This is a total misread of Hegel's "end of history," IMO.
"The dearth of ideas is the really true part of Fukuyama," Pierre Hassner, a French political philosopher, said recently. "In this sense, history really is finished."
Bored No More: History's End Scares Europe
By RICHARD BERNSTEIN
The New York Times
May 8, 2005
BERLIN — The Europeans watched collectively last month as the Airbus A380, the giant plane they see in competition with the United States, did something it hadn't done yet. It took off.
Unfortunately, Europe as a whole these days sometimes seems perilously close to crashing. Or at least in a state of collective perplexity about its role in the world, its identity, its future.
The most striking sign of that: the possibility that the French, despite their historical role as the chief inspirers of the European dream, might vote against the proposed Constitution for the enlarged 25-member union in a referendum at the end of May. France's president, Jacques Chirac, has warned that a "non" would mean not that Europe crashes but that "it stops" - for lack of its Constitution, painstakingly negotiated for four years.
Why this continued, perhaps growing, resistance to the idea of a unified Europe? A recent scene sums up the situation. A few days ago, Mr. Chirac went on French TV to answer questions on the Constitution posed by a group of 18- to 30-year-olds.
There are two solutions, he said. One "would lead to a Europe swept along by an ultraliberal current, which would be an Anglo-Saxon and Atlanticist Europe," he said. "That's not what we would wish." What Europe needs instead, he said, is "to be organized and strong so as to impose its humanism, its values." In other words, to have clear rules to guide its further movement ahead.
The response of the young people was strong and persistent skepticism, and, perhaps more important, pessimism. "I have the impression," one of them said, "that a little something is being hidden in this text, and that is that the text follows a liberal logic." By "liberal" the young person did not mean American-style liberalism, à la Edward M. Kennedy. He meant liberal in the European sense of an unregulated free-market economy of cheap labor competition that will cause Europe to jettison its social protections. The implication was that "liberalism" is what the bureaucrats in Brussels, the European Union's capital, want, and what the citizens of the individual nations like France must protect themselves against.
Yet the resistance runs deeper than that, and is more perplexing because Mr. Chirac has a point: Europe is more peaceful, prosperous, healthy and secure than ever in its history. Nevertheless, the French are crabby. The British, a majority of whom in recent polls also opposed the European Constitution, just voted to keep Tony Blair as prime minister after an idea-free campaign dominated by the issue of his credibility, or lack of it. A recent poll of Germans showed only 28 percent expecting life to be "very good" in the next 5 to 10 years and 40 percent saying they are unhappy.
"We look at the future as an opportunity," said Jeffrey Gedmin, an American conservative who is director of the Aspen Institute branch in Germany. "They look at it as a risk."
Perhaps an explanation for the current European spiritual condition was provided in that famous 1992 essay by Francis Fukuyama, who argued that history has ended. His idea was that the last great ideological struggle ended with the fall of Soviet Communism and the triumph of the liberal democratic idea, and that there could be no more advanced idea.
That is a cause for rejoicing. But as Mr. Fukuyama wrote, there was also something dispiriting about a post-historical world in which the Big Question no longer revolves around freedom but over how much New Zealand butter a nation could import.
"It is obvious by now that the European Union has become the framework for the disappearance of centuries of belligerence, and that's a fact," Michael Naumann, publisher of the German weekly Die Zeit, said. "But it has become so totally accepted that we won't go at each other's throats any more that people get bored."
In this sense, the European Union, which will include 27 countries and more than 500 million people by 2007, was made to be boring. Europeans have had more than their share of history - two world wars, dictatorships, German divisions, Soviet occupations - and there is no great appetite here for more of it.
" 'The rockets' red glare, bombs bursting in air,' sounds pretty good to an American," Mr. Gedmin said. "We say it at baseball games. But Germans don't want to hear about bombs bursting in air. They had that at Dresden."
So it is natural that the Europeans would focus on narrow matters of economic interest. "The dearth of ideas is the really true part of Fukuyama," Pierre Hassner, a French political philosopher, said recently. "In this sense, history really is finished."
But he and others disagree about the end-of-history argument; or, at least, they feel Europe doesn't represent the end of history Mr. Fukuyama had in mind. Even if he felt bored by New Zealand butter, his end of history was essentially a happy situation.
Europeans aren't happy. They are anxious, threatened not just by the Brussels bureaucracy but by immigration, economic stagnation and unemployment. "It's a nightmare of the end of history," said Alexander Adler, a commentator at Le Figaro, the French daily. "I don't think that Fukuyama thought it would lead to a foundering of historical optimism."
Mr. Hassner added to this idea: "The mood is not one of satisfaction or boredom but one of threat."
"In this sense," he said, "it's not the end of history but the beginning of a world that one doesn't understand. It's this feeling of having a big wind carrying us forward but we don't know where we are going."
nytimes.com |
