Francis Fukuyama: The End Of History Revisited

Good evening. Top that Frank. I am Stewart Brand from the Long Now Foundation. Its funny a while ago we had John Rendon who gave a talk a year ago and everybody assumed he was a conservative because he was giving work for the White House. Well he has done work for the last five White Houses and probably will do work for the next five. And he was a hard over Democrat, basically born that way and will stay that way. Frank is my favorite kind of conservative, I used to know Herman Conn and Herman was wonderful, Frank is wonderful. And one of the reasons Frank is wonderful is unlike many intellectuals he will stand up and be accountable for the stuff he has said and thought and revisit it and engage in what's called intellectual honesty, Frank Fukuyama. Well, thanks very much Stewart. I am really grateful to the Long Now Foundation for bringing me out here. I was actually supposed to give in a lecture in November but I had little accident on by bike. But I am back on my feet and really glad to be here. When Stewart first asked me to speak in this series, he said this is the series on long term thinking and can you talk about anything. And I thought you know, most of what I do is pretty a policy oriented towards the next six months to two years, and I said well, probably not. Then it occurred to me I had written this book a while ago called the End of History and the Last Man and I said, well, yeah actually that does fit in to the over all frame work of this series pretty well and I have been thinking about this consistently every since I wrote the original article with that title 17 years ago. So may be may be we can talk about that. So that's what I am gone a speak to you about today. So what I am going to do is first since there has been a lot of misunderstanding about this I am just going to restate what the End of History was all about. And then I am going to go through four different objections. Every conceivable objection to this theory has been raised by one person at some point over the years but I want to deal with the ones that I believe are the most cogent and quite honestly they are ones that I don't necessarily have answers to. And for all I know the theory could be complete bunk and will be disproved and then in fact I will give you several empirical tests for whether the theory is is correct or whether you will be able to see that it's correct as we go through as we go through the lecture. And the four just to give you a little heads up, the four objections. First has to do with radically Islam and its rejection of modernity. Second has to do with the lack of collective action and accountability and basically democracy at an international level. The third has to do with the problem of poverty, about how you get on the modernization escalator. And the fourth has to do with technology. Now let me got to the question of what the End of History was about. In about 10 days I am going to get on an airplane, I am going to go to Japan to give a couple of lectures. And then after about ten days in Japan I am going to fly down and spend a couple of weeks in highlands of Papua New Guinea. Now between Japan and Papua New Guinea you basically get the two ends of the developing spectrum at least as it exist in today's world, from a society in the highlands where you actually have certain pockets of tribes that have not seen the next tribe over, in Piangi much less European or an Australian or a Japanese or anyone else. It was a society that was completely acephalous there is no state. And many of the people in the highlands are still basically living at a hunter-gatherer level of existence. And then of course Japan is Japan. So the question is there was a certain period in human history when virtually whole of the world look like Papua New Guinea. Every body was divided up into these little groups of 50-60 people, very isolated, without technology to produce agriculture, without higher forms political organization. Today increasing parts of the world look like Japan. China, the largest country in the world is hurdling in that direction. And the question at this race is, is is this a coherent process and is there a reason to think that the kind of modernization that takes you from the level of Papua New Guinea to the level of Japan is actually driven by deeper social, economic, historical forces or is it all just a big accident? Could we all return to the status of being highlanders at some point in the future, and is there any particular reason to think that the kinds of political systems we see around us have a have this kind of deeper historical meaning. Now this is basically a theory about modernization. I guess that's the simplest way to explain it. And of course modernization is something that virtually every intellectual believed in over the past, I would say, 150 years and in fact in the years prior to the 1980s a large majority, I would say, of progressive intellectuals believe not only that there would be a progressive modernization as human societies evolve but that there is also an end of history and the end of history would be some form of Communist Utopia. And when I wrote my original article in 1989 I made a very simple observation, which was that I too, like all of the Marxists, believed that there was this progressive history that was propelling society to different and more complex levels of social organization. But that it didn't look like we are ever gone to get to communism. That whatever seems to be at the terminal point of this modernization process was some version of a market based economy and some version of liberal democracy. And so it was actually a fairly modest thesis that we would be getting off this train one stop earlier than most people had anticipated. And so it was not an outlandish thesis in terms of the way that people