After reading The End of History and the Last Man I felt like I really needed to know what Fukuyama's thoughts were on the book thirty years later, so I was very glad to find this book, answering exactly the questions I had, which Mathilde Fasting must have had about 2-3 years ago.
Fukuyama clarifies his thoughts on liberal democracy, stating that really it is three separate institutions: a modern state capable of delivering services and protecting the country, a rule of law that limits the power of the state to rules agreed upon by the community, and institutions of democratic accountability that ensure the state reflects the interests of the people. This can contrast with illiberal democracies, like Hungary, where legitimacy comes from the people, but the people don't want a liberal order that restrains their power and forces respect for minority rights, enforcing the law in an impartial fashion. Illiberal democracies are more like government by the mob.
The most important question that's arisen since Fukuyama published The End of History is whether China is offering a better model than liberal democracy. They are not. Fukuyama writes that it would be unwise for other countries to imitate the Chinese model because it requires China's long history of meritocratic centralized bureaucracy and a strong cultural emphasis on education. It makes me want to read Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations since that's basically Huntington's thesis, but about China instead of liberal democracy (AKA that liberal democracy is a unique product of the Western experience). I feel like I have to read that anyway now that I've read The End of History. What China does is it challenges Fukuyama's thinking that liberal democracy is the direction all countries are heading in. China is well past the point in GDP per capita where most countries' middle classes demand a democratic voice to protect property rights and so forth. But I think Fukuyama sells himself short when he compares China to Taiwan and South Korea, which became democracies at a lower level of wealth than China has today. I think that China hasn't become a democracy yet because (1) they are run not by a petty dictator but by the Communist Party of China, which is a nearly mythical organization that has been unstoppable for almost a century. I think that Chinese middle classes know are willing to give the Communist Party more latitude to work with because of those intangible factors. And (2), the CCP has been able to uphold its fundamental promise that gives it legitimacy: if the CCP is in power, the economy will grow fast. We are now seeing signs of slowdown. If China keeps slowing down economically, the party will lose that legitimacy and need to use its security apparatus to keep control. But if China keeps growing at 5-6%, then I don't see the CCP going down any time soon. Essentially, I don't think Fukuyama is proven wrong yet, and more time is necessary to see if China's model is truly sustainable. I would want to see what happens when Xi Jinping dies or loses power or when the Chinese economy slows down. Then we could say whether Fukuyama is right or wrong. Fukuyama says that he doesn't think "China will ever occupy the kind of hegemonic position that the United States has had."
One major problem with democratization is that, as Fukuyama says in this book, "all modern democracies are the lucky inheritors of nations that were formed by nondemocratic means, and their stability is due to the fact that they simply inherited these nations, but they didn't have to create them." That would seem to imply that one step on the road to democracy is a stable, authoritarian government that can build state power before the state is converted to a liberal democracy.
Fukuyama has really interesting thoughts on Europe that were talked about in this book. He says that
Europe is really stuck right now because it's gotten to the point where it needs to complete a unification process if it's going to solve problems like a fiscal union, but politically that's not really possible. The euro, in my view, was a big mistake. While the 2010 euro crisis didn't lead to a collapse of the currency, it cold recur at any point-- and may, this time over Italy rather than Greece. The Schengen system also does not work, because Europe doesn't have secure outer borders. That's going to come back to haunt Europe. There's a lull in migration right now, but a lot of people from sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East are going to want to move to Europe unless they secure that border, and that is just not politically tenable.
Additionally, Fukuyama says that the EU is strong in all the wrong places, like annoying economic regulations, and very weak in important areas like foreign policy, where there is essentially a vetocracy.
One part of the book was just crazy to read from today's perspective. This book was published fourteen months ago in May 2021 and so much has changed. Under the subheading "Ukraine--A Beacon of Hope," Mathilde Fasting asks Fukuyama the following:
Q: You have visited Ukraine many times, and you are hosting a program for promoting democracy there. How is it going? And why do you think it's important to be doing the work that you're doing in Ukraine?
A:
Ukraine is a big, important country that has been trying to free itself of the Russian mixture of kleptocracy and authoritarian government. It's made a great deal of progress since 2014, which many people don't recognize. Ukraine is the single most important frontline state in the war against authoritarian expansion. If Ukraine doesn't succeed in preserving its independence and democracy and in dealing with its own corruption problem, then no other countries in the post-Soviet space will succeed either. That's why I've spent a lot of time in Ukraine in the last few years.
At the present moment, things are not looking so good there. In 2019 Ukraine elected a new president, Volodymyr Zelensky, and a new Parliament in which 70 percent of the members have never served in politics before, many of them young people. It looked like they were sweeping out the entire old political elite. But in 2020 it has become evidence that Ukraine's oligarchs retain much of their power and continue to shape policy behind the scenes.
My theory of change is to sponsor leadership programs where we teach a lot of young Ukrainians about how democratic government is supposed to work and how they can help bring about policy reform. Whatever the larger political picture there, I can tell you that I come back optimistic every time I go to Ukraine. I work in these leadership programs where we teach a lot of young Ukrainians. There are a lot of younger people, in their thirties and forties. They didn't grow up under the Soviet Union, and they really want Ukraine to be a European country.
Miscellaneous Things:
- Fukuyama makes an interesting point that while the personal computer revolution was decentralizing in nature, the artificial intelligence revolution is centralizing. PCs gave everyone the ability to say what they wanted and see what they wanted on the internet freely. But artificial intelligence gives companies and governments the ability to show you what they want you to see. This is very good for authoritarians and bad for free people.
- I think I talked about this in my blog post on The End of History, but I'll just say again here that the point of The End of History wasn't that stuff would stop happening. It was a response to the communists who believed that history would progress from feudalism to capitalism to communism. Fukuyama instead agrees with Hegel that the final phase is liberal democracy.
- On our election system, Fukuyama has some proposals (which I largely agree with). He says that we should abandon first-past-the-post voting and primaries that encourage parties to select extreme choices. A ranked-choice system like Australia uses is probably better. Fukuyama likes the German system, which tries to reduce the number of parties by having a 5% threshold while retaining overall proportionality. And then there are also single-member districts that represent particular constituencies, creating a mixed system.
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