RE: FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
Earlier this morning I had occasion to thank John in a PM for his fine post. Now I can truly laud him for having helped me to discover Francis Fukuyama. For anyone that's interested, this was "mind blowing" for me, and I want to share the one presentation I was quickly able to find on the net.
So much of what you find on this thread is what I call "ego fluff", written not to enhance the knowledge or understanding of readers, but to flatter theirs. I know that I am guilty of this as well.
SO HERE IS FRANCIS FUKUYAMA IN AUSTRAILIA IN 2002. I WOULD URGE EVERYONE TO READ THIS SPEECH AT LEAST ONCE BEFORE THEY POST AGAIN
Francis Fukuyama PART I
I WOULD LIKE TO BEGIN by expressing my gratitude to The Centre for Independent Studies and its director, Greg Lindsay, for inviting me to Australia and giving me the opportunity to deliver the prestigious Bonython Lecture. I follow in a line of extraordinarily distinguished lecturers, and am humbled by the expectations they have established. I would also like to express a special word of gratitude to Owen Harries, who, early on in his tenure as editor of The National Interest, encouraged me to write the article that eventually became ‘The End of History?’. It was he who gave it prominence and encouraged debate over it, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Like many Americans, I have been preoccupied since September 11 trying to understand the meaning of this event and how the world has changed as a result of it. An accounting has been demanded of me in particular, since I argued 12 years ago that we had reached the ‘end of history’. September 11 would seem to qualify, prima facie, as an historical event, and the fact that it was perpetrated by a group of Islamic terrorists who reject virtually all aspects of the modern, Western world, lends credence, at least on the surface, to Samuel Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ hypothesis.
I have developed a standard answer to this challenge, which incidentally will not be the subject of my talk
tonight. The standard answer goes something like this. The ‘end of history’ hypothesis was about the process of modernisation. Progressive intellectuals around the world spent much of the last century and a half believing that historical progress would result in an evolution of modern societies toward socialism. In more recent years, they have held that societies could modernise and yet remain fundamentally different culturally. My hypothesis was that there was such a thing as a single, coherent modernisation process, but that it led not to socialism or to a variety of culturally-determined locations, but rather to liberal democracy and market-oriented economics as the only viable choices. The process of modernisation was, moreover, a universal one that would sooner or later drag all societies in its train.
Understood in this fashion, September 11 represents a real challenge, but not an ultimately convincing one. Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and radical Islamism more generally, do in fact represent ideological challenges to Western liberal democracy that are in certain ways sharper than those offered by Communism. But in the long run, it is hard to see that Islamism offers much of a realistic alternative as a governing ideology for real world societies. Not only does it have limited appeal to non-Muslims; it does not meet the aspirations of the vast majority of Muslims themselves. In the countries that have had recent experience of living under an actual Muslim theocracy—Iran and Afghanistan—there is every evidence that it has become extremely unpopular. Thus, while fanatical Islamists armed with weapons of mass destruction pose a severe threat in the short-run, the longer-term challenge in the battle of ideas is not going to come from this quarter. September 11 represents a serious detour, but in the end modernisation and globalisation will remain the central structuring principles of world politics.
I want, however, to explore another important issue that is related to the question of the end of history that has been raised by events since September 11, namely, whether the ‘West’, which was in my earlier account the ultimate goal of the historical process, is really a coherent concept, and whether the United States and its foreign policy might themselves become the central issues in international politics.
Reactions to September 11
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard published a long piece in Le Monde in which he argued that ‘Ultimately, it is they [i.e., the terrorists] who’ve done the deed, but it is we who have wanted it. . . . Terrorism is immoral, and it responds to a globalisation that is itself immoral.’ His image is one of France, and Europe more generally, as a island of civilisation caught in a struggle between two morally equivalent fundamentalisms, that of the United States and of the radical Islamists.