have thought about human history but it does seem to reflect to me what were the big developments at that time. Now in terms of universal histories, of which Marxism is a is a variant. There have been a lot of them written in history, a lot of them are Christian because the Christian Bible actually talks about the beginning of history and the Garden of Eden or the creation story and it talks about an end of history when god's kingdom arrives. And in a certain sense Marxism was a secular version. It really in a sense took Hagel to say that what we have in the human historical process is something like the story of the Christian Bible except played out in increasingly secular terms and that was a story that then Marx continued. You can actually enlarge the story because the kind of human history that I am going to talk about has not been in existence for more than about 10,000 years. Bob Wright wrote a book a few years ago called Nonzero in which he actually tries to place all of human history in a history of the biosphere in general in which he noted that there was this very long term over the course of billions of years and evolution as you went from prokaryotes to eukaryotes to multi cellular organisms, or individual single cell organism learned to live with each other and cooperate in multi cellular beings and then, so on up the evolutionary chain. I am not going to get into that part of the story. But it is possible if you take a sufficiently long perspective, as I guess we are supposed to do in this series, to see that actually human evolution and the evolution of human societies does take place in a much broader evolutionary story that includes non humans as well. Now the main person who has raised a systematic objection to my version of the End of History, my version of modernization, that is to say that there is a universal process of modernization that sooner or later most societies will arrive at. He is actually my former teacher and still a friend, a good friend Samuel Huntington who wrote a book a few years after the end of history called the 'Clash Of Civilizations' and he made a very different kind of argument he said that the evolution of human societies in the direction of liberal democracy was a kind of accident, that culture is the ultimate way that these societies to find themselves that there will be seven or eight major cultural groups that will be largely invariant and that what I see as a universal set of values, potentially universal set of values and institutions that were developed in the west are actually the cultural emanation of the particular Christian culture that happened to develop in this particular part of the northern Europe at a particular historical time. But that if you grew up in a Hindu or confusion or an orthodox Christian or Muslim cultural context, there is no particular reason to think that you will developed a similar sorts of political institutions. And so in a sense his view is that all of the developments that we have experienced in modernizing societies is really cultural bound and that ultimately you can be modern, you can have an Islamic republic of Iran that could presumably produce semiconductors and you know very high quality cars and yet be ruled by a system of mullahs where authorities come out of the Koran because culture is as I said the ultimate defining characteristic of societies that will not be overcome by the integrating forces of modernization. Now I have a interlinked series of arguments I would fly if you step back a little bit and take this long perspective why should we think that history is directional as opposed to being simply cyclical or just random you know one damn thing after another. And I would say that the probably the one social phenomenon that guarantees that you are not going to have a random or a cyclical history, is the accumulation of knowledge related to modern science and technology, because if you think about social phenomenon, the one thing that is cumulative and is not something subjected to periodic loss unlike let's say the arts or the literature or even particular forms of government is the steady accumulation of knowledge that is driven by human curiosity and the human desire to be able to master and manipulate the external world. Now I would say that at one end of this machine that I would construct you would put the development of science and technology as the driver and it is connected by a drive shaft to economic development because economic development is determined by the horizon of technological possibilities made possible by any given level of technological developments. So the world of coal and steel or the steam engine produces societies that look a certain way, you start urbanizing, you start developing an industrial working class, you have highly centralized a larger states but that is very different from the kind of world that emerges after the microprocessor, after the internet in which power tends to be more diffused and which it is much more difficult for centralized hierarchies to control the flow of information, the flow of power, the flow of resources. And therefore each one of these economic ages is going to differ in systematic ways from the one that preceded it determined by the level of technology and I think that is fairly well accepted the process of industrialization as you go from resource exports to light manufacturing to heavy manufacturing to a full industrialization and then to a post industrial society. That's a pattern that's been replicated by late developers whatever the culture starting point from which they start off. Now - so the engine is science and technology, you have economics and then there is a much more loose set of connecting rods that tie the economy to politics it is the case that there is a very strong empirical correlation between the high levels of economic