Richard K. Betts
"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slave of some defunct economist," John Maynard Keynes once wrote. Politicians and pundits view the world through instincts and assumptions rooted in some philosopher's Big Idea. Some ideas are old and taken for granted throughout society. For most Americans, it is the ideas of the liberal tradition, from
In times of change, people wonder more consciously about how the world works. The hiatus between the Cold War and 9/11 was such a time; conventional wisdom begged to be reinvented. Nearly a century of titanic struggle over which ideology would be the model for organizing societies around the globe -- fascism, communism, or Western liberal democracy -- had left only the last one standing. After a worldwide contest of superpowers, the only conflicts left were local, numerous but minor. What would the driving forces of world politics be after the twentieth century, the century of total war?
Among the theorists who jumped into the market for models of the future, three stood out:
None of the three visions won out as the new conventional wisdom, although Fukuyama's rang truest when the Berlin Wall fell, Huntington's did so after 9/11, and Mearsheimer's may do so once
Most optimistic was Fukuyama's vision of the final modern consensus on democracy and capitalism, the globalization of Western liberalism, and the "homogenization of all human societies," driven by technology and wealth. Some were put off by his presentation of a dense philosophical interpretation of Hegel and Nietzsche, but of the three visions, Fukuyama's still offered the one closest to mainstream American thinking. It resonated with other testaments to the promise of American leadership and Western norms, such as
Understood properly, Fukuyama was nowhere near as naive as his critics assumed. He did not claim that history (in Hegel's sense of a progression of human relations from lordship and bondage to freedom, equality, and constitutional government) had fully ended; rather, he argued that it was in the process of ending, with the main obstacles overcome but loose ends still to be tied up. His main point was that "liberal democracy remains the only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions and cultures across the globe," but he recognized that illiberal politics and conflict would persist for some time in the developing world, which remains "stuck in history."
Fukuyama likened the process of history to a strung-out wagon train, in which some wagons get temporarily stopped, damaged, or diverted but eventually arrive at the same destination. With no more fundamental disagreements about how societies should be organized, there would be nothing important to fight about. Fukuyama's original essay in The National Interest in 1989 was quite ahead of its time, written before Mikhail Gorbachev ended the Cold War. Even many who mistakenly saw the message as simplistic assumed that the collapse of communism left Western values as the wave of the future, and catastrophic war a relic of the past.
Like most red-blooded Americans, Fukuyama rejected the sour realist theory of international relations, which sees history not as a progression toward enlightenment and peace but as a cycle of conflict. Epochal threats made realism persuasive during much of the century of total war, but at bottom it is alien to American instincts and popular only among some cranky conservatives, Marxists, and academic theorists. (I have been accused of being among them.) Most people happily pronounced it passé once the communist threat imploded. "Treating a disease that no longer exists," Fukuyama claimed, "realists now find themselves proposing costly and dangerous cures to healthy patients."
Mearsheimer, however, is an unregenerate realist, and he threw cold water on the Cold War victory. Bucking the tide of optimism, he argued that international life would continue to be the brutal competition for power it had always been. He characterized the competition as tragic because countries end in conflict not out of malevolence but despite their desire for peace. In the absence of a world government to enforce rights, they find it impossible to trust one another, and simply striving for security drives them to seek control of their environment and thus dominance. If peace is to last, it will have to be fashioned from a stable balance of power, not the spread of nice ideas. In short, there is nothing really new about the new world.
