HAVE WE REACHED THE END OF HISTORY?' Francis Fukuyma* * The RAND Corporation In watching the flow of events over the pan decade or so. it is hard to avoid the feeling that something very fundamental has happened in worid hisioiy. The past year has seen a flood of articles commemorating the end of the Cold War. and the fact thai "peace" seems to be breaking out in many regions of the world. Most of these analyses lack any larger conceptual framework for distinguishing between what is essential and what is contingent or accidental in wortd history, and are predictably superficial. If Mr. Gorbachev were ousted from the Kremlin or a new AyaioUah proclaimed the millennium from a desolate Middle Eastern capital, these same commentators would scramble 10 announce the rebirth of a new era of conflict. And yet. all of these people sense dimly thai there is some larger process at work. a process that gives coherence and order to the daily headlines. The Twentieth Century saw Ac developed world descend into a paroxysm of ideological violence, as liberalism contended first with the remnants of absolutism, then bolshcvism and fascism, and finally an updated Marxism that threatened to lead to the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war. But the century that began full of self-confidence in the ultimate triumph of Western liberal democracy seems at its close to be returning full circle to where it sianed: not to an "end of ideology" or a convergence between capitalism and socialism, as eariier predicted, but to an unabashed vicioiy of economic and political liberalism. 'This anicle is based on a lecture presented at the University of Chicago's John M. Olin Center for Inquiry Imo the Theory and Practice of Democracy in February 19S9. It will appear in the summer 1989 issue of the Sational Interest. The author would like to pay special thanks to the Olin Center and 10 Professors Nathan Tarcov and Allan Blocm for their suppon in this and many earlier endeavors. The opinions expressed in this ard:':s sx the author's alone and do not reflect those of the RAND Corporaiion prof any agency of the U.S. government. 023 19 I I^^JThe triumph of the West. of the Western idea, is evident first of all in the total ^^Jexhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism. In the past decade. ^^Jthere have been unmistakable changes in the intellectual climate of the world's two J ^^Hlargest communist countries, and the beginnings of significant reform movements in ^^^Bboth. But this phenomenon extends beyond high politics and cSn be seen also in the I ^^Jineluctable spread of consumerist Western culture issuch diverse contexts as the ^^Hpeasants* markets and color television sets now omnipresent throughout China, the i ^^Hcooperative restaurants and clothing stores opened in the past year in Moscow, the 1 ^^J . Beethoven piped into Japanese depanment stores and the rock music enjoyed alike in ^^JPrague. Rangoon and Teheran. j ^^JWhat we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War. or the passing of a ^^Hparticular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is. the end point | ^^Hof mankind's ideological evolution and the univcrsalization of Western liberal democracy ^^^Bas the final form of human government. This is not to say that there will no longer be S^^^Jevents to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs's yearly summaries of international relations. ^^Jfor the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness ^^Jand is as yet incomplete in the real or material worid. But there are powerful reasons for I ^^Bbelieving that the ideal that will govern the material world w the Ions run. To understand ^^Hhow this is so. we must first consider some theoretical issues concerning the nature of : ^^^1historical change. ^^HThe notion of the end of history is not an original one. Its best known propaguor j ^^Jwas Karl Marx. who believed that the direction of historical development was a ^^Hpurposeful one determined by the interplay of material forces, and would come to an end I ^^^Bonly with the achievement of a communist Utopia that would finally resolve all prior ^^Hcontradictions. But the concept of history as a dialectical process with a beginning, a i ^^Hmiddle, and an end was borrowed by Marx from his great German predecessor. Geor; i ^HWilhelmFriedrich Hegel. ^^JFor better or worse, much of Hegel's hisioricism has become pan of our i ^^Jcontemporary intellectual baggage. The notion that mankind has progressed through 3 ^^Hseries of primitive stages of consciousness on his path to the present, and thai Aese s:;;-;s ] ^^^Hcorresponded to concrete forms of social organization, such as tribal, slavc-oir.in;. ^^Hltheocraiic. and finally d;mocratic-csaliiarian societies, has cccomc ir-scp-iRC:; wi -".; 20 • 3 modern understanding of man. Hegel was the first philosopher to speak the language of modern social science, insofar as man for him was the product of his concrete historical • and social environment and not, as earticr natural right theorists would have it. a collection of more or less fixed "natural" ttributes.