development and liberal democracy. Now Huntington would say that this is simply accidental that it just so happens at the Christian west modernized first and therefore this correlation between wealth and democracy is a by-product of this cultural phenomenon. But it is still striking that even outside of western - of the bounds that would be called western society including countries in Asia, this very interesting pattern has emerged where at about $6000 per capita income, which is about the level that Taiwan and Korea achieved sometime in the early 1980s. You get the development of an industrial working class, urbanization, much higher levels of education, universal literacy, development of a professional class, a complex civil society and the development of a property property of middle class where middle class that define in terms of its ownership of property. And all of these things have been linked in various ways to the emergence of political demands for participation in systems, there is no question that you can have authoritarian modernization at very rapid rate, this is what South Korea, Singapore China today have all done. But at a certain level of wealth it seems that there is a change in the nature of the society that seems to demand a greater involvement and accountability in a way that governments function, which is what we call a political democracy. So the first two parts of the machine are connected fairly rigidly but the second part is a pretty wobbly connection, they are very rich societies like Singapore that aren't democracies and there are relatively poor societies like Costa Rica or India that that are democracies it's not a perfect correlation. Now the far end of these machine you get - I don't know things connected by strings or something because when you get to the realm of culture, I actually agree with Huntington that the connections are not that great I believe that ultimately you are not going to get a homogenization of cultures around the world and in fact I would hope that we do not get a homogenization of cultures but there probably is something in the boundaries of cultural evolution, that needs to take place in a in a really modern society. One of them may be secular politics because of some other things, it doesn't seem like it's very safe when religion enters politics in a big way when you get a politicized religion. But I think it's probably safe to say that at the end of this train of gears or whatever they are that cultural homogenization- we're never going to become what what Huntington calls 'Davos man' you know this global cosmopolitan globalize technology using consumers you know self satisfied consumer thank goodness. But the rest of the you know the rest of the process it does seem to me, you can make an argument that there is this kind of set of connections and the question is whether the institutions that we see in currently modern societies are actually you know there is no question that Huntington is right that this stuff appeared in the Christian west for reasons having to do with a particular set of cultural and historical events that took place in early modern Europe. Democracy, universal human rights is in a way as many philosophers Tocquevill, Hegel, Nietzsche, have all said it is a form of secularized Christianity, our doctrine, contemporary doctrine of human rights comes ultimately from the Christian doctrine of universal equality of human beings under God based on their possession of certain divine attributes like choice all right. So there is no question that historically there was this connection but the question is once you discover these institutions, do they become functional in a way that they are usable by any other civilization regardless of its cultural starting points. The scientific method was invented by Rene Descartes and others in Europe at a certain historical point but once it's discovered it's invariant whether you are an African or Asian or Latin American, the scientific method becomes a kind of universal possession. So the question is are all liberal democratic institutions are market institutions in the economy like that or are they as Huntington would argue culturally - culturally bound. And I believe that even with all of the - sometimes terrible political events that have happened since I first wrote this article back in 1989 right as the Berlin Wall was coming down. That that basic story about modernization is still on track. It is very fashionable - I don't know may be it's different here in San Francisco and Washington right fashionably pessimistic about every thing and a lot of people like the intelligence agencies are paid to be pessimistic. And so you focus on terrorism in the middle east but we are actually today and over the past five years have been living through one of the most remarkable periods in global human history were there is not a single region of the world that is not been experiencing sustained growth and the two largest countries in the world, China and India are leading a pack in terms of the growth rates now. Obviously they are down sized to this global warming and all sorts of you know perhaps un sustainable trends that we have started but in terms of people being lifted out of poverty you had several hundred million in that category over the past 20-25 years because modernization has been very successful in many many parts of the world. And so I think the basic story line of human development is still very much with modernization. The question is does that modernization then require liberal democracy or not. And here you have got these really two interesting social experiments going on which are Russia and China because Russia and China are both modernizing, growing economically but under basically under authoritarian regimes. I mean in Russia you have got elections but basically no horizontal