PERSPECTIVES

No 23
August 2002

NZBR

History Is Still Going

Our Way

New Zealand
Business
Roundtable

by Francis Fukuyama
Published in Wall Street Journal
5 October 2001

stream of commentators
has been asserting that
the tragedy of Sept. 11
proves that I was utterly wrong to have
said more than a decade ago that we
had reached the end of history. The
chorus began almost immediately,
with George Will asserting that
history had returned from vacation,
and Fareed Zakaria declaring the end
of the end of history.
It is on the face of it nonsensical
and insulting to the memory of those
who died on Sept. 11 to declare that
this unprecedented attack did not rise
to the level of a historical event. But
the way in which I used the word
history, or rather, History, was
different: It referred to the progress
of mankind over the centuries toward
modernity, characterized by
institutions like liberal democracy
and capitalism.
March of History
My observation, made back in
1989 on the eve of the collapse of
communism, was that this
evolutionary process did seem to be
bringing ever larger parts of the world
toward modernity. And if we looked
beyond liberal democracy and
markets, there was nothing else
towards which we could expect to
evolve; hence the end of history.
While there were retrograde areas
that resisted that process, it was hard
to find a viable alternative type of
civilization that people actually
wanted to live in after the discrediting
of socialism, monarchy, fascism, and
other types of authoritarian rule.

This view has been challenged by

many people, and perhaps most
articulately by Samuel Huntington. He
argued that rather than progressing
toward a single global system, the
world remained mired in a clash of
civilizations where six or seven major
cultural groups would coexist without
converging and constitute the new
fracture lines of global conflict. Since
the successful attack on the centre of
global capitalism was evidently
perpetrated by Islamic extremists
unhappy with the very existence of
Western civilization, observers have
been handicapping the Huntington
clash view over my own end of
history hypothesis rather heavily.
I believe that in the end I remain
right: Modernity is a very powerful
freight train that will not be derailed
by recent events, however painful and
unprecedented. Democracy and free
markets will continue to expand over
time as the dominant organizing
principals for much of the world. But
it is worthwhile thinking about what the
true scope of the present challenge is.
It has always been my belief that
modernity has a cultural basis. Liberal
democracy and free markets do not
work at all times and everywhere. They
work best in societies with certain
values whose origins may not be
entirely rational. It is not an accident
that modern liberal democracy
emerged first in the Christian West,
since the universalism of democratic
rights can be seen in many ways as a
secular form of Christian universalism.
The central question raised by
Samuel Huntington is whether

Francis Fukuyama, a professor of international political economy at the Johns

Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, is author of The End of History
and the Last Man.

Francis Fukuyama will

deliver the New Zealand
Business Roundtables
Sir Ronald Trotter
Lecture in Wellington on
12 August 2002. For more
information, contact
Rebecca Collerton
04 472 6100.

www.nzbr.org.nz

Modernity is a very
powerful freight train
that will not be derailed
by
recent
events,
however painful and
unprecedented.

The clash consists of a

series of rearguard
actions from societies
whose
traditional
existence is indeed
threatened by modernization.

institutions of modernity such as

liberal democracy and free markets
will work only in the West, or
whether there is something broader
in their appeal that will allow them
to make headway in non-Western
societies. I believe there is. The
proof lies in the progress that
democracy and free markets have
made in regions like East Asia, Latin
America, Orthodox Europe, South
Asia, and even Africa. Proof lies
also in the millions of Third World
immigrants who vote with their feet
every year to live in Western
societies and eventually assimilate
to Western values. The flow of
people moving in the opposite
direction, and the number who want
to blow up what they can of the
West, is by contrast negligible.
But there does seem to be
something about Islam, or at least the
fundamentalist versions of Islam that
have been dominant in recent years,
that makes Muslim societies
particularly resistant to modernity.
Of all contemporary cultural
systems, the Islamic world has the
fewest democracies (Turkey alone
qualifies), and contains no countries
that have made the transition from
Third to First World status in the
manner of South Korea or
Singapore.
There are plenty of non-Western
people who prefer the economic and
technological part of modernity and
hope to have it without having to
accept democratic politics or
Western cultural values as well (eg,
China or Singapore). There are
others who like both the economic
and political versions of modernity,
but just cant figure out how to make
it happen (Russia is an example). For
them, transition to Western-style
modernity may be long and painful.
But there are no insuperable cultural
barriers likely to prevent them from
eventually getting there, and they
constitute about fourth-fifths of the
worlds people.
Islam, by contrast, is the only
cultural system that seems to
regularly produce people, like
Osama bin Laden or the Taliban, who
reject modernity lock, stock and
barrel. This raises the question of