^nie mastery and transformation of- man's natural environment through the application of science and technology was originally not a Marxist concept, but a Hegelian one. Unlike later historidsts whose historical relativism degenerated into relativism tout corn. however.'Hegcl believed that" history culminated in in absolute moment - a moment in which a final, rational form of society and state became victorious. - It is Hegel's misfortune to be known now primarily as Marx's precursor, and it is our misfonune thai few of us are familiar with Hegel's work from direct study, but only as it is has been filtered through the distorting lens of Marxism. Only in France has there been an effort to save Hegel from his Marxist interpreters and to resurrect him as the philosopher who most correctly speaks to our time. Among those modern French interpreters of Hegel, the greatest was cenainly Alcxandre Kojevc. a brilliant Russian emigre who taught a highly influential series of seminars in Paris in the 1930s at the Ecole Practique des Hauies Eludes.^ While largely unknown in the United Stales. Kojevc had a major impact on the intellectual life of the continent. Among his students ranged such future luminaries as Jean-Paul Sanre on the led and Raymond Aron on the right: postwar existentialism borrowed many of its basic categories from Hegel via Kojevc. Kojevc sought to resurrect the Hegel of the Phenomenohfy of Mind. the Hegel who proclaimed history to be at an end in 1806. For this early Hegel saw in Napoleon's defeat of the Prussian monarchy at the Battle of Jena the victory of the ideals of the French Revolution, and the imminent universalization of the state incorporating the principles of liberty and equality. Kojeve. far from rejecting Hegel in light of the turbulent events of the next century and a half. insisted that the latter had been essentially correct1 The Battle of Jena marked the end of history because it was at that point thai the vanguard, of humanity (a term quite familiar to Marxists) actualized the principles of SKojcvc's best-known work is his Introduction a la lecture de Hefel (Paris. Editions GaUimard. 1947). which is a transcript oflhc£co/c Practique lectures from the - 1930s. This book is available in English in a translation bv James Nichols entitled Introduction to the Reading ofHesel. ^n this respect Kojevc stands in sharp contrast to contemporary German imcrpreicni of Hegel like Herbert Marcysc who. being more sympathetic to Marx regarded Hegel ultimately as an historically bound and incomplete philosopher. 025 21 I I I/^the French Revolution- while lhele was considerable wor*to bc done ^1806 ~ I\ abolishing slavery and the slave trade, extending the franchise to workers, women, blacks i •) and other racial minorities, etc. - the bwc principles of the liberal democratic stale I •Vcouldnotbetoprw-cdupon.Thetwowortdwaisinthiscenniryandjheiranendant Irevolutions and upheavals simply had the effect of extending those principles spatially. \ Iiuch that the various provinces of human civilization were*brought up to the level of its •most advanced outposts, and of forcing ihosesqrietics in Europe and Nonh America ai J •me vanguard of civilization to implement their liberalism more fully. •The state thai emerges at the end of history is liberal insofar as it recognizes and •; Iprotects through a system of law man's universal right to freedom, and democratic .' |insofar as it exists only with the consent of the governed. For Kojevc. this so-called •"universal homogeneous state" found real-life embodiment in the countries of postwar | |western Europe -precisely those flabby, prosperous, self-satisfied, inward.looking. mweak-willed stales whose grandest project was nothing more heroic than the creation of ' |the Common Market.4 But this was only to be expected. For human history and ihe |conflict that characterized it was based on the existence of "contradictions": primitive |man's quest for mutual recognition, the dialectic of the master and slave, the I • transformation and mastery of nature, the struggle for the universal recognition of rights. |and the dichotomy between proletarian and capitalist. But in the universal homogeneous |state, all prior coniradietionsare resolved and all human needs are satisfied. There is no |struggle or conflict over "large_" issues, and consequently no need for generals or |statesmen; whatremains is primarily economic activity. And indeed. Kojcve's life was |consistent with his icaclung: bcUeving thai there was no more work for philosophers as |",U. since Hegel correnly understood had already achieved absolute knowledge, he left . Jteaching after the war and spent the remainder of his life working as a bureaucrat in the JEuropean Economic Community, until his death in 1968. '[ JTo his contemporaries at mid-century. Kojeve's proclamation of the end of history •must have seemed like the typical eccentric solipsism of a French intellectual, coming as ' Jit did on the heels of World War II and at the very height of the Cold War. To •comprehend how Kojeve could have been so audacious as 10 assen thai history had • J" ended, we must first of all understand the meaning of Hegelian idealism. i ^H^oicvc 3::eCTaiivcly identified the end of history wilh the postwar "Ai-.er.;-n H" ay of lit,:'." 10^ srd which'he thought ihe Soviet Union was moving as well. B026 22 .•.-•••• -; :••••* -s'*^"-":' "'•'-' 5 " "'•' "•• •••'• ^''P^'--''. T- •" i • - . •••••• -•;-'5>•' ."