accountability in the political system and in China you have got a fully authoritarian system that suppresses dissidence censors the internet, does all of these other sorts of things. So I told you I would give you a way of testing whether I am right or not, so one easy test is only you have to just wait 20 years and then you can write to me. But I will be around hopefully I will be around 20 years you can say you know has which of these systems has democratic modernization at a lower level like India or the higher level like Europe and the United States and Japan has that proved to be politically stable and successful and economically you know productive or do these authoritarian modernizers prove to have certain long term advantages. I will make the bet on the side of the liberal democracy because I believe that modern political systems have to be accountable you cannot have good government. With out feed back loops built into the political system and as societies become more complex as they do more things and the governments do more things those feed back loops, those accountability mechanisms become more and more difficult so that if people cannot protest the fact that a chemical factory is dumping very toxic chemicals into the Amur River as happened in Harbin a couple of years ago. You are going to have a less successful society that one in which those kinds of accountability mechanisms exists. But it's a test and I you know I'm no prophet so we will have to see how those experiments work out. Now let me go through the four objections to the theory I mean in the way the existence of China and Russia constituting them selves a kind of objection. But let me go through the other ones, lets begin with Islam. Not the religion Islam but but the phenomenon that we have seen particularly since September 11th, a very radicalized Islamists ideology. Many people have said openly this is a refutation of the end of the history radical Islamist Osama Bin Laden the Al Qaeda folks do not want modernization in any way shape of form not only don't they want liberal democracy, they don't want a modern consumer society and so they are very determinately stuck in the middle ages. Now I have always felt even after September 11th that this is actually giving these groups too much credit because in fact with the one complicated exception of Iran certainly none of the Sunni groups have succeeded in coming to power in a single country and in those places were they have succeeded Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Iran this is not for any body else that is not an alienated Muslim living at the fringes of Muslim society these are not successful models of development that other people around the world want to emulate and the desire to promote this kind of political Islam really does not you know it's not some thing that's typically felt by people that are not culturally Muslim to begin with. Now the deeper question has been raised by a lot of scholars is whether there are a permanent cultural obstacles to modernization either in the economic or in the political forum and that's some how this one particular cultural group represents a particularly severe obstacle. My general view of that is it's extremely unlikely that this is true that there is really as far as I can see no inherent reason in the religion itself Islam to think that in this a Muslim society cannot modernize economically and in fact you have had several fairly successful cases of that like Turkey and Malaysia or Indonesia at a lower level of development and I also think there is no particular reason why Muslim society cannot sustain - create and sustain a liberal democracy and again you got a number of examples again Turkey, Mali Senegal, Indonesia since 1997. So the question is really what is the radical rejection of modernity being driven by? and here I would say it comes less out of the religion Islam per se. Islam as a religion it's very legalistic it's very rooted in local traditions and customs that define and describe to individuals their particular identities but what's very interesting about the people in the contemporary world that tend to be attracted to these Islamists or Jihadist groups is that they actually are not people living in traditional Islamists Islamic societies they are people living at the fringes of western societies. Some times that's the case when they live in Western Europe in Muslim minority communities as was the case of Mohammed Atta or Mohammed Bouyeri who killed the Dutch film maker Theo van Gogh or the July 7th sub way bombers in London. Some time the alienation comes when the modern world comes to visit people in the middle east in the form of internet, television, you know the Western cultural onslaught that we associate with globalization and I would argue that the extremism you see is actually the result of actually what is the fairly familiar loss of identity for people that are caught in this cultural no man's land between traditional societies and successfully modernizing societies. It's quite interesting that successfully modernizing societies like India and China do not produce this kind of terrorists but they really come more out of the stratum of people that have been exposed modernization but have not gotten on the train successfully and this actually I think makes the phenomenon some thing it's not that's it should make you feel good about it but it's some thing we have seen before because that was a classic sociological explanation for the social origins of both fascism and Bolshevism that typical Bolshevik or fascist was the working class person who did not find a home in the industrialized world, just left the village that tightly woven community now living in a big city with out a clear identity. Hitler comes along and says I will tell you who you are you are a German and I think Osama Bin