Posted on 10/27/2003 11:51:06 AM PST by quidnunc
Writing as the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Francis Fukuyama famously announced the “End of History.” The world, he argued, was fast approaching the final stage of its political evolution. Western democratic capitalism had proved itself superior to all its historical rivals and now would find acceptance across the globe. Here were the communist regimes dropping into the dustbin of history, Fukuyama noted, while dictatorships and statist economies in Asia and South America were toppling too. A new world consumer class was evolving, leaving behind such retrograde notions as nationhood and national honor. As a result, war would grow rare or even vanish: what was there left to fight about? Gone, or going fast, was the old stuff of history — the mercurial, often larger-than-life men who sorted out on the battlefield the conflicts of traditions and values that once divided nations. Fukuyama acknowledged that the End of History would have a downside. Ennui would set in, as we sophisticated consumers became modern-day lotus-eaters, hooked on channel surfing and material comforts. But after the wars of the twentieth century, the prospect of peaceful, humdrum boredom seemed a pretty good deal.
How naive all this sounds today. Islamist hijackers crashing planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the looming threat of worse terror outrages, have shown that a global embrace of the values of modern democracy is a distant hope, and anything but predetermined. Equally striking, it’s not just the West and the non-democratic world that are not converging; the West itself is pulling apart. Real differences between America and Europe about what kind of lives citizens can and should live not only persist but are growing wider.
A Fukuyaman might counter that September 11 was only a bump on the road to universal democracy, prosperity, and peace. Whether the Middle East’s mullahs and fascists know it or not, this argument would run, the budding spiritual and material desires of their masses for all things Western eventually will make them more like us — though how long this will take is unknown. It’s impossible ultimately to disprove such a long-range contention, of course. But look around. Fukuyama’s global village has seen a lot of old-fashioned ethnic, religious, and political violence since history’s purported end in 1989: Afghanistan, Algeria, Colombia, Iraq, Russia, Rwanda, Sudan, the former Yugoslavia, to name just a handful of flash points. Plato may have been right when he remarked in his Laws that peace, not war, is the exception in human affairs.
In fact, rather than bringing us all together, as Fukuyama predicted, the spread of English as the global lingua franca, of accessible, inexpensive high technology, and of universal fashion and communication has led to chaos as often as calm. These developments have incited envy, resentment, and anger among traditional societies. The men and women of these societies sense — as how could they not when encountering the image of Britney Spears gyrating or the subversive idea of free speech? — an affront to the power of the patriarch, mullah, or other hierarchical figure who demands respect based solely on religious dogma, gender, or class.
The new technologies, despite what Fukuyama would say, do not make modern liberal democrats out of our enemies but simply allow them to do their destructive work more effectively. Even though Islamists and other of globalization’s malcontents profess hatred for capitalist democracy, they don’t hesitate to use some of the West’s technological marvels against the West itself. How much easier it has become to plot and shoot and bomb and disrupt and incite with all those fancy gadgets! Flight simulators made it simpler for medieval-minded men, decked out in Nikes and fanny packs, to ram a kiloton or two of explosive power into the New York skyline. Both Usama and Saddam have employed modern mass media to cheer and spur the killing of infidels.
Leaving aside the mullahs and Arab despots, where is there much proof that freedom must follow in the train of affluence, as Fukuyama holds? Left-wing capitalists in China, their right-wing counterparts in Singapore, or their ex-KGB counterparts in Russia certainly do not assume that their throngs of consumers are natural democrats, and so far there’s little to say that they’re wrong. And where is the evidence that these consumers will inevitably become comfort-loving pacifists? Democracy and market reforms seem only to have emboldened India to confront Pakistan’s terrorist-spawning madrassa culture. Rich and free Japan is considering rearming rather than writing more checks to stop North Korean missiles from zooming through its airspace.
America, too, seems as subject to history as ever. Abandoning the belief that it’s always possible to keep thuggish regimes in check with words and bribes, it is returning to military activism, seeking to impose democracy — or at least some kind of decent government — on former terrorist-sponsoring nations, instead of waiting for the end of history somehow to make it spring up. Sure, postmodern, peroxide-topped Jasons and tongue-pierced Nicoles sulk at malls from coast to coast — bored, materialistic Fukuyamans all. But by contrast there are those American teens of the Third Mechanized Division, wearing their Ray-Bans and blaring rock, who rolled through Iraq like Patton’s Third Army reborn, pursuing George W. Bush’s vision of old-fashioned military victory, liberation, and nation building.
What about Europe? Surely there we can see Fukuyama’s post-historical future shaping up, in an increasingly hedonistic life-style that puts individual pleasure ahead of national pride or strong convictions, in a general embrace of pacifism, and in support for such multinational institutions as the United Nations, the International Criminal Court, and the European Union, which promise affluence and peace based on negotiation and consensus. Europeans say that sober reflection on their own checkered past has taught them to reject wars of the nation-state, to mediate, not deter, and to trust in Enlightenment rationality instead of primitive emotions surrounding God and country.
Look closer, though, and you’ll discover the pulse of history still beating beneath Europe’s postmodern surface — and beating stronger daily. During the cold war, it is important to remember, the looming threat of the Soviet Union kept in check the political ambitions and rivalries of Europe’s old nations. The half-century of peace from 1945 to 1989 was not so much a dividend of new attitudes as the result of the presence of a quarter-million American troops, who really did keep the Russians out and Germany’s military down. Facing a mutual foe armed with the most advanced weaponry, fielding an enormous army, embodying a proselytizing revolutionary ideology, and willing to shed the blood of 30 million of its own citizens did wonders to paper over less pressing differences. If France and Germany don’t stand as squarely with us in the War on Terror as they did in the cold war, it’s in part because al-Qaida and its rogue-nation supporters, menacing as they are, don’t threaten Europe’s capital cities with thousands of nuclear missiles, as did the Soviets.
With the evil empire’s collapse and America’s gradual withdrawal (the U.S. has closed 32 bases in Europe and reduced its troop presence there by 65 percent since a cold-war high), the European nations’ age-old drive for status, influence, and power has slowly started to reassert itself, increasing tensions on the Continent. German chancellor Gerhard Schröder proclaims “decisions will be made in Berlin,” French president Jacques Chirac shakes a finger at Poles and Rumanians for not following France’s leadership, and Italian and German politicians hurl schoolyard insults at one another. The Eastern Europeans, bordered by a reunified Germany and a nationalist Russia, wonder whether American guns might not provide better insurance than the European Union should the aggressive urges of historical enemies prove merely dormant and not extinct. It will be interesting to see whether all of Europe or just some of its historically more bellicose states will boost defense expenditures above the parsimonious European average of 0.5 percent of GNP.
Europe’s resurgent political ambitions and passions are even more apparent in the Continent’s relations with the U.S. — relations that, in the controversy over military action in Iraq, worsened to the point where France and Germany openly opposed and undermined their ally of a half-century.
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(Excerpt) Read more at city-journal.org ...
These emerging trends require the United States to rethink its relations with Europe. NATO’s American architects rightly believed that the organization they created not only would protect Europeans from Russians and Europeans from one another, but shield us from them as well. We need comparable hardheadedness in thinking of what steps we should take to improve relations with Europe — and protect ourselves at the same time.
Just so!
Sure, but how will the next generation react? We are already seeing the young in Iran get very unhappy with their mullahs.(By the way, good to see your name again, quidnunc)
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