and perpetual reign of liberal American capitalism, the predominant present reality; he was also implicitly slamming the door on the past, muffling the cries and whispers of previous generations. Since ‘all of the really big questions had been settled’, he argued, ‘in the posthistorical period there will be neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history’. Imagination, heroism and idealism would be supplanted by economic calculation.
Not the most appealing manifesto for a brave new world, you might think. And Fukuyama would agree – sometimes. When celebrating the ultimate triumph of liberal capitalism he chides those tiresome nations which are still somehow ‘stuck in history’, and means it as an insult; yet in his more wistful moments he admits that ‘the end of history will be a sad time’. Sad, and deeply dull: he fears that sheer boredom, married to ‘a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed’, may yet ‘serve to get history started again’. The incredulous italics are mine: having asserted that modern Americanstyle capitalist democracy is so manifestly unimprovable that it has seen off every conceivable challenger, Fukuyama casually concedes that this invincible titan could yet be overthrown by nothing stronger than the sleepy ennui of its beneficiaries. One is reminded of Karl Marx’s private confession to Frederick Engels after writing a newspaper article on the likely outcome of the Indian mutiny in the 1850s: ‘It is possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way.’
Fukuyama’s dialectic is similarly artful. He parades Hegel’s philosophy of history as supporting evidence for his own blithe certainty; yet he acknowledges (if only in a footnote) that the Hegelian historical terminus, the supreme desideratum, was not American capitalism but the absolute monarchy of nineteenth-century Prussia, described by Hegel as ‘the achievement of the modern world, a world in which the substantial Idea has won the infinite form’. No doubt Stone Age men and women, if they ever gave it a moment’s thought, assumed that their own way of life was just as immutable: few people have ever been able to imagine any kind of society other than the one that they inhabit. If Hegel was wrong about the eternal reign of Prussian absolutism, why should we believe that the present system has any more staying power? Fukuyama has an answer to that, too: ‘We cannot picture to ourselves a world that is essentially different from the present one, and at the same time better. Other, less reflective ages also thought of themselves as the best, but we arrive at this conclusion exhausted, as it were, from the pursuit of alternatives we felt had to be better than liberal democracy.’
The contempt for ‘less reflective ages’ is deliciously ironic. Fukuyama’s beloved Hegel had a fatal penchant for concepts such as the Substantial Idea and the World Spirit – the Geist – but, thanks to the Enlightenment’s legacy, he did work in an era which enjoyed an embarras de richesse of truly imaginative reinterpretations of the world. After the collapse of Communism there was an eruption of grand universal theories whose reflectiveness was in inverse proportion to their réclame. Cretinous oversimplification seemed to be what policy-makers and political analysts required. Where Fukuyama led, his old tutor from Harvard, Samuel Huntington, soon followed. His pitch for the Big Idea market – global chaos theory – mimicked Fukuyama’s own product-launch so closely, indeed, that one wondered if both men had taken the same correspondence course on How to Be a Modern Political Guru in Three Easy Lessons.
First, summarise your tentative thesis in an American policy journal: Huntington’s essay ‘The Clash of Civilizations?’ (note the query) was published by Foreign Affairs in the summer of 1993.
Secondly, devise a concept so arrestingly simple that it can be understood and discussed even by half-witted politicians or TV chat-show hosts. Again, Huntington was happy to oblige. ‘It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic,’ he wrote. ‘The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilisations. The clash of civilisations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilisations will be the battle lines of the future.’
Finally, having got everyone talking about your provocative new idea (Huntington’s article was translated into twenty-six languages), reap the rewards by expanding it into a bestselling book. The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order was duly published in 1996.
There, however, any resemblance to Fukuyama ceased – or so it appeared. Huntington’s paradigm was generally taken as a rebuttal of Fukuyama’s Panglossian optimism. As well it might be, for Huntington was a perfect specimen of the gloomy realist, committed to maintaining the balance of power and profoundly mistrustful of utopian dreamers – or indeed anyone who thought or hoped that the human condition was susceptible to improvement. As he told an interviewer, ‘I am a child of Niehbur’ – Ronald Niehbur, a Protestant theologian who believed that order could be preserved only by severe restrictions designed to bridle humanity’s inherent wickedness.
Huntington’s fellow-postgraduates at Harvard in 1950 included a chubby, precocious émigré called Henry Kissinger; a few years later, as a young don at the university’s School of Government, his closest colleague was Zbigniew Brzezinski, later a hawkish National Security Adviser to President Carter. Unlike his friends Kissinger and Brzezinski, Huntington remained in academe, seeking inspiration from tutorials and seminars rather than crisis meetings in the Oval Office (though he did advise Lyndon Johnson’s administration in 1967, and wrote a few speeches for Jimmy Carter a decade later). His modus operandi was set out in his first book, The Soldier and the State, in 1957. While admitting that ‘actual personalities, institutions and beliefs do not fit into neat logical categories’, he nevertheless insisted that ‘neat logical categories are necessary if a man is to think profitably about the real world in which he lives and to derive from it lessons for broader application and use’. Without abstraction, generalisation and simplification there could be no understanding. One reviewer complained that the text was ‘noisy with the sounds of sawing and stretching as the facts are forced into the bed that has been prepared for them’.
This was the technique he exercised thirty-five years later (and rather profitably, to purloin his own adverb) when formulating the Clash of Civilisations theory. He divided the world into ‘seven or eight’ distinct civilisations – Western, Islamic, Hindu, Latin American, Slavic-Orthodox, Confucian, Japanese and ‘possibly’ African. The artificiality of this taxonomy became most apparent with his startling declaration that Greece ‘is not part of Western civilisation’; because it happened to have the wrong sort of Christianity, the birthplace of European culture was filed alongside Russia under ‘Orthodox’. Guessing that this might raise eyebrows, Huntington cited an extra reason for excluding Greeks from the Western bloc: for a few years in the 1960s and 1970s they were ruled by a military dictatorship. Yet Spain, which endured the dictatorship of General Franco at the same time, was welcomed into his club without any awkward questions from the membership secretary.
The categorisation unmistakably reflected his own values and prejudices, as when he rebuked politicians in Australia for betraying the country’s Western heritage by seeking to ‘cultivate close ties with its [Asian] neighbours’. Mixed marriages between countries representing different cultures can never succeed, Huntington said, because ‘successful economic association needs a commonality of civilisation’. With characteristic perversity, however, he decided that incongruous alliances outside the Western world were entirely natural: hence, for example, his warning that an Islamic – Confucian coalition ‘has emerged to challenge Western interests, values and power’, as proved by the sale of Chinese weapons to Iran and Pakistan in the 1980s. The supply of Western arms to Saudi Arabia in that period, exemplified most conspicuously by the multi-billion-dollar Al-Yamamah contract, did not lead him to conclude that there is an equally ‘natural’ Christian-Islamic connection.
As the argument proceeds, it becomes increasingly clear that pedantic distinctions between, say, Japan and Thailand or Italy and Greece are a flimsy camouflage intended to disguise his even cruder overstatement: that the modern world can be