Write a brief note on The End of History debate. (UPSC CSE Mains 2017 - Political Science and International Relations, Paper 1)
- "The End of History and the Last Man" by Francis Fukuyama is a book published in 1992 arguing that the end of the Cold-War marks the endpoint of the development of human history.
- Fukuyama draws heavily on the Philosophy of Hegel and its interpretation by Kojeve. Hegel, to summarize, saw history as evolving through conflict between opposing ideas (Hegelian dialectics of thesis, antithesis and synthesis). Kojeve translated this highly influential line of thought into an argument holding that the final condition of humanity''s socio-political order is a homogeneous state ruled by a single victorious ideology. This will mark the end of ideology (and therefore of history) since such a society will be, according to Kojeve, a "post-political" society which won''t be divided by ideological differences.
- With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Fukuyama argued, liberal democracy had emerged as the only viable model of governance for the future. But the victory of liberal democracy wasn’t merely a matter of contingent fact, as if the Western nations just happened to have economically and militarily out-performed the communist states. Liberal democracy not only was, but deserved to be, criterial as the form of government best suited to sheltering human flourishing, and its triumph is partly explained by that very fact.
- Fukuyama did not mean that we had reached a stage where nothing else would occur of historical significance – that all problems had been solved and politics would now be smooth-sailing.
- His argument was that the unfolding of history had revealed – albeit in fits and starts – the ideal form of political organisation: liberal democratic states tied to market economies.
- Fukuyama’s use of the word “history” here is best approximated by synonyms in sociology such as “modernisation” or “development”.
- He wasn’t saying those states that claimed to be liberal democracies lived up to this ideal, nor that such a political organisation resolved all possible problems – merely that liberal democracy, with all its flaws, was the unsurpassable ideal.
- For him, a liberal democratic state requires three things. First, it is democratic, not only in the sense of allowing elections, but in the outcomes of these elections resulting in the implementation of the will of the citizenry. Secondly, the state possesses sufficient strength and authority to enforce its laws and administer services. Thirdly, the state – and its highest representatives – is itself constrained by law. Its leaders are not above the law.
- During the Cold War (1946–1991), the great debate about the appropriate form of government was between communism (led by the Soviet Union) and democracy (led by the United States and her allies). Communism’s claim was that liberal democracy was not the best possible state – that there was a society that provided its members with even greater security and freedom than democracy and that the Soviet Union was in the process of building it. Western countries saw little if any evidence of freedom in the Soviet Union and the countries it controlled, and most people believed that real progress, both moral and material, came more easily to multiparty democracies with market-based economies.
- With the overthrow and abolition of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and the dissolution of the latter, it seemed to many that communist ideology would never again be taken seriously as an alternative to liberal democracy. “History,” in the sense of the search for the kind of government most conducive to human flourishing, had in this sense come to an end. The job from now on would not be to debate which kind of government is best, but only to establish liberal democracies wherever they didn’t yet exist.
- Fukuyama''s thesis in "The End of History and the Last Man" was heavily criticized by both other historical thinkers and history itself. Most notable among Fukuyama''s critiques is Samuel Huntington in his book "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order” (1996) where he explains that cultural forces will take over ideological forces in shaping global history. Since September 11th 2001 Huntington''s critique of Fukuyama''s "The End of History" is proved painfully right, history did not come to its end.
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