Baudrillard does not, of course, speak for all Frenchmen, and his piece was quickly denounced in Le Monde by Alain Minc who said that it reflected ‘the French intelligensia’s traditional inability to recognise that a hierarchy of values exists’. But Baudrillard’s view, while phrased in an offensive way unique to French intellectuals, represents more of an undercurrent in Europe than many Americans realise or are inclined to admit. The idea that the United States was only getting what it deserved in the Word Trade Center/Pentagon attacks was a far from uncommon view, not just in Europe but in many other parts of the world.
There was, of course, a large, spontaneous outpouring of support for the United States and for Americans around the world after September 11, with European governments lining up immediately to help the US prosecute its ‘war on terrorism’. But with the demonstration of total American military dominance that came with the successful rousting of al-Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan, new expressions of anti-Americanism began to pour forth. After President Bush’s denunciation of the ‘axis of evil’ in his late January State of the Union address, it was not just European intellectuals but European politicians and publics more generally that began to criticise the United States on a wide variety of fronts. According to Will Hutton, the Labourite journalist, Britain’s US ally is ‘not the same good America . . . that reconstructed Europe and led an international liberal economic and social order’(1) Rather, it had been taken over by a group of crazed conservatives and was now the chief source of global instability. In France, a book became a bestseller arguing that September 11 was not the work of Muslim extremists but of a cabal of conservatives within the US government. (2) According to one poll, some 30 percent of French people regard the United States as France’s chief enemy. While many Americans regard September 11 as a broad attack on Western civilisation, Europeans are much more likely to regard it as a response to specifically American policies, representing a risk from which they are largely immune.
What is going on here? The end of history was supposed to be about the victory of Western, not simply American, values and institutions. The Cold War was fought by alliances based on shared values of freedom and democracy. And yet an enormous gulf has opened up in American and European perceptions about the world, and the sense of shared values is increasingly frayed. Does the concept of the ‘West’ still make sense in the first decade of the 21st century? Is the fracture line over globalisation actually a division not between the West and the Rest, but between the United States and the Rest?
And where will Australia fit in such a divided world? It is historically tied more closely to Europe than to America, but as a land of new settlement it shares many characteristics with the United States. It is situated, moreover, in a part of the world in which American power and influence matter greatly in the maintenance of peace and an open international trading order.
In my view, the idea of the West remains a coherent one, and that there remain critical shared values, institutions, and interests that will continue to bind the world’s developed democracies, and Europe and the United States, in particular. But there are some deeper differences emerging between Western democracies that will be highly neuralgic in America’s dealings with the world in the coming years that need critical attention by policymakers and by, yes, statesmen.
The nature of the rift between America and its allies
In the remainder of this lecture I will refer repeatedly to differences between Europe and the United States. But it should be kept in mind that ‘Europe’ in this context is more of a placeholder for global attitudes critical of American foreign policy. Europeans, of course, are themselves divided in their views of the US; the views I characterise as typical of them are often broadly representative of left-of-centre opinion in a variety of countries around the world, including Australia and New Zealand. Asian countries from Japan to Malaysia have voiced similar misgivings about American unilateralism in the wake of September 11. Some views, however, related to the need to devolve sovereignty to supranational organisations, are peculiar to the historical experience of members of the European Union.
The ostensible issues raised in the US-European disputes since the ‘axis of evil’ speech for the most part revolve around alleged American unilateralism and international law. There is by now a familiar list of European complaints about American policy, including but not limited to the Bush Administration’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, its failure to ratify the Rio Pact on biodiversity, its withdrawal from the ABM treaty and pursuit of missile defence, its opposition to the ban on land mines, its treatment of al-Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, its opposition to new provisions of the biological warfare convention, and most recently its opposition to the International Criminal Court.
The most serious act of US unilateralism in European eyes concerns the Bush Administration’s announced intention to bring about regime change in Iraq, if necessary through a go-it-alone invasion. The axis of evil speech did indeed mark a very important change in American foreign policy from deterrence to a policy of active preemption of terrorism. This doctrine was further amplified in Bush’s West Point speech in June, in which he declared ‘the war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action.’
