaken in
the name of ideologies which claimed to be more advanced than liberalism, but whose pretensions were ultimately unmasked by
history. In the meantime, they have helped to spread the universal homogenous state to the point where it could have a significant
effect on the overall character of international relations.
IV
WHAT ARE the implications of the end of history for international relations? Clearly, the vast bulk of the Third World
remains very much mired in history, and will be a terrain of conflict for many years to come. But let us focus for the time
being on the larger and more developed states of the world who after all account for the greater part of world politics. Russia
and China are not likely to join the developed nations of the West as liberal societies any time in the foreseeable future,
but suppose for a moment that Marxism-Leninism ceases to be a factor driving the foreign policies of these states - a prospect
which, if not yet here, the last few years have made a real possibility. How will the overall characteristics of a de-ideologized
world differ from those of the one with which we are familiar at such a hypothetical juncture?
The most common answer is - not very much. For there is a very widespread belief among many observers of international
relations that underneath the skin of ideology is a hard core of great power national interest that guarantees a fairly high
level of competition and conflict between nations. Indeed, according to one academically popular school of international relations
theory, conflict inheres in the international system as such, and to understand the prospects for conflict one must look at
the shape of the system - for example, whether it is bipolar or multipolar - rather than at the specific character of the
nations and regimes that constitute it. This school in effect applies a Hobbesian view of politics to international relations,
and assumes that aggression and insecurity are universal characteristics of human societies rather than the product of specific
historical circumstances.
Believers in this line of thought take the relations that existed between the participants in the classical nineteenth
century European balance of power as a model for what a de-ideologized contemporary world would look like. Charles Krauthammer,
for example, recently explained that if as a result of Gorbachev's reforms the USSR is shorn of Marxist-Leninist ideology,
its behavior will revert to that of nineteenth century imperial Russia.[16] While he finds this more reassuring than the threat
posed by a communist Russia, he implies that there will still be a substantial degree of competition and conflict in the international
system, just as there was say between Russia and Britain or Wilhelmine Germany in the last century. This is, of course, a
convenient point of view for people who want to admit that something major is changing in the Soviet Union, but do not want
to accept responsibility for recommending the radical policy redirection implicit in such a view. But is it true?
In fact, the notion that ideology is a superstructure imposed on a substratum of permanent great power interest is a highly
questionable proposition. For the way in which any state defines its national interest is not universal but rests on some
kind of prior ideological basis, just as we saw that economic behavior is determined by a prior state of consciousness. In
this century, states have adopted highly articulated doctrines with explicit foreign policy agendas legitimizing expansionism,
like Marxism-Leninism or National Socialism.
THE EXPANSIONIST and competitive behavior of nineteenth-century European states rested on no less ideal a basis; it just
so happened that the ideology driving it was less explicit than the doctrines of the twentieth century. For one thing, most
"liberal" European societies were illiberal insofar as they believed in the legitimacy of imperialism, that is,
the right of one nation to rule over other nations without regard for the wishes of the ruled. The justifications for imperialism
varied from nation to nation, from a crude belief in the legitimacy of force, particularly when applied to non-Europeans,
to the White Man's Burden and Europe's Christianizing mission, to the desire to give people of color access to the culture
of Rabelais and Moliere. But whatever the particular ideological basis, every "developed" country believed in the
acceptability of higher civilizations ruling lower ones - including, incidentally, the United States with regard to the Philippines.
This led to a drive for pure territorial aggrandizement in the latter half of the century and played no small role in causing
the Great War.
The radical and deformed outgrowth of nineteenth-century imperialism was German fascism, an ideology which justified Germany's
right not only to rule over non-European peoples, but over all non-German ones. But in retrospect it seems that Hitler represented
a diseased bypath in the general course of European development, and since his fiery defeat, the legitimacy of any kind of
territorial aggrandizement has been thoroughly discredited.[17] Since the Second World War, European nationalism has been
defanged and shorn of any real relevance to foreign policy, with the consequence that the nineteenth-century model of great
power behavior has become a serious anachronism. The most extreme form of nationalism that any Western European state has
mustered since 1945 has been Gaullism, whose self-assertion has been confined largely to the realm of nuisance politics and
culture. International life for the part of the world that has reached the end of history is far more preoccupied with economics
than with politics or strategy.
The developed states of the West do maintain defense establishments and in the postwar period have competed vigorously
for influence to meet a worldwide communist threat. This behavior has been driven, however, by an external threat from states
that possess overtly expansionist ideologies, and would not exist in their absence. To take the "neo-realist" theory
seriously, one would have to believe that "natural" competitive behavior would reassert itself among the OECD states
were Russia and China to disappear from the face of the earth. That is, West Germany and France would arm themselves against
each other as they did in the 193Os, Australia and New Zealand would send military advisers to block each others' advances
in Africa, and the U.S.-Canadian border would become fortified. Such a prospect is, of course, ludicrous: minus Marxist-Leninist
ideology, we are far more likely to see the "Common Marketization" of world politics than the disintegration of
the EEC into nineteenth-century competitiveness. Indeed, as our experiences in dealing with Europe on matters such as terrorism
or Libya prove, they are much further gone than we down the road that denies the legitimacy of the use of force in international
politics, even in self-defense.
