I had to read this classic book at some point, and I had already been somewhat familiar with Fukuyama's work through readings in college. I found the book to be highly relevant still, however I didn't realize how conservative Fukuyama was. One thing that has always annoyed me is the stupid criticism based on reading the title and nothing more that Fukuyama is somehow saying events will stop happening. That's not what the title means. However, I think he chose a really confusing title that is not that helpful, since it relies on different meanings of both "end" and "history" that most people aren't familiar with unless they read Hegel and Marx (nerds). The "End of History" is not a chronological end of events, but a sort of result of the "historical" movement of human progress. Marx believed that history moved towards an end of communism, but Fukuyama believes that end to be liberal democracy. And Fukuyama specifically states that states can regress from liberal democracy, so it is not like once you get there you are done. Rather, it is that once you get there, you have achieved the apex of political development, and that any change from the pure form of liberal democracy is a regression from it, moving backwards.
I really enjoyed discussion of governmental legitimacy in the book. Fukuyama, writing just after the fall of the USSR, explains that "it was much more difficult to tolerate economic failure in the Soviet system because the regime itself had explicitly based its claims to legitimacy on its ability to deliver its people a high material standard of living." Fukuyama goes on to explain that the USSR actually achieved this until the early 1970s, but when its economy declined (along with that of the West interestingly enough post-1973), it lost legitimacy in the eyes of its citizens. Between 1928 and 1955, Soviet GNP increased yearly between 4.4 and 6.3 percent, but slowed to 2.0 to 2.3 percent between 1975 and 1985. Once the government proved it could not uphold its promise of economic growth, it was no longer legitimate. This differs somewhat from the emphasis Tony Judt puts on the Soviet repressive apparatus as a tool to uphold the government in his book Postwar. Judt emphasizes less the economic performance of the state and rather the USSR's reduction of willingness to repress free speech as the moment that allowed criticism to flourish and end the Communist experiment. But perhaps these two views can be reconciled as the economic decline depriving the state of legitimacy over many years and the easing of restrictions allowing people to express their displeasure at the Communist Party, provoking the sudden end of the USSR.
Writing at the fall of the USSR, Fukuyama's argument is that the system of monarchy lost any legitimacy by the end of World War One, and that Fascism lost legitimacy after World War Two (or the 1970s in Spain and Portugal maybe), and that now that Communism had failed in 1991, there was no competitor to liberal democracy. Liberal democracy's main competitors have discredited themselves, and by the 1990s, even if not all or most regimes were truly liberal democracies (or anywhere close), almost all governments made some pretense of being liberal democracies, holding elections even if they were fake. Most importantly, Fukuyama believes that history moves in a single coherent direction following natural science due to the cumulative nature of both. Because we write down and preserve our scientific knowledge, science advances cumulative of the discoveries that came earlier, and history is the same. But here Fukuyama makes too big a jump, I think, and if I remember correctly from his book about order and decay, he's changed his mind on this. He writes that history is not reversible, and that there is no going back, erroneously arguing at one point that it would require that a civilization vanish entirely for history to reverse itself. But not only do civilizations vanish entirely sometimes (like those ones that pop up on LIDAR in the jungle every now and then), but liberal democracies often experience backsliding and a reduction in rights, like the United States right now.
The End of History is a highly psychological book, analyzing why certain types of governments work. He identifies the high correlation between higher education and democracy, a trend that has become dominant in America politics, as the highly educated tend to vote Democrat and favor preservation of democracy, whereas Republicans tend to support minority rule more and are made up of a less-educated coalition. Even more central to the book are the concepts of thymos and megalothymos, meaning the desire for recognition and the desire for recognition over others, respectively. Fukuyama believes that liberal democracy is especially good due to how it contains thymotic urges, as it grants equality to satisfy individuals' urge to be treated like others, and has constraints to prevent individuals from accumulating too much power. People don't just want to live under an economically strong dictatorship, they desire the dignity afforded to those who have a say in their government's choices. Simultaneously, through the freedom of expression in the arts and the free market, individuals can rise up high enough to satisfy their megalothymotic urges without disupting society like a medieval lord who had to go to war. The one urge that modern liberal democracy cannot satisfy is the urge to risk life and limb in war, as politically, liberal democracy doesn't offer so many benefits to those who rise up in politics as a monarchical system.
The book also made me reflect on how it is more difficult for some countries to become liberal democracies because liberal democracy is a sort of privilege afforded to countries that don't need the faster development and political unification that can come with authoritarianism. A country like Russia, surrounded on almost all sides by potential rivals, doesn't have as clear a path to liberal democracy as Canada, which has only one neighbor that is also a liberal democracy. But the big question is whether or not the type of government matters in determining the government's actions. While we can observe that liberal democracies never seem to go to war with other liberal democracies, we may also observe that a country like Russia, regardless of whether it is communist, liberal democratic, or authoritarian, has the same borders no matter what, which will inspire the same actions, like desiring Black Sea ports.
The End of History has some serious weaknesses. At times, Fukuyama neglects to use hard data and engages in stereotyping, using the common refrain that Japanese culture is more group-oriented to justify its economic nationalism. Additionally, he uses that "group-oriented" culture to show that the Japanese consent to living under a government dominated by one political party, but you could say the same of Mexico in the middle of the twentieth century, which is a totally different culture. Moreover, Fukuyama's worst moment in the book comes when he decries those in America who "devote their lives to the total and complete elimination of any vestiges of inequality, making sure that no little girl should have to pay more to have her locks cut than a little boy, that no Boy Scout troop be closed to homosexual scoutmasters, that no building be built without a concrete wheelchair ramp going up to the front door. These passions exist in American society because of, and not despite, the smallness of its actual remaining inequalities." That has to be by far the most stupid statement of the whole book and I was downright embarrassed for the author when I read that.
I'll end by saying that I like that book and that it raises really good questions about government and political science. I find myself thinking frequently about what Fukuyama said about the USSR's legitimacy being based on its ability to sustain a strong economy. In the same way, the USA's legitimacy is based on its ability to maintain a democracy and strong rights for minorities. If America cannot maintain that political legitimacy, it loses its reason for existing. That makes gerrymandering and malapportionment a crisis of legitimacy for the country that we must solve. Fukuyama is prescient in identifying that the greatest threats to liberal democracy come from the inside, as illiberal actors seek to overthrow the entire democracy to achieve their personal or group goals.
Miscellaneous Facts:
- Fukuyama does not count Periclean Athens as a liberal democracy because it did not systematically protect individual rights.
- Not really a "fact," but Fukuyama writes that "while economic planning does play a relatively greater role in Asia than in the United States, the most successful sectors within Asian economies have tended to be those permitting the greatest degree of competition in domestic markets and integration into international ones." To support this, he cites Michael Porter, The Competitive Advantage of Nations, but directly contradicts the thesis of How Asia Works, which I read a few years ago. I'm not sure which is right, but I think that the high level of competition in domestic markets and integration into international ones may still include very significant government intervention, unlike Fukuyama implies.
- The key difference between Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington is that Fukuyama believes that liberal democracy is a universal value while Huntington believes that not all cultures can adopt it, specifically Islamic cultures.
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