Laden in many ways has been doing that. He says I will tell you who you are. You are a member of this global Muslim UMA and I can define your identity very precisely in terms of the following ideology. So that doesn't mean that we are not going to have a lot of big problems dealing with this political movement. Now but I just you know I think that this is you know it rises to the level of a civilizational challenge. Second big objection to my theory has to do with the problem of International society and democracy at an International level. Now we have these things called a nation state democracies, United States, France, Japan, South Korea so forth. And actually after a couple of hundred years of political development we pretty much know, there is a lot of variance but we pretty much know what the institutions of the modern liberal democracy are to look like. But we really do not have in the contemporary world our mechanisms that enforce a certain degree of accountability and reciprocity at and you know and that's another word for democracy at an International level. And one of the things I think that has been quite striking, just traveling around the world after the Iraq war is the degree to which this has been exacerbated by the overwhelming dominance of the United States at a whole variety of levels. United States today spends as much on its military as the entire rest of the world combined. You know the British at the height of their Empire tried to size their Navy so it would be as large as the second and the third next second and third largest Navies and we beat everybody combined. And that hegemony is true at a political level; we can overturn regimes 8000 miles away. We can in in economics the dollar continues to carry very great weight and culturally the Unites States is very hegemonic. But it sets up the ground for a huge amount of anti-Americanism in the world; I think ultimately because of this lack of both American, what what non-Americans regard as American accountability and the lack of mechanisms of reciprocity. I've don't know how many non-Americans I've heard say in the last few years; "You know, I really wish I could vote in an American election because who you elect President has a big effect on my life, but American Presidents are only accountable to American voters. And so I think there is a kind of institutional problem there. Institutional problem by the way that I do not believe is ever going to be solved by the United Nations. I think its going to be solved by actually a layering of multiple and overlapping international institutions; many of which will not look like traditional international organizations that I believe you know, simply have to populate the world. This is one of the consequences of globalization; because globalization does create winners and losers. And if you are going keep the world stable at an international level those kinds of mechanisms of accountability have to be there. So that is a task. I don't know whether it will be accomplished but I think it's it's a task that's crying out to be done. Third objection has to do with poverty. And the question of how you get on this economic escalator to begin with? I mentioned earlier that the correlation between a relatively high level of economic development and liberal democracy is you know as far as you know, I am just a social scientist; I am not a natural scientist. But as far as we social scientists go almost qualifies as a law that these two things are pretty well are pretty well linked. But that presupposes that you can some how get yourself up to the level of $6000 per capita and it turns out that that is actually not that easy for many societies and there is a big chicken and egg problem here. The problem with development I think is really not the question of resources, its not needing an external big push ala Jeffrey Sachs; it is a question of institutions. You cannot have a long term economic growth unless you have a state and unless that state can do things that states are supposed to do, like provide public services and public goods, maintain a basic rule of law, domestic order, defense from enemies and the like. And I think if you look around the world today, you'll see that those parts that have successfully developed had relatively strong states in their pre-modern periods and it was only a matter of getting the policies right that then allowed them to take off. So the state in many respects - and China was more ancient than it was in Europe, you go all the way back; you know, three and four centuries and you still have things that look like centralized administrative apparatuses with bureaucrats and taxation and cadastral surveys and all that sorts of things that states undertake. And so it actually wasn't that big a leap for a relatively strong state like China to figure out that Communism was a kind of stupid economic policy, replace it with one that listen to market signals and then they take off like like gangbusters. But in many parts of the world, including where I am going, Papua New Guinea and including many parts of Sub-Saharan Africa, there was not a prior tradition of stateness, there were in certain parts of Africa, but in many other parts of the developing world you had institutions that were at a lower level of development than than anything that we would call a state. And in many other parts of the world what institutions you had were severely disrupted by colonialism. And I think you know the case of this was clearly the worst in Africa where you had a whole variety of traditional institutions at the time of European colonization in the and then colonization came very late there in the 1870's and 1880's. And the Europeans, basically by the time they got to Africa, didn't want to give them real institutions because they wanted you know, they are kind of exhausted, they were looking