The automatic assumption that Russia shorn of its expansionist communist ideology should pick up where the czars left
off just prior to the Bolshevik Revolution is therefore a curious one. It assumes that the evolution of human consciousness
has stood still in the meantime, and that the Soviets, while picking up currently fashionable ideas in the realm of economics,
will return to foreign policy views a century out of date in the rest of Europe. This is certainly not what happened to China
after it began its reform process. Chinese competitiveness and expansionism on the world scene have virtually disappeared:
Beijing no longer sponsors Maoist insurgencies or tries to cultivate influence in distant African countries as it did in the
1960s. This is not to say that there are not troublesome aspects to contemporary Chinese foreign policy, such as the reckless
sale of ballistic missile technology in the Middle East; and the PRC continues to manifest traditional great power behavior
in its sponsorship of the Khmer Rouge against Vietnam. But the former is explained by commercial motives and the latter is
a vestige of earlier ideologically-based rivalries. The new China far more resembles Gaullist France than pre-World War I
Germany.
The real question for the future, however, is the degree to which Soviet elites have assimilated the consciousness of
the universal homogenous state that is post-Hitler Europe. From their writings and from my own personal contacts with them,
there is no question in my mind that the liberal Soviet intelligentsia rallying around Gorbachev have arrived at the end-of-history
view in a remarkably short time, due in no small measure to the contacts they have had since the Brezhnev era with the larger
European civilization around them. "New political thinking," the general rubric for their views, describes a world
dominated by economic concerns, in which there are no ideological grounds for major conflict between nations, and in which,
consequently, the use of military force becomes less legitimate. As Foreign Minister Shevardnadze put it in mid-1988:
The struggle between two opposing systems is no longer a determining tendency of the present-day era. At the modern stage,
the ability to build up material wealth at an accelerated rate on the basis of front-ranking science and high-level techniques
and technology, and to distribute it fairly, and through joint efforts to restore and protect the resources necessary for
mankind's survival acquires decisive importance.[18]
The post-historical consciousness represented by "new thinking" is only one possible future for the Soviet Union,
however. There has always been a very strong current of great Russian chauvinism in the Soviet Union, which has found freer
expression since the advent of glasnost. It may be possible to return to traditional Marxism-Leninism for a while as a simple
rallying point for those who want to restore the authority that Gorbachev has dissipated. But as in Poland, Marxism-Leninism
is dead as a mobilizing ideology: under its banner people cannot be made to work harder, and its adherents have lost confidence
in themselves. Unlike the propagators of traditional Marxism-Leninism, however, ultranationalists in the USSR believe in their
Slavophile cause passionately, and one gets the sense that the fascist alternative is not one that has played itself out entirely
there.
The Soviet Union, then, is at a fork in the road: it can start down the path that was staked out by Western Europe forty-five
years ago, a path that most of Asia has followed, or it can realize its own uniqueness and remain stuck in history. The choice
it makes will be highly important for us, given the Soviet Union's size and military strength, for that power will continue
to preoccupy us and slow our realization that we have already emerged on the other side of history.
V
THE PASSING of Marxism-Leninism first from China and then from the Soviet Union will mean its death as a living ideology
of world historical significance. For while there may be some isolated true believers left in places like Managua, Pyongyang,
or Cambridge, Massachusetts, the fact that there is not a single large state in which it is a going concern undermines completely
its pretensions to being in the vanguard of human history. And the death of this ideology means the growing "Common Marketization"
of international relations, and the diminution of the likelihood of large-scale conflict between states.
This does not by any means imply the end of international conflict per se. For the world at that point would be divided
between a part that was historical and a part that was post-historical. Conflict between states still in history, and between
those states and those at the end of history, would still be possible. There would still be a high and perhaps rising level
of ethnic and nationalist violence, since those are impulses incompletely played out, even in parts of the post-historical
world. Palestinians and Kurds, Sikhs and Tamils, Irish Catholics and Walloons, Armenians and Azeris, will continue to have
their unresolved grievances. This implies that terrorism and wars of national liberation will continue to be an important
item on the international agenda. But large-scale conflict must involve large states still caught in the grip of history,
and they are what appear to be passing from the scene.
The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one's life for a purely
abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced
by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated
consumer demands. In the post-historical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of
the museum of human history. I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history
existed. Such nostalgia, in fact, will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some
time to come. Even though I recognize its inevitability, I have the most ambivalent feelings for the civilization that has
been created in Europe since 1945, with its north Atlantic and Asian offshoots. Perhaps this very prospect of centuries of
boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.