The European view is that Europe is seeking to create a genuine rule-based international order suitable to the circumstances of the post-Cold War world. That world, free of sharp ideological conflicts and large-scale military competition, is one that gives substantially more room for consensus, dialogue, and negotiation as ways of settling disputes. They are horrified by the Bush Administration’s announcement of a virtually open-ended doctrine of preemption against terrorists or states that sponsor terrorists, in which the United States and the United States alone decides when and where to use force. In Europe, the nation-state to an increasing extent has been dissociated from military power, despite the fact that the modern state built on centralised power was born on that continent.
Robert Kagan, in a brilliant recent article in Policy Review, (3) put the current difference between the United States and Europe as follows. The Europeans are the ones who actually believe they are living at the end of history, that is, in a largely peaceful world that to an increasing degree can be governed by law, norms, and international agreements. In this world, power politics and classical realpolitik have become obsolete. Americans, by contrast, think they are still living in history, and need to use traditional power-political means to deal with threats from Iraq, al-Qaeda, and other malign forces. According to Kagan, the Europeans are half right: they have indeed created an end-of-history world for themselves within the European Union, where sovereignty has given way to supranational organisation. What they don’t understand, however, is that the peace and safety of their European bubble is guaranteed ultimately by American military power. Absent that, they themselves would be dragged backwards into history.
Is the rift genuine?
This, at least, is the popularly accepted account of American unilateralism and European emphasis on international law and institutions. We need to ask, however, whether it is in fact accurate, and whether the US has consistently been more unilateralist than Europe. The truth of the matter here is far more complicated, with the differences between the US and Europe being much more nuanced.
Liberal internationalism, after all, has a long and honoured place in American foreign policy. The United States was, after all, the country that promoted the League of Nations, the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, the GATT/WTO, and a host of other international organisations. There are a huge number of international governance organisations in the world today in which the US participates as an active, if not the most active member, from standards-setting, nuclear power safety, and scientific cooperation, to aviation safety, bank settlements, drug regulation, accounting standards/corporate governance, and telecommunications.
It is useful here to make a distinction between those forms of liberal internationalism that are primarily economic, and those that have a more political or security dimension. Particularly in recent years, the United States has focused on international institutions that have promoted international trade and investment. It has put substantial effort into creating a rule-based international trade and investment regime with stronger and more autonomous decision-making authority. The motives for this are obvious: Americans benefit strongly from and indeed dominate the global economy, which is why globalisation bears a ‘made in the USA’ label.
In the realm of economics, the Europeans don’t have all that great a record with regard to respect for multilateral rules when compared to the United States. They have been on their high horse this year because of American actions with regard to steel and agricultural subsidies, and they are right to complain about American hypocrisy with regard to free trade. But this I regard as kind of normal hypocrisy: all countries act in contradiction of declared free trade principles, and the Europeans have been notorious for among other things agricultural subsidies maintained at higher levels and over longer periods of time than American ones. America is guilty only of the most recent outbreak of hypocrisy. And in any event, the American administration can argue that its backsliding on trade was a tactical retreat undertaken for the sake of Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), which was in fact granted by the US Congress in early August. With TPA the Bush Administration has announced an ambitious trade liberalisation agenda including the ending of agricultural subsidies, though at this point the agenda remains an unfulfilled promise.
There are a number of areas where the Europeans have acted unilaterally in economic matters, and in ways that at times contravene the existing legal order. The EU resisted unfavourable decisions against them on bananas for nine years, and beef hormones for even longer. They have announced a precautionary principle with regard to genetically modified foods, which is very difficult to reconcile with the WTO’s sanitary and phytosanitary rules. Indeed, the Europeans have been violating their own rules with regard to GM foods, with certain member states setting standards different from those of the community itself. The European Competition Commission under Mario Monti successfully blocked the merger of GE and Honeywell when the deal had been approved by American and Canadian regulators, in ways that promoted suspicions that the EU was simply acting to protect specific European interests. Finally, the EU has succeeded in exporting its data privacy rules to the United States through its safe harbour arrangements.