• , *• For Hegel, the contradictions that drive history exist first of ill in the realm of ' ' ' ! human consciousness. i.c., on the level of ideas2 - not the trivial election year proposals of American politicians, but ideas in the sense of large unifying world views that might. • best be understood under the rubric of ideology. Ideology in this sense is not restricted to : "• the secular and explicit political doctrines we usually associate with the term. but can include religion, culture, and the complex of moral values underlying any society as weQ. j Hegel's view of the relationship Jxtween the ideal and the real or material worlds was an extremely complicated one. beginning with the fact thai for him the distinction J between the two was only apparent.6 He did not believe thai the real world conformed or could be made to conform to ideological preconceptions of philosophy professors in any s simplemindcd way. or that the "material" world could not impinge on the ideal. Indeed. I Hegel the professor was temporarily thrown out of work as a result of a very material event, the Battle of Jena. But while Hegel's writing and thinking could be slopped by a j bullet from the material world, the hand on the trigger of the gun was motivated in turn by the ideas of liberty and equality that had driven the French Revolution. " I For Hegel, all human behavior in the material wortd. and hence all human history. is rooted in a prior state of consciousness - an idea similar to the one expressed by John Maynard Kcyncs when he said that all current economic policies were based on the ' ; offhand sayings of a forgoncn economics professor from the preceding generation. This consciousness may not be explicit and self-aware, as are modern political doctrines, but j may rather take the form of religion or simple cultural or moral habits. And yet this realm of consciousness in the long run necessarily becomes manifest in the material | world, indeed, creates the material wortd in its own image. Consciousness is cause and not effecL and can develop autonomously from the material world: hence the real subtext i underlying the apparent jumble of current events is the history of ideology. I Hegel's idealism has fared pooriy at the hands of later thinkers. Marx reversed the priority of the real and the ideal completely, relegating the entire realm of consciousness - • religion, an. culture, philosophy itself - to a "superstructure* that was determined entirely by the prevailing material mode of production. Yet another unfortunate legacy of STha notion was expressed in the famous aphorism from the preface to the Philosophv ofHiswrv to the effect that "everything that is rational is real. and everything that is real is rational'." i •fcdecd. for Hegel the very dichotomy between the ideal and material worlds was itself only an apparent one that was ultimately overcome by the self-conscious r-&jc;u in his system, the material world is itself only an aspect of mind. - 027 23 I ______________________________------ | JMarxism is our tendency to retreat into materialist orutiliiarian explanations of political Bor historical phenomena, and our disinclination to believe in the autonomous power of " Jideas. A recent example of this is Paid Kennedy's hugely successful The Rise and Fall of • Jihe Great Powers, which ascribes the decline of (real poweis to staple economic ; Joverexiension. Obviously, this is true on some level: an empire whose economy is ! ^Hbandy above the level of subsistence cannot bankrupt fe treasury indefinitely. But Hwhether a highly productive modern industrial society chooses to spend 3 or 7 percent of 1 Jits GNP on defense rather than consumption is entirely a maner of that society's political ^1priorities, which is in turn determined in the realm of consciousness. , i HThe materialist bias of modern thought is characteristic not only of people on the i Jleft who may be sympathetic to Marxism, but of many passionate anti-Marxists as welL BIndeed, there is on the right what one might label the WaH Street Journal school of 1 ^|deterministic materialism that discounts the importance of ideology and culture and sees . ^|man as essentially a rational, profit-maximizing individual. It is precisely this kind of | ^Hindividual and his pursuit of material incentives that is posited as the basis for economic ^1life as such in economics textbooks.7 One small example win illustrate the problematic | ^Hcharacter of such materialist views. • ^BMax Weber begins his famous book The Protesuuu Ethic and ihe Spirit cf , ^HCapitalism by noting the differential economic performance of Protestant and Catholic •I ^Hcommunities throughout Europe and America, summed up in the proverb thai Proiesiarus ^Beat well while Catholics sleep well. Weber notes that according to any economic theory j ^Hthai posited man as a rational profil-roaximizer. raising the piece-work rate should ^Hincrease tabor productivity. But in fact. in many traditional peasant communities, raising ! ^Hthe piece-work rate actually had the opposite effect of lowering labor productivity: at the ^Hhigher rate. a peasant accustomed to earning two and a half marks per day found he could . ^Bcam the same amount by working less. and did so because he valued leisure more than ' ^Bincome. The choices of leisure over income, or of the militaristic life of the Spanan ^Bhoplitc over the wealth of the Athenian trader, or even the ascetic life of the earty ; ^Hcapitalist entrepreneur over that of a traditional leisured aristocrat, cannot possibly be ^Hexplained by the impersonal working of material forces, but come preeminently out of the ( ^J - - ^rticre of consciousness-what we haw labeled here broadly as ideology. And indeed, a ^H"In fact. modern economists, recognizing thai man does not always behavejis a ^^1wojii-maxiniizcr. posit a "utility" function, utility being cither income or sense c-^r I ^^1good that can be maximized: leisure, sexual satisfaction, or the pleasure of 1 ^Hphiloscchizing. Thai profil must be replaced wiui a value like utility inji;;:;s it; ^Hcogcrxv PI' the idealist perspective. 