Notes:
1. Kojève's best known work is his Introduction à la lecture de Hegel (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1947), which is a transcript
of the Ecole Practique lectures from the 1930's. This book is available in English entitled Introduction to the Reading of
Hegel arranged by Raymond Queneau, edited by Allan Bloom, and translated by James Nichols (New York: Basic Books, 1969). (back
to text)
2. In this respect Kojève stands in sharp contrast to contemporary German interpreters of Hegel like Herbert Marcuse who,
being more sympathetic to Marx, regarded Hegel ultimately as an historically bound and incomplete philosopher. (back to text)
3. Kojève alternatively identified the end of history with the postwar "American way of life," toward which
he thought the Soviet Union was moving as well. (back to text)
4. This notion was expressed in the famous aphorism from the preface to the Philosophy of History to the effect that "everything
that is rational is real, and everything that is real is rational." (back to text)
5. Indeed, for Hegel the very dichotomy between the ideal and material worlds was itself only an apparent one that was
ultimately overcome by the self-conscious subject; in his system, the material world is itself only an aspect of mind. (back
to text)
6. In fact, modern economists, recognizing that man does not always behave as a profit-maximizer, posit a "utility"
function, utility being either income or some other good that can be maximized: leisure, sexual satisfaction, or the pleasure
of philosophizing. That profit must be replaced with a value like utility indicates the cogency of the idealist perspective.
(back to text)
7. One need look no further than the recent performance of Vietnamese immigrants in the U.S. school system when compared
to their black of Hispanic classmates to realize that culture and consciousness are absolutely crucial to explain not only
economic behavior but virtually every other important aspect of life as well. (back to text)
8. I understand that a full explanation of the origins of the reform movements in China and Russia is a good deal more
complicated than this simple formula would suggest. The Soviet reform, for example, was motivated in good measure by Moscow's
sense of insecurity in the technological-military realm. Nonetheless, neither country ion the eve of its reforms was in such
a state of material crisis that one could have predicted the surprising reform paths ultimately taken. (back to text)
9. It is still not clear whether the Soviet people are as "Protestant" as Gorbachev and will follow him down
that path. (back to text)
10. The internal politics of the Byzantine Empire at the time of Justinian revolved around a conflict between the so-called
monophysites and monothelites, who believed that the unity of the Holy Trinity was alternatively one of nature or of will.
This conflict corresponded to some extent to one between proponents of different racing teams in the Hippodrome in Byzantium
and led to a not insignificant level of political violence. Modern historians would tend to seek the roots of such conflicts
in antagonisms between social classes or some other modern economic category, being unwilling to believe that men would kill
each other over the nature of the Trinity. (back to text)
11. I am not using the term "fascism" here in its most precise sense, fully aware of the frequent misuse of
this term to denounce anyone to the right of the user. "Fascism" here denotes nay organized ultra nationalist movement
with universalistic pretensions - not universalistic with regard to its nationalism, of course, since the latter is exclusive
by definition, but with regard to the movement's belief in its right to rule other people. Hence Imperial Japan would qualify
as fascist while former strongman Stoessner's Paraguay or Pinochet's Chile would not. Obviously fascist ideologies cannot
be universalistic in the sense of Marxism or liberalism, but the structure of the doctrine can be transferred from country
to country. (back to text)
12. I use the example of Japan with some caution, since Kojève late in his life came to conclude that Japan, with its
culture based on purely formal arts, proved that the universal homogenous state was not victorious and that history had perhaps
not ended. See the long note at the end of the second edition of Introduction à la Lecture de Hegel, 462-3. (back to text)
13. This is not true in Poland and Hungary, however, whose Communist parties have taken moves toward true power sharing
and pluralism. (back to text)
14. This is particularly true of the leading Soviet conservative, former Second Secretary Yegor Ligachev, who has publicly
recognized many of the deep defects of the Brezhnev period. (back to text)
15. I am thinking particularly of Rousseau and the Western philosophical tradition that flows from him that was highly
critical of Lockean or Hobbesian liberalism, though one could criticize liberalism from the standpoint of classical political
philosophy as well. (back to text)
16. See his article, "Beyond the Cold War," New Republic, December 19, 1988. (back to text)
17. It took European colonial powers like France several years after the war to admit the illegitimacy of their empires,
but decolonialization was an inevitable consequence of the Allied victory which had been based on the promise of a restoration
of democratic freedoms. (back to text)
18. Vestnik Ministerstva Inostrannikh Del SSSR no. 15 (August 1988), 27-46. "New thinking" does of course serve
a propagandistic purpose in persuading Western audiences of Soviet good intentions. But the fact that it is good propaganda
does not mean that is formulators do not take many of its ideas seriously. (back to text)
** Summer 1989, The National Interest.
* Francis Fukuyama is deputy director of the State Department's policy planning staff and former analyst at the RAND Corporation.
This article is based on a lecture presented at the University of Chicago's John M. Olin Center and to Nathan Tarcov and Allan
Bloom for their support in this and many earlier endeavors. The opinions expresses in this article do not reflect those of
the RAND Corporation or of any agency of the U.S. government.
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