A different end of history

Joshua Loo

№1, Volume V

Francis Fukuyama

The End of History and the Last Man

973.933 WOL—John Sargeaunt Room

ISBN 978-1408711408 / 1408711400

For a book whose major conclusions are wrong, The End of History is a surprisingly well-written book. The analysis is insightful, and, for long periods of time, completely correct; obviously there are some analytic gaps, but there will always be analytic gaps, given that this is political science and philosophy, not a rigorously defined logic system; it is not clear that the book is much worse than any other, in analytic terms—Fukuyama was, to some degree, simply unlucky. The question is, therefore: How did Fukuyama manage to so erroneously predict the future?

Before that, it is necessary to explain how Fukuyama was wrong. The primary thesis of the book is that liberal democracy is the end state of humanity—there is no political ideology which will succeed it. There are several subsidiary claims—that totalitarian dictatorship, for example, is incompatible with strong economic growth, that θυμοσ is responsible for our desire for democracy (and that democracy best recognises this desire), and a few further subsidiary claims.

That the final claim is false is fairly obviously true. Fukuyama rests his claim that liberal democracy is the future on the subsidiary claim that there are no alternatives. There are, and they are remarkably successful. China is clearly not democratic (there is no need to provide a citation for this); this is evidenced economically, in that China’s GDP is more than half that of the United States in nominal terms, and greater in purchasing power terms. It is also true in political terms. China also dominates various strategic sectors, such as the manufacture of transistor-based equipment; consortia of its scientists are at the forefront of research in quantum computing, genetics, and energy-efficient technologies.

Evidence of this abounds: there is democratic reversal nearly everywhere, with South Africa perhaps being the only tentative exception. The United States has been reclassified as a ‘flawed democracy’ by the Economist Intelligence Unit;¹ gerrymandering is widespread^2,3,4). In the United Kingdom, detractors of the referendum result seem to think the country in crisis before any departure, whilst supporters note that the process has not been completed yet, and appears to be a failure in that sense.

Fukuyama’s arguments that centralised state control of economies appears to broadly be infeasible are sound, so long as the comparative is between the state planning we saw in the USSR, and the (somewhat distorted) free market systems of the PRC, United Kingdom, France, et al.. He then proceeds to claim that θυμοσ requires that there exist a liberal democracy.

Perhaps in the 1990s and early 2000s, this was true. The decline of activism is perhaps most visible in Hong Kong, where the propensity to protest was once described as ‘the national sport.’⁵ In 2003, up to a tenth of the population marched against the proposed enactment of Article 23 anti-subversion legislation, and won.⁶ Now, such legislation is once more a governmenal agendum—and there have been no protests. The 2017 pro-democracy march saw a turnout of just 66,000—far lower than any previous year.⁷ Why?

The primary reason is that the winds of change now face a different direction—the authoritarian direction of China. This is why leaders do not speak of ‘democracy’ but ‘development’, for they are no longer the same; to be developed is no longer to be democratic. Those leaders who once had to pay lip service to democracy—whose number once included such unlikely democrats as Putin—because of Chinese development, are now able to point to something else. Fukuyama would not of course dispute this, for the reverse was part of his explanation of the power of liberal democracy.