Europe is home of ‘last man’
You have to understand the thesis properly. «The End of History» comes out of a Hegelian-Marxist tradition that says there is a broad historical evolution of human societies. The Marxists believed that the end of history would come with a communist utopia. My observation back in 1989 was that this didn’t look like it was going to happen. To the extent that there was an end of history, it would terminate in what the Marxists would call a bourgeois democracy in some form of market economy. And if you wanted to be modern, those were the conditions under which modern societies flourish. I don’t really see that there is an alternative. The most plausible, I think, is some form of East Asian soft authoritarianism, like in China where they permit a market economy but they still have an authoritarian government. We’ll have to see whether in another generation the Chinese can keep that system working. So you keep your eyes on China as a potential balance to American hegemony? It’s not a question of hegemony. The challenge can come from anywhere, but the question as to what is an alternative model for modern society, I think the only plausible one is this Asian one. I think these Muslim societies are never going to be modern, they don’t want to be modern, so that’s not really a challenge in that sense. Do you think Islamic fundamentalism is a temporary setback to historical progress? I think it’s a reaction to a failed process of modernization. I think that’s really what drives it. If you look at it, it is not really fundamentalism. It’s a different kind of Islamist ideology that is actually partly modern in its roots. It is not trying to resurrect an older form of Islam. If you look at places where that has actually come to power, in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, these are not happy societies. I think people living in them don’t really feel they have solved the problems that exist in Western Europe. I think in fact just the opposite; I think they generate a lot of internal unhappiness. Iran is in some ways a very troubled society. Failed modernization Then it’s essentially a modern product, not an attempt to roll back modernity. It is an attempt to roll back modernity but it is in response to failed modernization. That’s why Western Europe has actually been the source of a lot of this radicalism, as in the case of Mohammad Atta or Mohammad Buyeri in the Netherlands or the July 7 bombers in London. These are all people who don’t know who they are, they are not traditional Muslims and they are not integrated into Dutch or British society successfully. Radical Islamism is a kind of ideology that tells them who they are; it provides a kind of identity for them. I think that’s why it’s very appealing and why so many of the organizers of these attacks have actually not been people that came out of traditional Muslim societies but people that were living in the West and confronting the West. You have said that humans are made for liberal democracies. Some critics say you hold a deterministic view of history. Indeed, can you claim liberalism’s superiority without resorting to metaphysics? Various thinkers like the pragmatist Richard Rorty claim we should keep the political project but shed the philosophical one. No, I think it is not possible to avoid the philosophical question. I mean if it’s simply a matter of what works, there have been a lot of societies that have worked over time and you can’t really tell what works until a lot of time has passed. So I do think that you need to resort to higher values and a rational discussion on the ends of man and what is ultimately more satisfying for human beings. So do you believe that human nature exists, that if you scratch under the surface of cultures you will actually find a set of core values that we all share? Yes, I think that a belief in universal human rights ultimately has to be grounded in some understanding of human nature. Do you think that the US has anything to learn from Europe? There is a view out there that says «The End of History» was all about promoting a specifically American model of democracy and modernization. That is completely wrong. I actually think that Europe is really the home of the last man at the end of history. That represents a more consistent effort to establish, not just on a national level but on a trans-national level, a set of democratic norms and values. So in that sense I think the European welfare state is more my vision of what the end of history looks like. I think that both Europeans and Americans have had different experiences when it comes to sovereignty, nationalism, the role of military force. I think that explains their differing attitudes. I think the American national experience with military power has been in general more positive. In Europe the dominant historical memory is really World War I, which Europeans regard as the abuse of sovereignty and nationalism. I think that has led to a very different attitude toward wars. Which one of these is right I think is very hard to say because they do reflect different national experiences. The counterargument by theorists such as Robert Kagan would be that Europe’s success in building a good welfare state was thanks to the US military umbrella during the Cold War. I think that’s true. Like I said, neither of these views is wrong. Look, there can’t be a single theoretical answer to the question «Can military power be used for good ends?» In human history a lot of times it’s been used for terrible ends, but at other times it’s a means of resisting tyranny and aggression, so I think that there will be times when it is necessary to resort to force and other times when excessive force can get you into a lot of trouble.