Mearsheimer was a party pooper, defying what seemed to be common sense. Many found it easy to write him off when he claimed the revival of traditional conflicts would soon make everyone nostalgic for the simplicity and stability of the Cold War. But realism can never be written off for long. This school of thought has always agitated, even angered, American liberals and neoconservatives (who are in many ways just liberals in wolves' clothing). The theory falls out of favor whenever peace breaks out, but it keeps coming back because peace never proves permanent. Mearsheimer's vision is especially telling because it is an extreme version of realism that does not see any benign actors in the system and assumes that all great powers seek hegemony: "There are no status quo powers . . . save for the occasional hegemon that wants to maintain its dominating position."THE WEST AND THE REST
Huntington's idea, first broached in this magazine, was the most novel and jarring. Like Fukuyama, Huntington recognized the impact of globalization, but he saw it generating conflict rather than consensus. In tune with Mearsheimer, he believed "soft power is power only when it rests on a foundation of hard power," but he saw the relevant concentrations of power as transnational cultural areas -- eight basic civilizations -- rather than particular states. What Fukuyama saw as a liberal bow wave, Huntington saw as the crest of the wave, an ethnocentric Western model whose force had peaked. To Huntington, the world was unifying economically and technologically but not socially. "The forces of integration in the world are real and are precisely what are generating counterforces of cultural assertion," he wrote. The West would remain dominant for some time but was beginning a gradual decline relative to other civilizations, especially those in
Huntington packed his 1996 book with data about the upsurge of non-Western cultures: the small and shrinking proportion of the world's population made up by the West and
Huntington's main point was that modernization is not the same as westernization. Foreigners' participation in Western consumer culture does not mean that they accept Western values, such as social pluralism, the rule of law, the separation of church and state, representative government, or individualism. "The essence of Western civilization is the Magna Carta, not the Magna Mac," Huntington wrote. This means that "somewhere in the
The homogenization Fukuyama saw resembled what Huntington called "
Many misread Huntington's initial article as a xenophobic call to arms for the West against "the rest." The later book made clear that his aim was quite the opposite: to prevent the growing clash of civilizations from becoming a war of civilizations. He called for humility instead of hubris, writing, "Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous." Spreading Western values does not promote peace but provokes resistance: "If non-Western societies are once again to be shaped by Western culture, it will happen only as a result of the expansion, deployment, and impact of Western power. Imperialism is the necessary logical consequence of universalism." The wiser alternative, he argued, is to accept that "the security of the world requires acceptance of global multiculturality."
So Fukuyama's solution was Huntington's problem. To avoid escalating conflict between civilizations requires rejecting universalism, respecting the legitimacy of non-Western cultures, and, most of all, refraining from intervention in the conflicts of non-Western civilizations. Staying out, Huntington wrote, "is the first requirement of peace." This would turn out to be especially difficult in dealing with the Islamic world, which, he said, has a record of being "far more involved in intergroup violence than the people of any other civilization."AFTER 9/11
When al Qaeda struck the
Writing before 9/11, Fukuyama saw the Islamic exception as a minor distraction. Mearsheimer had nothing at all to say about it, since no Islamic state is a great power, the only political unit he considers important. As for terrorism, the word does not even appear in the index to either of their books. Huntington, in contrast, forthrightly saw Islam as a significant challenge, believing that it is more vibrant than Fukuyama thought. For example, he explained that Islamic fundamentalists are disproportionately intellectuals and technocrats from "the more 'modern' sectors of the middle class."
Of the three, only Huntington anticipated how big a loose end in the end of history Islam would be. After The Clash of Civilizations was published, the Islamic world presented a multifront military challenge to Americans -- partly as
In the post-Cold War hiatus, the visions of Fukuyama, Huntington, and Mearsheimer pointed to very different forces setting the odds of conflict or cooperation. These visions seemed starkly opposed to one another, and those who found one convincing considered the others flat-out wrong. But when one peels away the top layers of the three arguments and gets down to the conditions the authors set for their forecasts, it turns out that they point in a remarkably similar -- and pessimistic -- direction.