1 *028 24 i ^ '.••-.• ^E^^. ' :;: •••:' ! i • •" . • i | central theme of Weber's work was to prove that contrary to Marx. (he material mode of ' production, far from being the "base." was itself a "superstructure* with roots in religion ' . and culture, and that to understand the emergence of modern capitalism and the profit ' motive one had to study their antecedents in the realm of the spiriL As we look around the contemporary world, the poverty of materialist theories of : economic development is all too apparent. The Wall Street Journal school of detenninistic materialism habitually points to the stunning economic success of Asia to the past few decades as evidence ofth"viability office market economics, with the implication that all societies would see similar development were they to simply allow i ' their populations to freely pursue their material sclf-intcrcsL Surely free markets and stable political systems are a necessary precondition to capitalist economic growth. But * i just as surely the cultural heritage of those Far Eastern societies, the ethic of work and I saving and family, a religious heritage that docs not. like Islam, place restrictions on ccnain forms of economic behavior, and other deeply ingrained moral qualities, are j equally imponant in explaining the economic performance of Asia.* And yet the intellectual weight of materialism is such thai not a single respectable contemporary 1 theory of economic development addresses consciousness and culture seriously as the matrix within which economic behavior is formed. - i Failure to understand that the roots of economic behavior lie in the realm of I consciousness and culture leads to the common mistake of attributing material causes to phenomena that are essentially ideal in nature. For example, it is commonplace in the j West to interpret the reform movements first in China and most recently in the Soviet Union as the victory of the material over the ideal - that is. a recognition that ideological | incentives could not replace material ones in stimulating a highly productive modern ' economy, and that if one wanted to prosper, one had to appeal to baser forms of self- . interest. But the deep defects of socialist economies were evident thirty or fony years I ago to anyone who chose to look. Why was it that these countries moved away from central planning only in the 1980s? The answer must be found in the consciousness of j the elites and leaders ruling them. who decided to opt for the "Protestant" life of wealth and risk over the "Catholic" path of poverty and security.' That change was in no way I •One need look no further than the recent performance of Vietnamese immigrants in the U.S. school system when compared to their black or Hispanic classmates to realize I that culture and consciousness are absolutely crucial to explain not only economic | behavior but virtually every other important aspect of life as well. •I understand that a full explanation of the origins of the reform movements in . China and Russia is a good deal more complicated than (his simple formula would | 029 I 25 I __________________________________________ 1 ^oC^1^-^ 1. g "^/. ^- -l,<^< i-/ KO- ( -^Ir'^ f^--: j made inevitable by the material conditions in which either country found itself on the eve of the reform, but instead came about as the result of the victory of one idea over , another.10 • For Kojevc as for all good Hegelians, understanding the underiyjnf processes of j history requires understanding developments to the realm of consciousness or ideas, since consciousness will ultimately remake the material worid to its own image. To say that history ended in 1806 meant that ffllnkind's ideological evolution ended to the ideals of . i the French or American revolutions: while particular regimes to the real world might not implement these ideals fully, their theoretical truth is absolute and could not be improved \ upon. Hence it did not matter to Kojeve thai the consciousness of the postwar generation of Europeans had not been univeisalized throughout the worid: if ideological (development had in fan ended, the homogeneous state would eventually become victorious throughout the material worid. I have neither the space nor. frankly, the ability to defend in depth Hegel's radical idealist perspective. The issue was not whether Hegel's system was right, but whether his perspective might not uncover the problematic nature of many materialist j explanations we often lake for granted. This is not to deny the role of material facers as such. To a literal-minded idealist, human society can be built around any arbitrary set of i principles regardless of their relationship to the material worid. And in fact men have 1 proven themselves able 10 endure the most extreme material hardships in the name of ideas that exist in the realm of the spirit alone, be they the divinity of cows or unity in will of the Holy Trinity." But while man's very perception of the material world is shaped by his historical consciousness of it. the material world can clearly affect to return the viability of a particular state of consciousness. In particular, the spectacular abundance of advanced i suggest. The Soviet reform, for example, was motivated in good measure by Moscow's sense of insecurity to the technological-military realm. Nonetheless, neither counay on the eve of its reforms was to such a state ofmazerial crisis thai one could have pre^icie.1 the surprising reform paths ultimately taken. "It is still not clear whether the Soviet people are as "Protestant" as Gorbachev and will follow him down that path. ----- - - - -..