The End of History and the last man by Francis Fukuyama
The idea of "the end of history" requires Francis
Fukuyama to define what history is. History according to Fukuyama is a
chronology, an attempt to put a collection of events into a specific and
continuous framework. Hegel's worldview, from which Fukuyama emerges, is
that history has a direction - progress. Hegel explains history as the
"Great Parade of Liberties" - the history in which universal liberty
is the founding idea in historical development. If we were once slaves, then
landowners and slowly freedoms expand throughout history.
In contrast to Marx, for whom what motivates the world
is reality and the consciousness derived from it, Hegel argued that the motive
of the world is only consciousness, ideology.
The idea of "the end of history" was coined by
Hegel in 1812 following Napoleon's great victory at the Battle of Vienna which
following Napoleon's decision determined that the values of the French
Empire, i.e. the liberal democratic state and liberty became a pattern by which
the whole world would align. Fukuyama argues that indeed, as Hegel predicted,
the pattern of the Western liberal state is a winning pattern that the whole
world will gradually align with and slowly the values of modernity are
grasped in countries and more countries are becoming democratic, liberal, etc
...
Fukuyama claimed that in the 20th century there were
challenges to this pattern, which Hegel did not foresee:
Communism - an approach that denies the universal freedoms
expressed in the idea of the free market. The communist approach collapsed in
the late 20th century.
Fascism-Nazism - approaches that did not accept the concept
of freedom as a legitimate concept, or the idea of universal equality between
human beings. Therefore, according to Fukuyama, these attitudes in advance were
doomed to disappear, and the loss in the Second World War only accelerated
this.
Nationalism - ostensibly, moderate nationalism is supposed to
be integrated into modernity (nationalism = defines the state). But the
national-nationalist ideology (separatism, racism) is in conflict with the
universal principles, and will therefore struggle for relevance and weaken over
time.
Religious Fundamentalism - Fukuyama has not been able to deal
with these ideas. The problem as we have analyzed it - the lack of universal
elements, that is, fundamentalism cannot be attractive to those who do not
belong to a particular religion.
The end of history is a stage in which all these challenges
no longer exist, the insight that the Western nation-state is the model that
the whole world will go and adopt. Once these insights are established, according
to Fukuyama, we will reach the end of history.
In 1989, when Fukuyama delivered his speech and published the
article about the end of history, we were in fact in the midst of the collapse
of the only alternative to modernity - communism. Moreover, a year earlier the
Iran-Iraq war ended which was an exceptional and isolated case of a
long-standing system of two states neither of which represented either the
Communist bloc on the one hand or the US on the other, and yet it was a bloody,
heavy and significant war. Fukuyama argues that we are witnessing a world that
can now be divided between the world that ended history and the world that has
not yet finished history.
"The end of history" was initially criticized but
in the winter of 1991-1992 it turns out that Fukuyama was right and the first
Gulf War breaks out - the US goes to war against Iraq to evacuate Iraq from
Kuwait. From the Warsaw Pact, Latin American and East Asian countries (Japan,
Korea and China) and certain Muslim countries supported by the regime (Egypt,
Kuwait, Jordan, Turkey). On the Iraqi side are Iraq, Iran (which has been
Iraq's enemy for years) and other Muslim countries like Syria ... "B.
see The End of History (Fukuyama) Explained
