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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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 Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 9:04 pm Post subject: The End of the End of History |
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This long essay is based upon Kagan's new book (which I strongly recommend) The Return of History and the End of Dreams.
http://www.tnr.com/story.html?id=ee167382-bd16-4b13-beb7-08effe1a6844
A sample:
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Again, this competition is not the Cold War redux. It is more like the nineteenth century redux. In the nineteenth century, the absolutist rulers of Russia and Austria shored up fellow autocracies in post-revolutionary France and used force to suppress liberal rebellions in Germany, Poland, Italy, and Spain. Palmerston's Britain used British power to aid liberals on the continent; the United States cheered on liberal revolutions in Hungary and Germany and expressed outrage when Russian troops suppressed liberal forces in Poland. Today Ukraine has already been a battleground between forces supported by the West and forces supported by Russia, and it could well be a battleground again in the future. Georgia could be another. It is worth contemplating what the world would look like, what Europe would look like, if democratic movements in Ukraine and Georgia failed or were forcefully suppressed, and the two nations became autocracies with close ties to Moscow. It is worth considering what the effect would be in East Asia if China used force to quash a democratic system in Taiwan and install a friendlier autocracy in its place.
The global competition between democratic governments and autocratic governments will become a dominant feature of the twenty-first-century world. The great powers are increasingly choosing sides and identifying themselves with one camp or the other. India, which during the Cold War was proudly neutral or even pro-Soviet, has begun to identify itself as part of the democratic West. Japan in recent years has also gone out of its way to position itself as a democratic great power, sharing common values with other Asian democracies but also with non-Asian democracies. For both Japan and India the desire to be part of the democratic world is genuine, but it is also part of a geopolitical calculation--a way of cementing solidarity with other great powers that can be helpful in their strategic competition with autocratic China.
There is no perfect symmetry in international affairs. The twin realities of the present era--great power competition and the contest between democracy and autocracy--will not always produce the same alignments. Democratic India in its geopolitical competition with autocratic China supports the Burmese dictatorship in order to deny Beijing a strategic advantage. India's diplomats enjoy playing the other great powers against each other, sometimes warming to Russia, sometimes to China. Democratic Greece and Cyprus pursue close relations with Russia partly out of cultural solidarity with Eastern Orthodox cousins, but more out of economic interest. The United States has long allied itself with Arab dictatorships for strategic and economic reasons, as well as to successive military rulers in Pakistan. As in the Cold War, strategic and economic considerations, as well as cultural affinities, may often cut against ideology.
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Essentially, he is arguing that a hard return to realism is upon us. Can't say I disagree, though I am not convinced that a very sick Russia can actually count as a meaningful realist opponent. China, as well, has serious demographic issues and an acute water shortage that could bring the whole story to an end. Anyways, the moral of the story is that the NGO model of a country is dead, and the old god of realism is being reborn. Good.
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| The great fallacy of our era has been the belief that a liberal international order rests on the triumph of ideas alone, or on the natural unfolding of human progress. It is an immensely attractive notion, deeply rooted in the Enlightenment worldview of which all of us in the liberal world are the product. Our political scientists posit theories of modernization, with sequential stages of political and economic development that lead upward toward liberalism. Our political philosophers imagine a grand historical dialectic, in which the battle of worldviews over the centuries produces, in the end, the correct liberal democratic answer. Naturally, many are inclined to believe that the Cold War ended the way it did simply because the better worldview triumphed, and that the international order that exists today is but the next stage forward in humanity's march from strife and aggression toward a peaceful and prosperous co-existence. |
History has no inherent set goals to progress towards. Le Duh. Black Swans lie in our path, and when ideas and power meet the outcome is unpredictable. The nation state exists to protect people from internal and external threats. Not to fluff them. Time to get back to real(ist) business.
Here is him discussing the troubles that post-modern Europe has in adapting to the new world (from the WaPo):
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Europeans are apprehensive, with good reason. They bet, massively, in the 1990s on the primacy of geoeconomics over geopolitics, a new era in which a huge and productive European economy would compete as an equal with the United States and China. They cut back on defense budgets, calculating that soft power was in and that hard power was out. They imagined that the world would come to replicate the European Union, and that when it did, the European Union would be a postmodern superpower.