at each other wearily in the decades prior to the great war and they wanted to do colonialism on the cheap. So instead of what the British did in India, which was spending a 200 year period building Indian institutions they tried to empower local elites. They did various variations on local law local rule that managed to undermine traditional institutions without transmitting any thing like a modern state institutions. And I think that this is one of the big problems in global development right now. You cannot solve the poverty problem and get people on this escalator that will get you up to this $6000 level without being able to solve this prior question of having a state and having a political order that can provide these sorts of basic services. I would go further than that and say that there is actually an important degree to which the current international system actually promotes state weakness in a whole variety of ways. Sometimes we kill countries by kindness. About eight percent to 12 percent of the GDP of every Sub-Saharan African country actually comes from the international donor community. So it's not like of generosity, I think that's the problem. But what happens is that when you transfer money on on those levels you also infantilize countries because they actually don't need to create their own institutions. They can rely on NGO's and external donors to do this. A lot of cases we freeze conflicts. Europe went through, in its historical evolution to its current 20th century stage; it went through actually three separate stages of evolution. There was a stage of state formation which was a bloody period. European rulers fought each other to create territorially coherent spaces political spaces, a lot of that required basically ethnic cleansing to make sure that they are relatively homogeneous, a process that really continued up through the late 20th century. Excuse me. Second stage was the implementation of a liberal rule of law that restrained the sovereign. And then finally and only at the end you had democratization. And that process that took 500 years in the case of a country like France, we are expecting developing countries to replicate within a generation. Excuse me. And so for that reason the problem of poverty remains. Well, I've been fighting a cold for the last week. My voice may be giving out. Fortunately we are at the fourth point now. Last point is technology. As I said the historical process is driven by the unfolding of modern science and technology. Up till now technology excuse me technology has been able to solve the problems that it set for itself; particularly the problem of economic productivity. There is no particular reason to think that this will continue forever and we have certain technological developments that could obviously end modernization tomorrow. The one that we've been particularly worried about is the question of global warming. But there are others as well. There has been a democratization of military technology or the whole problem of weapons of mass destruction, democratizes extremely powerful means of destructions that used to be only in the procession of nation states. Now individuals potentially can employ it and there are other issues as well. The ability to shape human behavior on very subtle ways through biotechnology is another issue that I have written about in the future. And there is no guarantee that our political institutions will keep up with this pace of technological development. You just look at the collective action problems that are engendered by dealing with global warming and you see some dimensions of that problem. And on this the fourth point I give you no particular assurance. I cannot predict whether the growth of the institutions at international level will meet this requirements or not and if they don't I think that the technology itself that has been the source of these broader story that I have been telling you about modernization may bring a whole of that to an end. Now I just want to end by saying the following. I have been accused of being a kind of Marxist and of course the End of History was a Marxist concept and as I said, I was just getting off one station early. But I think I am quite different from most Marxists in the sense that I do not believe that there are iron laws of history. I do not believe that any of the forces that I have described, that would tend to create a long term process of modernization or universal history as I have described it, lock societies in. Agency, individual human agency is extremely important. If particular battles had not been won, if particular politicians had not gotten elected or had not taken power in a Coup-d'etat, the entire subsequent history of those societies could be written very differently. I believe, as does Bob Wright, that in end there are certain equilibrating mechanisms in human societies so that if an invention is invented in one society and then squelched as the as the rifle was in the early Tokugawa, Japan it eventually will get out because it confers an advantage and there will be a process of defensive competition as societies interact with each other. That means that none of these inventions can ever be suppressed for terribly long. But it doesn't mean that in the mean time you can't have tremendous variation simply based on the kinds of political choices that we as citizens or we as politicians or we as government officials make. So that the fact that I still believe that there is such a thing as history does not relieve any of us from our responsibilities as individuals to be political participants because we in very important ways can continue to shape our political futures. I am not going to take any more risks with my voice completely going out. So may be I will just stop there we can just take questions. But thank you very much for your attention.