By the end his book, Fukuyama -- the most optimistic of the three -- turns out to lack conviction. His vision is more complex and contingent than other versions of liberal theory, and less triumphant. He goes beyond the many who embrace globalization and
Converging with the other two authors, Fukuyama worries that a Western civilization that went no further than the triumph of materialism and justice "would be unable to defend itself from civilizations . . . whose citizens were ready to forsake comfort and safety and who were not afraid to risk their lives for the sake of dominion." Although confident that history is ending, he concedes that boredom with the result, or exceptions to the rule, may restart it. By the last chapter of Fukuyama's book, Nietzsche has gained on Hegel, and history seems to be at not an end but an intermission.WILL CHINA RESTART HISTORY?
The West's future relations with
Fukuyama has little to say about
As for Mearsheimer,
To Mearsheimer, the liberal policy of "engagement" offers no solution to
If one believes the rest of Mearsheimer's book,
So should Americans relax after all? No. Affection for bipolarity is wrong. It rests too much on the fortunate "long peace" of the Cold War -- which was not that stable much of the time -- and it is not clear why lessons should not be drawn from the other examples of bipolarity that produced catastrophic wars:
Optimism depends on alternatives that all of the three theorists consider unlikely. One is the common liberal vision, but this is the simple materialist sort that Fukuyama considers too sterile to last. Another would be a conservative prescription of restraint, such as Huntington's, but this is out of character for Americans and has been ever since they became accustomed to muscular activism after 1945. In his book The Post-American World,
Huntington is more of a democrat, yet he also fears that Americans will not face up to hard choices. "If
None of the three authors wrote of the darkest visions about the future, which go beyond politics. (For example,
This is a reminder that simple visions, however powerful, do not hold up as reliable predictors of particular developments. Visions are vital for clarifying thinking about the forces that drive international relations, the main directions to expect events to take, and one's basic faith in matters of politics, but they cannot account for many specifics in the actual complexity of political life. The biggest ideas may also yield the least accurate estimates. The psychologist
Reminders of the limits of theory ring true to practical people. But if causes and effects are hopelessly random, then there is no hope for informed policy. Terminal uncertainty, however, is not an option for statesmen. They cannot just take shots in the dark, so they cannot do without some assumptions about how the world works. This is why practical people are slaves of defunct economists or contemporary political theorists. Policymakers need intellectual anchors if they are to make informed decisions that are any more likely to move the world in the right direction than the wrong one.
So what do the three visions offer? Despite what seemed like stark differences when they were first advanced, many of their implications wound up being on the same page. Fukuyama captured the drama of the West's final unification, a momentous consolidation of liberalism on a grand scale and a world-shaping development even if the Western model does not prove universal. A less ambitious version of Fukuyama's vision that stops short of demanding the full westernization of "the rest" is quite compatible with Huntington's, which urged the West to concentrate on keeping itself together, solving its own problems, reversing a trend of creeping decadence, and renewing its vitality. In contrast to many U.S. liberals' preference, Huntington sought universalism at home and multiculturalism abroad. Fukuyama's vision can also be surprisingly compatible with Mearsheimer's, since Fukuyama conceded that realism still applied to dealings with the part of the world still stuck in history. (Mearsheimer, however, disagreed with the notion that Western states had outgrown the possibility of war among themselves.)
Huntington, too, accepted much of realism, since in his view, civilizational struggle is still played out in large part among the "core states" in each culture. He also agreed that the
The most significant similarity, and a dispiriting one, is that all three authors were out of step with the attitudes that have dominated U.S. foreign policy and made it overreach after the Cold War. First, in different ways, all three saw beyond Davos-style liberalism and recognized that noneconomic motives would remain powerful roiling forces. Mearsheimer did not focus on the importance of moral dignity and identity, as the other two did, but he argued even more forcefully than they did that trade, prosperity, and law in themselves do not guarantee peace. Second, none supported crusading neoconservatism. (Fukuyama broke with the neoconservatives over the
Available at Amazon.com:
The End of History and the Last Man
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order
The Tragedy of Great Power Politics
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Running Out of Water: The Looming Crisis and Solutions to Conserve Our Most Precious Resource
Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water
Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization
At War with the Weather: Managing Large-Scale Risks in a New Era of Catastrophes
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