For a while, it seemed to work. With Russia prostrate, the magnetic attraction of Europe, along with the promise of the American security guarantee, pulled just about every nation in the east into the Western orbit. The appeal of what Robert Cooper called Europe's "voluntary empire" seemed without limit.
Today, however, European expansion has slowed and perhaps halted, and not just because Europeans balk at taking in Turkey. They also fear resurgent Russia. They realize that by enlarging eastward, Europe acquired a new Eastern problem. Or, rather, the old Eastern problem, the centuries-old contest between Russia and its near neighbors.
It wasn't a problem when Russia was weak and poor and eager to integrate itself into the West. But Russia is back on its feet, rich and resentful, seeking not to join Europe but to take a special path back to great-power status. Putin laments the fall of the Soviet Union and seeks to regain predominant influence in the Baltic states and Eastern Europe, as well as over Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova and the rest of what Russians call their "near abroad." But the former are now formally part of Europe, and the latter are what Europeans call their "new neighborhood."
And so the nations of the European Union find themselves embroiled in a very 19th-century confrontation. After a decade of voluntary retreat, Russia now pushes back against Europe's powerful attractive force, using traditional levers of power. It has imposed a total embargo on trade with Georgia. It has episodically denied oil supplies to Lithuania, Latvia and Belarus; cut off gas supplies to Ukraine and Moldova; and punished Estonia with a suspension of rail traffic and a cyber-attack on its government's computer system in a dispute over a Soviet war memorial. It supports separatist movements in Georgia and keeps its own armed forces on Georgian territory and in Moldova. It has effectively pulled out of the Conventional Forces in Europe Treaty, freeing it to deploy forces wherever necessary on its western flank.
Polls show Europeans increasingly take a dim view of their large neighbor. French President Nicolas Sarkozy observed last year that "Russia is imposing its return on the world scene by playing its assets, notably oil and gas, with a certain brutality." Even the Finnish defense minister worries that "military force" has once again become a "key element" in how Russia "conducts its international relations."
But Europe may be institutionally and temperamentally ill-equipped to respond. Can it bring a knife to a knife fight? |
And if it can't, can they ask America to bring if for them?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/05/AR2008020502879.html |
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RufusW
Joined: 14 Jun 2008
Location: Busan
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| Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 10:26 pm Post subject: |
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I support the 'End of History' 100%, completely, it will happen undoubtedly.
When we start using renewable energy properly, countries cannot use their resources to bully other countries. China's move to market forces will create democracy eventually.
India will be the most powerful country in the world - it'll outstrip China and it'll be democratic.
"many are inclined to believe that the Cold War ended the way it did simply because the better worldview triumphed" - yea it did, capitalism, the USSR was spent to the grave. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 10:33 pm Post subject: |
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| I support the 'End of History' 100%, completely, it will happen undoubtedly. |
Even in Saudi? Care to provide a time line?
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| When we start using renewable energy properly, countries cannot use their resources to bully other countries. |
Sometimes, nations bully for reasons other than energy.
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| China's move to market forces will create democracy eventually. |
Fukuyama's thesis, if I remember correctly, was that liberal democracy and markets will triumph the world over. Markets, I agree. Even democracy, maybe (if we are willing to be very flexible with the meaning) but liberal democracy, no. The CCP is modeling itself off of the PAP in Singapore. It is nominally a democracy, but a liberal democracy it isn't.
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| India will be the most powerful country in the world - it'll outstrip China and it'll be democratic. |
I agree and disagree. I don't think India will survive as one country. But it will still likely overtake China, but mostly because China is almost out of water and their labour supply has apparently peaked. |
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RufusW
Joined: 14 Jun 2008
Location: Busan
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| Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 10:53 pm Post subject: |
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Saudi - maybe 100 years let's say. Does it matter when? - it will happen eventually.
There would be bullying, but remember the wealth of each nation is tied up in their cordial relations. In a fully integrated world economy no-one wants to annoy anyone else too much.
Yes Fukuyama - I totally believe his thesis.
You can't create a 'bit of democracy'. Democracy creates democracy, and alongside this liberalism is created. Autocratic regimes are basically fighting against human nature (or at least the best way of representing it) - and they ain't going to win.
To a certain extent a free market creates democracy - complete information, freedom to move etc... this all helps an economy develop. And in the future when countries are only concerned about being as efficient and competitive as possible they will have to implement liberal social policies (letting women work is an obvious, simple example).