how representative such people are of

the larger Muslim community, and
whether this rejection is somehow
inherent in Islam.
For if the
rejectionists are more than a lunatic
fringe, then Mr Huntington is right that
we are in for a protracted conflict made
dangerous by virtue of their
technological empowerment.
The answer that politicians East and
West have been putting out since Sept.
11 is that those sympathetic with the
terrorists are a tiny minority of
Muslims, and that the vast majority are
appalled by what happened. It is
important for them to say this to prevent
Muslims as a group from becoming
targets of hatred. The problem is that
dislike and hatred of America and what
it stands for are clearly much more
widespread than that.
Certainly the group of people
willing to go on suicide missions and
actively conspire against the U.S. is
tiny. But sympathy may be manifest in
nothing more than initial feelings of
Schadenfreude at the sight of the
collapsing towers, an immediate sense
of satisfaction that the U.S. was getting
what it deserved, to be followed only
later by pro forma expressions of
disapproval. By this standard, sympathy
for the terrorists is characteristic of
much more than a tiny minority of
Muslims, extending from the middle
classes in countries like Egypt to
immigrants in the West.
This broader dislike and hatred
would seem to represent something
much deeper than mere opposition to
American policies like support for
Israel or the Iraq embargo,
encompassing a hatred of the
underlying society. After all, many
people around the world, including
many Americans, disagree with U.S.
policies, but this does not send them
into paroxysms of anger and violence.
Nor is it necessarily a matter of
ignorance about the quality of life in
the West. The suicide hijacker
Mohamed Atta was a well-educated
man from a well-to-do Egyptian family
who lived and studied in Germany and
the U.S. for several years. Perhaps, as
many commentators have speculated,
the hatred is born out of a resentment
of Western success and Muslim failure.

But rather than psychologize the

Muslim world, it makes more sense
to ask whether radical Islam
constitutes a serious alternative to
Western liberal democracy for
Muslims themselves. (It goes
without saying that, unlike
communism, radical Islam has
virtually no appeal in the
contemporary world apart from
those who are culturally Islamic to
begin with.)
For Muslims themselves,
political Islam has proven much
more appealing in the abstract than
in reality. After 23 years of rule by
fundamentalist clerics, most Iranians,
and in particular nearly everyone
under 30, would like to live in a far
more liberal society. Afghans who
have experienced Taliban rule have
much the same feelings. All of the
anti-American hatred that has been
drummed up does not translate into
a viable political program for Muslim
societies to follow in the years
ahead.
The West Dominates
We remain at the end of history
because there is only one system that
will continue to dominate world
politics, that of the liberaldemocratic West. This does not
imply a world free from conflict, nor
the disappearance of culture as a
distinguishing characteristic of
societies. (In my original article, I
noted that the posthistorical world
would continue to see terrorism and
wars of national liberation.)
But the struggle we face is not
the clash of several distinct and equal
cultures struggling amongst one
another like the great powers of 19th
century Europe. The clash consists
of a series of rearguard actions from
societies
whose
traditional
existence is indeed threatened by
modernization. The strength of the
backlash reflects the severity of this
threat. But time and resources are
on the side of modernity, and I see
no lack of a will to prevail in the
United States today.
Reprinted with permission of The Wall Street
Journal. Copyright 2001, Dow Jones &
Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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