For all their talk of wanting to establish a rule-based international order, the Europeans haven’t done that well within the EU itself. As John van Oudenaren has argued, the Europeans have developed a decision-making system of Byzantine complexity, with overlapping and inconsistent rules and weak enforcement powers. (4) The European Commission often doesn’t have the power even to monitor compliance of member states with its own directives, much less the ability to make them conform. This fits with an attitude towards law in certain parts of Europe that sees declarative intent often of greater importance than actual implementation, and which Americans tend to see instead as undermining the very rule of law.
It should be noted that Australia and New Zealand are actually in a much better position to criticise American hypocrisy on trade issues than are the Europeans, since neither one has anything like a Common Agricultural Policy or the clout to enforce safety or privacy rules unilaterally on other countries. Both countries, being highly dependent on agricultural exports, have been strong supporters of free trade in recent years and are particularly vulnerable to American agricultural subsidies. New Zealand in particular since the mid-1980s has moved to one of the lowest levels of agricultural protection of any country in the world.
The second type of liberal internationalism has to do with politics and security. With the exception of the two environmental agreements (Rio and Kyoto), all of the US-European disputes in recent months have concerned security-related issues (the International Criminal Court may not seem like a security matter, but the reason that the United States does not want to participate in it is out of fear that its soldiers and officials may be held criminally liable by the Court in the conduct of their duties). It is in this realm that the tables are turned and European charges of American unilateralism are made.
It is possible to overstate the importance of these disputes. A great deal of European irritation with the United States arises from stylistic matters, and from the Bush Administration’s strange failure to consult, explain, justify, and cajole in the manner of previous administrations. The administration could have let ratification of Kyoto languish in Congress as the Clinton administration did, rather than casually announcing withdrawal from the pact at a luncheon for NATO ambassadors. Europeans did not like the religious language of the ‘axis of evil’, nor the fact that this major policy shift was announced as it were on the fly without prior notification or explanation. The United States has had a consistent record of using strong-arm tactics to shape international agreements to its liking, and then to walk away from them at the last moment. This pattern goes all the way back to Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations, and was continued in negotiations over the Rio Pact, Kyoto, and the International Criminal Court (ICC). Even if you are skeptical about the value of international institutions, it is not difficult to see why non-Americans might get a little irritated at this kind of behavior.
The foregoing suggests that much of the European-American rift concerns style rather than substance. The Clinton administration talked a multilateralist game, while the Bush administration has at times asserted what amounts to a kind of principled unilateralism; in fact, policy between the two administrations doesn’t differ in substance all that much. Clinton may have signed the Kyoto and ICC treaties, but he knew he wouldn’t spend much political capital in a hopeless effort to get them through Congress. On the other hand, the US effort in Afghanistan made use of a reasonably broad coalition of forces.
But while it is tempting to say the problem is simply stylistic, I think that it is fundamentally wrong. There is in fact a deeper issue of principle between the United States and Europe that will ensure that transatlantic relations will remain neuralgic through the years to come. The disagreement is not over the principles of liberal democracy, which both sides share, but over where the ultimate source of liberal democratic legitimacy lies.
To put it rather schematically and over-simply, Americans tend not to see any source of democratic legitimacy higher than the constitutional democratic nation-state. To the extent that any international organisation has legitimacy, it is because duly constituted democratic majorities have handed that legitimacy up to them in a negotiated, contractual process. Such legitimacy can be withdrawn at any time by the contracting parties; international law and organisation have no existence independent of this type of voluntary agreement between sovereign nation-states. |