"The CCP is modeling itself off of the PAP in Singapore" - unfortunately I don't know much about this. But as I said, it would be hard to give citizens a little bit of power (a semi-democracy) and them not to want to increase it. Citizens would be hungry for power.
I believe India will stay as one - I doubt there's a civil war brewing. And even if it did, it would re-integrate (like the UK) into a union anyway. India will overtake China simply because it is the most populace nation in the world.
We're obviously not discussing whether Western democracy is actually democratic - but that's another debate. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Thu Jul 17, 2008 10:56 pm Post subject: |
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| I don't really know what democracy is anyways. I have no say in how my government operates, and I know this because I have an elementary understanding of maths. For me, it is the "liberal" that matters, and I can't help but notice that the "liberal" comes from one civilization, and only portions of that civilization. I don't know if it is transferable. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2008 6:02 pm Post subject: |
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Fukuyama's thesis is compatible with realist foreign policy like Kagan's. His is more of a philosophical view about the progress of the ideal state. He makes a convincing case that the ideal state would be a representative democracy, and that is not going to change, ever. Democracy's triumph would not be measured in Cold War domino theory, i.e., by counting democracies on the map. It would be measured by what part of the world would strive for democracy itself.
If democracy is a Western invention, and I would argue that it is, then it has caught on quite nicely the world over. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2008 8:00 pm Post subject: |
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I generally agree. His major point is not with the thrust of history but that the 19th century is making a rapid comeback. Democracy can still triumph, but not the post-modern European variety that sees the state not in terms of defining interests but rather a large international charity. We can make the choice of if history will end, or not. Or as he puts it:
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History has returned, and the democracies must come together to shape it, or others will shape it for them.
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I think our (non-American democracies) mistake was in thinking the progression to liberal democracy to be natural or inherent. |
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Kuros
Joined: 27 Apr 2004
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| Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2008 9:32 pm Post subject: |
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| mises wrote: |
I generally agree. His major point is not with the thrust of history but that the 19th century is making a rapid comeback. Democracy can still triumph, but not the post-modern European variety that sees the state not in terms of defining interests but rather a large international charity. We can make the choice of if history will end, or not. Or as he puts it:
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History has returned, and the democracies must come together to shape it, or others will shape it for them.
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I think our (non-American democracies) mistake was in thinking the progression to liberal democracy to be natural or inherent. |
The problem is that Kagan isn't talking about history in the same way as Fukuyama was.
History here is the Hegelian concept of a progressive dialectic. Fukuyama is still right, the dialectic has ended, thus history has ended. The end of history is a good thing. It means we have finally arrived at a shared ideal: the modern, representative, pluralistic democratic state. |
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mises
Joined: 05 Nov 2007
Location: retired
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| Posted: Tue Jul 22, 2008 9:51 pm Post subject: |
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| Kuros wrote: |
| mises wrote: |
I generally agree. His major point is not with the thrust of history but that the 19th century is making a rapid comeback. Democracy can still triumph, but not the post-modern European variety that sees the state not in terms of defining interests but rather a large international charity. We can make the choice of if history will end, or not. Or as he puts it:
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History has returned, and the democracies must come together to shape it, or others will shape it for them.
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I think our (non-American democracies) mistake was in thinking the progression to liberal democracy to be natural or inherent. |
The problem is that Kagan isn't talking about history in the same way as Fukuyama was.
History here is the Hegelian concept of a progressive dialectic. Fukuyama is still right, the dialectic has ended, thus history has ended. The end of history is a good thing. It means we have finally arrived at a shared ideal: the modern, representative, pluralistic democratic state. |
Actually, I think they are using very similar meanings. His use of the word "history" is, I think, to place his slim tome into a larger discussion started in modern times by FF. While he doesn't elaborate as much as FF about the various dimensions of it, he certainly seems to believe that China and Russia will find their way to the End, but that their path is ahead of them and sometimes we forget that. He also seems to think that this process can be considerably slowed or even derailed, if not for the good efforts of the West. I do not share his assumption that there is an inherent end to history, as you put it "the modern, representative, pluralistic democratic state." We humans are, in my opinion, far too unstable for such a grand ideal to be inherently true.
Really, it is very similar to day 1 of any graduate IR course. He is making a classical realist argument but the goings on of the day lend credibility to his position. My interest in the subject is likely because I've been reading quite a lot about Canadian foreign policy lately. The Canadians haven't caught up. |
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