@@ Portrait of a Zionazi @@
Arash
June 27, 2004
History man
The latest offering from the writer whose analysis made sense of the
post-Cold War era tackles the world after the trauma of 11 September. And it
looks a lot less rosy
By Jason Burke
Francis Fukuyama
DoB: 27 October 1952 (Chicago)
Family: Married to Laura Holmgren (they have three children)
Education: Cornell and Harvard
Job: Professor of international political economy, Johns Hopkins University,
Washington
http://www.sais-jhu.edu/faculty/fukuyama/
In the summer of 1989 a young American academic announced, in a relatively
obscure conservative foreign policy journal, that history had ended. Or at
least soon would. At the time, few had heard of Francis Fukuyama, then
working in the US State Department. But then few people thought that the
Berlin Wall would be hauled down within years, let alone months. Fukuyama, a
modest, quietly spoken man who at 37 appeared to have correctly predicted
the collapse of communism while simultaneously providing a perfect framework
for understanding the post-Cold War world order, was catapulted to global
attention.
Twelve years later, on 11 September 2001, Fukuyama was working in his
seventh-floor office at Washington's Johns Hopkins University when a Boeing
757 with 64 people on board crashed into the Pentagon. He was able to watch
the smoke rising into the clear blue air as the headquarters of America's
defence establishment burned. History, at least in the sense most people
understood it, had not apparently ended after all.
Smirking columnists and academic opponents circled like B-52s over Tora
Bora. The Guardian wondered drily if Fukuyama would be writing a sequel to
The End of History, the book he had published in 1992, ignoring the several
books he had published subsequently on topics ranging from biotechnology to
social capital and the market. 'Good to see historian Francis Fukuyama
responding to the carnage in Manhattan [by] arguing shamelessly that it has
left the world "irrevocably different" - the importance of the nation state
reasserted, a re-energised America forced to forsake isolationism,' the
Sunday Times sneered. 'All this from a writer who made his name with the
sunnily titled The End of History. To paraphrase Attlee, a period of silence
on his part would be welcome.'
In fact, the demise of Fukuyama's philosophy was regularly announced through
the Nineties. With wars and genocide killing hundreds of thousands in the
Balkans and Africa 'history' - at least in the sense that most people
understood it - seemed as vibrant and vicious as ever. What made the attacks
on Fukuyama more pointed was that the trajectory of his thinking, from
unchallenged global dominance in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet
Union to unsteady and threatened insecurity following the attacks on New
York and Washington, was a metaphor, in the minds of many of his detractors,
for American power itself. The fact that his book, unlike most works by
American foreign policy specialists, had been a global bestseller,
commanding a $400,000 advance, hardly helped.
But Fukuyama had never argued that the stream of daily events - history as
war, peace, kings, queens, bombs and famines - would slew to a halt. When he
spoke of history Fukuyama meant the grand tale of human society's evolution
of a cultural - and thus political and economic - system that matches our
species' collective aspirations and can fulfil them. Fukuyama, drawing
heavily on Hegel, felt that our various civilisations' constant development
of varying alternative forms of government and culture that had been the
dominant theme in history ever since the earliest societies was over. The
dialectic progression through thesis and antithesis was over. A synthesis,
unchallenged by any coherent alternative, had finally evolved. The best
example of that synthesis was, happily, to be found in America circa 1990.
'We are talking about ... the endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution
and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of
human government,' Fukuyama declared.
Mrs Thatcher was apparently unimpressed. 'End of history? The beginning of
nonsense,' she is reported to have said. But then she, like so many of those
who comment on Fukuyama, probably hadn't actually read his books.
Francis Fukuyama was born in Chicago in 1952 into a dynasty of academics.
His maternal grandfather had founded the economics department at Kyoto
University, Japan. His father was a sociologist and a protestant minister.
He read classics at Cornell University, having learned ancient Greek to take
the course. It was 1970 and a time of social ferment and Fukuyama, an only
child from a religious and bookish family, was shocked and disturbed by the
student protests that had virtually shut down the institution. He went on to
Yale where he took a postgraduate course in comparative literature and
travelled to Paris to study Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida, a seemingly
odd choice for someone who had been angered by campus radicalism. Half a
year of deconstructionism, black polo necks and espressos was enough - he
told an interviewer recently that 'perhaps when you are young you think that
something must be profound just because it is difficult'. He returned to the
USA to study political science. It was, apparently, 'a huge relief'.
