History Has No End
By VICTOR DAVIS HANSON Mr. Hanson teaches classics at California State University at Fresno and is a contributing editor of City Journal, from whose latest issue this is adapted. NY Sun
Writing as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Francis Fukuyama famously announced the “End of History.” The world, he argued, was fast approaching the final stage of its political evolution. Western democratic capitalism had proved itself superior to its historical rivals and would find acceptance.
Here were the communist regimes dropping into the dustbin of history while dictatorships and statist economies in Asia and South America were toppling. A new worldwide consumer class was evolving, leaving behind such retrograde notions as nationhood and national honor. As a result, war would grow rare or vanish.
Gone, or going fast, was the old stuff of history — the often larger-than-life men who sorted out on the battlefield the conflicts of traditions and values that once divided nations. And Mr. Fukuyama acknowledged that the End of History would have a downside as sophisticated consumers became lotus-eaters, hooked on channel surfing and material comforts.
How naive all this sounds today.The looming threat of terrorism has shown that a global embrace of modern democracy is a distant hope. Equally striking, it’s not just the West and the non-democratic world that are diverging; the West itself is pulling apart. Differences between America and Europe about how citizens should live are growing.
A Fukuyaman might counter that terrorism is a bump on the road to universal democracy, prosperity, and peace.Whether certain Middle Eastern terrorist regimes know it,this argument would run, the budding spiritual and material desires of the masses for all things Western eventually will make them more like us.
In fact, rather than bringing us all together, as Mr. Fukuyama predicted, the spread of English as the global lingua franca, of accessible, inexpensive high technology, and of universal fashion and communication has led to chaos as often as calm. And these developments have incited envy, resentment, and anger among traditional societies.
The new technologies, despite Mr. Fukuyama, do not make liberal democrats out of our enemies but simply allow them to do their destructive work more effectively. Even though globalization’s malcontents profess hatred for capitalist democracy, they use the West’s technology against us.
Where is the proof that freedom must follow in the train of affluence, as Fukuyama holds? And where is the evidence that consumers will become comfort-loving pacifists? America, too, seems as subject to history as ever. Abandoning the belief that we can check dictators with words and bribes, we’re returning to military activism.
As for Europe, surely we can see Fukuyama’s post-historical future shaping up, in an increasingly hedonistic life-style that puts pleasure ahead of national pride or convictions. Europeans say that reflection on their checkered past has taught them to reject wars, to mediate, not deter, and to trust in Enlightenment rationality instead of primitive emotions surrounding God, family, and country. Look closer, though, and you’ll discover the pulse of history beating beneath Europe’s postmodern surface.
During the Cold War,the threat of the Soviet Union kept in check the rivalries of Europe’s old nations. With the Evil Empire’s collapse, the European nations’ age-old drive for status,influence, and power slowly started to reassert itself, increasing tensions.
Europe’s resurgent political ambitions and passions are even more apparent in its relations with America, which hardly squares with the End-of-History model, even though the Europeans were making post-historical complaints that America was acting like the Lone Ranger and even though the European position was that international diplomacy could eventually handle the Iraq problem.
In fact, the European opposition to America over Iraq and the fuss the European nations made about international organizations and diplomacy had more to do with realpolitik — the desire to answer American influence and champion their own power — than they did with belief in the obsolescence of
national identity or military force.
The dustup between the Old Europeans and America over Iraq only widened a trans-Atlantic rift, the product of historical, cultural, and political differences between Europe and America. Resentment of us runs deep.This is a residue of World War II. No good deed goes unpunished.
What’s more, European animosity toward America has a snobbish component — an anti-bourgeois disdain that is the legacy of Europe’s socialist left and ancien-régime right.Criticisms of America often start out on the left — we’re too hegemonic and don’t care about poor countries — then veer to the aristocratic right: We’re a motley sort, promoting vulgar food and mass entertainment.
Our old-fashioned belief in right and wrong also infuriates the Europeans. Americans have an ingrained distrust of moral laxity masquerading as “sophistication,” and our dissident religious heritage has made us comfortable with making clear-cut moral choices in politics — “simplistic” choices, Euros would say.
It is precisely because we recognize the existence of evil, pure and simple, that we feel justified in using force to strip power from ogres. Europeans, cynical in politics and morals, think that this attitude makes us loose cannons.
Paradoxically, the most consequential reason Continental Europe and America are pulling apart is the European Union itself.European visionaries have had a long history of dreaming up and seeking to implement with murderous efficiency nationalist or socialist utopias.The European Union,benign as it currently seems, is the latest manifestation of this minatory utopian spirit.
The E.U.’s greatest hubris is to imagine that it can overcome the historical allegiances and political cultures of Europe’s many nations by creating a “European” man, freed from local attachments and resentments, conflicting interests, ethnicity, and differing visions of the good life, while wedded to rationality, egalitarianism, secularism, and the enlightened rule of bureaucrats.
All that makes this squaring of the circle plausible is Europe’s choice to spend little on defense, which allows more money for social services — a choice itself resting on the utopian assumption that the world has entered an era in which national disagreements can be resolved peacefully through international organizations — above all, the United Nations. Unfortunately, like Europe’s bygone brave new worlds, the E.U. is deeply anti-democratic and used by elites to grab power while mouthing platitudes about “brotherhood.”
As for America, the E.U. is so contemptuous that anti-Americanism often seems to be its founding principle. Nothing is more foreign to statist utopian fantasies than the American emphasis on individual liberty, local self-government, equality under the law, and slow, imperfect reform.
The skeptical Founding Fathers, influenced by the British Enlightenment, built a republic based on the anti-utopian belief that men are fallible and selfinterested, love their property, and can best manage their affairs locally.
The Founders saw the café theorizing of Continental elites and French philosophers as a danger to good government, which requires institutional checks and balances and a citizenry of perennially vigilant individual citizens. From America’s beginnings, that spirit of rugged individualism and self-reliance found a home here and stands opposed to collectivism.
The resulting split between America and Europe is of seismic importance. Though the European Union may offer superficial relief, in light of the Continent’s bloody history, it constitutes a potential long-term threat to America and the world.
To the extent that the E.U. succeeds in forging a common European identity, anti-Americanism will likely be its lodestar. Of course, it will fail, because for most people being a European could never be as meaningful as being a Frenchman or a German. And even in failure, the project could be catastrophic: By denigrating a healthy natural sense of nationhood, the E.U. risks unleashing a militaristic chauvinism. Behind the pretense that a dash of multinationalism and pacifist platitudes have transformed Europe into an Endof-History society, it is still mostly the Continent of old,torn by envy and pride and conjuring up utopian fantasies of pan-European rule while nationalist resentments fester.That’s what makes the question of European re-armament so crucial. Should Europe rearm, it could field forces as strong as our own. If the Europeans insist on empowering unaccountable international organizations such as the U.N., we should at least try to make them more accountable and harder to use as masks for power-political ends. America seeks neither a hostile nor a subservient Europe, but one of confident democratic allies such as the U.K. The U.N. has never truly prevented or concluded a war. We stand a better chance of bringing about a bright future if we remember that man’s nature is unchanging — and that, therefore, history never ends.
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