Fukuyama, Huntingdon, Friedman
We are only a decade in to the twenty-first century, and anyone who hopes to analyze long-term geopolitical trends for America and its place in the world must begin by conceding that change is happening fast. Large scale ideological shifts that began taking place at the end of the twentieth century -- most particularly the end of the Cold War, that tense and heavily-armed standoff between rival ideologies which concluded not with a bang but a whimper as Gorbachev's Soviet Union devolved into Yeltsin's and then Putin's Russia -- have been occurring for long enough now that Francis Fukuyama's prematurely triumphalist announcement of "the end of history" seems closer to the end of twentieth century history, the end of an era. But the dawn of a new era is tempting for prognosticators, and I would like to address the varying overviews that three of the most influential commentators -- Fukuyama, Samuel Huntingdon, and Tom Friedman -- have offered by way of predictions for the twenty-first century. I focus on these three as authors of influential grand narratives that have been offered, and offer both summary and critique of each of them in turn. But to conclude I will apply the theories of each to the most recent sort of history -- the events of the past two months, still in progress as of this writing -- in order to assess their success thus far in predictive skill.
Fukuyama was the first scholar to leap into the business of prognostication on behalf of American imperium, unless we count astrologer Joan Quigley's sub-rosa employment with the Reagan administration. To be honest, Quigley's services might have been just as reliable as Fukuyama's in this regard, for contemporary analysts will forever regard Fukuyama as a once-influential thinker who declared an "end to history" shortly before 9/11. But it is worth resurrecting Fukuyama's thesis to see what his ground base for analysis had been, and if there is anything worth salvaging once the cringeworthy title of his most famous work has been disregarded. Fukuyama was basically trying to determine what the large scale ideological shift within the West would portend after the fall of the Soviet Union -- his announcement of "the end of history" was really a strong statement in support of the proposition that liberal capitalist democracies carry within them a transformative power such that all Western governments, or possibly all governments in Fukuyama's opinion, aspire to their condition. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a validation of those ideological tenets which were held across a varying spectrum of states, including a number which fell to the left of the U.S.A. And represented a more socialistic form of liberal democracy. Fukuyama concludes that 1989 represented a victory for the basic principle of capitalism, but that inherent in this capitalist principle is the notion of universal human rights. This seems muddle-headed given that the origin of the western notion of individual rights is to be found precisely two centuries before the transformative events Fukuyama is addressing, the very transformative event of the French Revolution. Does Fukuyama somehow see a necessary linkage between the ideology of human rights as put forward by France's revolutionary government and the onward march of freedom that would then be propounded by Napoleon's territorial ambitions for all of Europe under French imperial rule? In point of fact, Fukuyama's own ideas would play quite easily into the hands of Straussian neoconservatives who would use his championing of a universal Enlightenment standard of rights into a justification for their own belligerent ambitions, more worthy of Talleyrand than Napoleon really, in Iraq. The events of the past decade in the Middle East -- in which the vast influx of capital has created a situation not like that of East Germans struggling to shake off ideological control in the late 1980s, as Fukuyama might have predicted, but has rather created a nervous oligarchy not unlike France's ancien regime...
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