From the start he appeared to be blessed with a peculiar prescience. His
thesis, completed in the year before Afghanistan was invaded, was on Soviet
threats to intervene in the Middle East. He joined the RAND corporation, the
huge think tank based in California, and very quickly became involved in
right-wing politics - not as a hustling activist, but as a prized policy
wonk. In 1981, Paul Wolfowitz, now the controversial US deputy defence
secretary and an arch 'neo-con' and then director of national planning,
brought the young academic into President Reagan's administration. After
another spell at RAND he was once more summoned, this time by George Bush's
government.
Again, Fukuyama proved his ability to foresee, with uncanny accuracy, coming
trends. He spoke of German re-unification, when no one thought the Berlin
Wall would fall. He was laughed at by the 'experts' when he started talking
about the collapse of the Warsaw Pact. When publishers offered six figure
sums for the The End of History, Fukuyama, who is married with three
children, resigned from his government job. He made the bestseller lists in
France, Chile, Japan and the USA.
There have been four - counting the work to be published next month - books
since then. Though all have had equally dramatic titles, none has had the
stunning impact of his first work. Trust: The Social Virtues and the
Creation of Posterity examined the market place in the era of globalisation
and was a hit in the business book market, joining the biographies of Lee
Iacocca and the 'Secrets of CEOs' handbooks in thousands of airport stores.
The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order
examined the decline of the traditional Western family. Perhaps unable to
escape the early days as a Japanese-American classicist confronted by
long-haired hippies at Cornell, he blames, in terms that will make any Daily
Mail reader happy, the birth control pill and the entry of women into the
workforce for social breakdown.
And then came Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology
Revolution. Fukuyama, showing a breadth and a confidence that few academics
possess, set about examining the consequences of our new ability to tinker
with human DNA for medical, agricultural and industrial purposes. This time
his vision was of something considerably less utopian than the world full of
hard-working, happy capitalist liberals imagined in The End of History .
Always more of a futurologist than historian, Fukuyama presents us with
something that is almost pure sci-fi: a world of mad scientists using
biotechnlogy, psychochemical drugs and genetic engineering to manipulate the
human race. Fukuyama says that attempts at social engineering by economists
and political leaders during the twentieth century didn't work because,
unlike liberal capitalist democracy, they did not fit basic human nature.
Put bluntly, people want private property, rights and such like and will
reject systems that don't supply them. But, imagine if it was possible to
alter human nature itself. To make the mind fit the society, not vice versa.
Well, says Fukuyama, if it isn't happening just yet, it might well soon.
Fukuyama imagines a future where the northern hemisphere has access to
genetic advances that allow them to create a master race by screening out
weak, diseased, disabled or even unattractive offspring. Those who haven't
access to the technology will fight to gain it.
More recently, Fukuyama has focused on the consequences of 11 September. His
latest work, State Building: Governance and Order in the 21st Century,
retains the debate-provoking sharpness of his previous books. While the last
generation or so has seen a healthy reduction in the power of states,
Fukuyama now says the chief issue for global politics will be how to build
states up. The arch-priest of global capitalism is rowing back from his
earlier triumphalist vision. 'For individual societies and for the global
community,' he writes, 'the withering away of the state will be a disaster.'
The gap opened by the decay of sovereign state power has been 'filled by
multinational corporations, NGOs, international organisations, crime
syndicates, terrorist groups and so forth.' With globalisation, coercive
technologies have become democratised. Nation-states, with their legitimate
monopolies of force, must fill this vacuum. State-building, as well as
state-deconstructing, is now critical.
Fukuyama has spent much of the last decade combating the more pessimistic
vision of his fellow academic, Samuel Huntingdon, whose theory that the
world is heading ineluctably for a violent 'clash of civilisations' was
boosted by 11 September. Fukuyama has consistently argued that the 'freight
train' of modernisation will not be derailed, even by the worst efforts of
Osama bin Laden and co. Nor, clearly, will his 'end of history' theory.
Modernity will come to all eventually, he insists. Though quite whose
modernity is never quite clear.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1248218,00.html