Francis Fukuyama, Democracy versus culture
June 29th, 02007 by Stewart Brand
Francis Fukuyama began by describing the four most significant challenges to the thesis in his famed 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man. In the book he proposed that humanity’s economic progress over the past 10,000 years was driven by the accumulation of science and technology over time. That connection is direct and reliable.
Less direct and reliable, but very important, is the sequence from economic progress to the adoption of liberal democracy. Political modernization accompanies economic modernization. This is a deep force of history, the book claims.
Fukuyama describes the rise of the idea of human rights in the West as a secularization of Christian doctrine. That led to accountability mechanisms— “You can’t have good governance without feedback loops.” Once there is a propertied middle class, they demand political participation. The threshold for that demand appears to about $6,000 per capita per year. It’s hard to get to, but hundreds of millions of people in the world are making that climb right now.
China and Russia will be a test of his thesis, Fukuyama said. They are getting wealthier. If they democratize in the next twenty years, he’s right. If they remain authoritarian, he’s wrong.
Fukuyama is most intrigued by a challenge that comes from his old teacher and continuing friend, Samuel Huntington, author of The Clash of Civilizations. Culture can trump modernization, says Huntington— current radical Islam is an example. Fukuyama agrees that people at the fringe of modernization feel a sense of onslaught, and they can respond as Bolsheviks and Fascists did in the 20th century. “A Hitler or a Bin Laden proclaims, ‘I can tell you who you are.’”
A second challenge to the universalism of liberal democracy is that it does not yet work internationally. Fukuyama agrees, noting that the major current obstacle is America’s overwhelming hegemony. He expects no solution from the UN, but an overlapping set of international institutions could eventually do the job.
A third challenge is the continuing poverty trap for so many in the world. Fukuyama says it takes a national state with the rule of law and time to learn from mistakes before you get economic takeoff. He sees later colonialism, done on the cheap (instead of with the patient institution building that England did in India), as a major source of the world’s current failed and crippled states.
The final challenge that impresses Fukuyama is the possibility that technology may now be accelerating too fast to cure its own problems the way it has done in the past. Climate change could be an example of that. And Fukuyama particularly worries that biotechnology might so transform human nature that it will fragment humanity irreparably.
While he sees meaning in history, Fukuyama said it’s not a matter of iron law. Human agency counts. History swerves on who wins a battle or an election. We are responsible.
Two further angles on Fukuyama’s thesis emerged at dinner. One concerned how society’s morality should express itself in dealing with the threat/promise of biotechnology. Conservative Fukuyama promoted strict government regulation while the liberals (and libertarians) in the room said the market and Internet should sort it out. Kevin Kelly asked Fukuyama, “Do you think human nature is as good as it can be?” I proposed to Washington-based Fukuyama that he was in the midst of a classic argument between the coasts. East Coast says, “Ready, aim, don’t fire.” West Coast says, “Fire, aim, ready.”
Then there’s the European Union. In his talk Fukuyama praised it as the fullest realization of his theory. At dinner he acknowledged his concern that Europe may be headed toward permanent conflict with its growing immigrant populations, whose first allegiance continues to be to their own cultures.
September 21st, 2007 at 9:54 am
Points on to the LNF for a ‘fair and balanced’ perspective in bringing people like Fukuyama and Rendon to speak.
Points off for lowering the caliber of the seminars as a whole, by bringing people like Fukuyama and Rendon to speak.
There are those enlightened few whose ideas are leading us into the future, and others whose ideas are dragging the ‘present tense’ back into our blood-soaked and all too predictable past. I hope the LNF can make the distinction.
December 21st, 2007 at 1:09 pm
Scratchmark,
Your comment does not strike me as coherent. Fukuyama is rather updating some of the most cogent political economy of the last century, namely the work of Kojeve, who still looms large. Any person interested in political economics would be served well by thinking about Kojeve’s and Fukuyama’s work. The present is less blood soaked than the past largely due to the rationalization of state and economic institutions is one simple way of summing up an aspect of Kojeve.
December 21st, 2007 at 1:19 pm
I don’t know that I put that too clearly, here is a snippet from a work cited on the wikipedia Kojeve page:
“political leaders of capitalist states might choose the route of economic cooperation and integration as an alternative to mutually self-destructive wars.” We can probably change that might to will.
Where Fukuyama has changed his focus of late is exactly where Kojeve was pointing; there exists and will continue to exist a kind of capitalist-socialist synthesis. The large state infrastructures are not going away pace our libertarian fantasists. In fact, if you were surprised that the Bush admin grew the state infrastructure, you would do well to give Kojeve a quick glance.
March 25th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
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July 2nd, 2008 at 2:34 am
Thanks edphil, I will look up Kojeve then…I should point out though, given the dwindling corner that western capitalist societies have painted themselves into vis a vis environmental (and lately, economic) collapse- I’d have to say the phrase ‘cogent political economy’ was a bit oxymoronic. Have a look at the Nicholas Taleb and Jared Diamond lectures on that count.
August 1st, 2008 at 9:31 am
alas, fukuyama, partially chastened by the absence of the end of history, has not officially made any
‘long bets’ at http://www.longbets.org/, so the net cannot officially give them the short shrift they so richly deserve.
this grand neocon pajandrum is still repackaging his odious vacuities expecting that we should just forget what the straussian cause he peddles entails: specifically, the noble lie, and the elevation of the elite.
the long now organization rightly places patience in their seven cardinal virtues slot, but by including this self-aggrandizing and boring little twerp in it’s list of funky intellectuals, it is testing that of it’s most devoted followers. although I suppose, from the meagre discussion that seems to have followed, silence is still the most perfect expression of scorn.
March 12th, 2009 at 6:29 am
Fukuyama’s The End of History posits that liberal democracy represents the end-point of political development - that societies will naturally evolve towards it. This provided some of the intellectual impetus for promoting the drive towards “democracy” in the rest of the world (or the simulation of democracy evidenced by “free” elections) by the GWB administration.
However, liberal democracy needs continuing economic growth and a distribution of wealth such that all vested interests (or almost all) are satisfied. In a resource-constrained world this is manifestly not possible over the long term. In fact we are seeing the breakdown of liberal democracy all over the world, as the economies on which they depend falter and crumble.
We are also seeing the growth in authoritarian regimes, which are needed to control human populations where wealth and power distribution are skewed and many groups are suppressed based on their “otherness”. In some areas, eg in Muslim societies, it is women; in Sudan or Rwanda, it is the non-dominant ethnicities etc.
Perhaps there will soon be a book, “The End of Liberal Democracy”.