-.-- HThc internal politics of the Byzantine Empire at the time of Justinian revolved around a conflict between the so-called monophysiics and monotheliics. who bclifved that the unity of the Holy Trinity was alternatively one of nature or of will. This Kntlir. corresponded to some extent to one between proponents of different racing leans in Cif Hippodrome in Byzantium and led to a not inacnilieani level of political violer.;;. Modern historians woulJ lend to seel; the roots of r-ch conflicts in ani2;?nisni.< :<•:•* c;-. social classes or some other moJem economic cascscn. being '.nuill:-.; :a bcl;.". e :^~: men would kill each other over ifte nature of •".':; Tr.n;iy. ! 030 26 9 • ; liberal economies and the infinitely diverse consumer culture made possible by them seem to both foster and preserve liberalism in the political sphere. I want to avoid the materialist determinism that says that liberal economics inevitably produces liberal politics, because 1 believe that both economics andpolitics presuppose^ autonomous prior state of consciousness that makes them possible. But that state of consciousness thai permits the growth of liberalism seems to stabilize to the way one would expect at the end of history if it is underwritten by the abundance of a modern free market economy. We might summarize the cwitent of the universal homogeneous state as liberal democracy to the political sphere combined with easy access to video cassette recorders and stereos to the economic. tM^'tr^r^-y-e"-'-'' '^••'•'•^••"':. '•f'w ^i".<^-"n. •J ^j."-s • ^wf-^>. IV. Have we in fact reached the end of history? Are there, in Other words, any fundamental ••contradictions" in human life thai cannot be resolved in the context of modern liberalism, thai would be resolvable by an alternative political-economic structure? If we accept the idealist premises laid out above, we must seek an answer 10 this question in the realm of ideology and consciousness. Our task is not to answer exhaustively the challenges to liberalism promoted by every crackpot mcssiah around the world, but only those that are embodied in important social or political forces and movements, and which are therefore pan of world history. For our purposes, it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Borkina-Faso. for we are interested to what one could in some sense call the common idcologlcaLbentagepf inankmd.---/:"-•••'• '-.""•' •••-'•- -- -''- -" • ^•'•'•^ ^-t^'*- In the past century, there have been two major challenges to liberalism, those of fascism and of communism. The former" saw the political weakness, materialism. anomic. and lack of community of the West as fundamental contradictions in liberal societies thai could only be resolved by a strong stale that forged a new -people" on the ---":i am noi using the icnn "fascism" here to its roost precise sense, fully aware of the frequent misuse of this term to denounce anyone to the right of the user. Tascisa" here denotes anv organized ultra-nationalist movement with universalisuc pretensions - not universalisuc with regard to its nationalism, of course, since the latter is exclusive ty definition, but with regard to the movement's belief in its right to rule other people. Hence Imperial Japan would qualify as fascist while former strongman Siocssner s Paraguay or Pinochci's Chile would not. Obviously fascist ideologies cannoi be univcrsalistic in ihe sense of Marxism or liberalism, but the structure of the docmne sa be transferred from country to country. 031 27 1 i . io basis of national exdusiveness. Fascism was of course destroyed as a living ideology by | WoridWarIL This was a defeat, of course, on a very material level, but it amounted to a defeat of the idea as welL What destroyed fascism as an idea was not universal moral : wulsionagainstit.ttoceplcntyofpeoplewerewffltagtoAdorsetheideaastongasil 1 seemedthewaveofthefuture.butitslackofsucccss. After the war. it looked to adst people that German fascism as wen as its other European and Asian variants were bound to sdf-descuci. There was no material reason why new fascist movements could not have sprung up again after the war to other locates, but for the fact that expansionist , ultranationalism. with its promise of unending conflict leading to disastrous military defeat, had completely lost its appeal. The ruins of the Reich chancellory as weU as the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed this ideology on the level of consciousness as weU as materially, and aU of the proio-fasdsi movements spawned by the German and Japanese examples like the Peronisi movement in Argentina or Subhas Chandra Bose's Indian National Army withered after the war. The ideological challenge mounted by the other great alternative to liberalism. , communism, was far more serious. Marx. speaking Hegel's language, asserted thai liberal society contained a fundamental contradiction that could not be resolved within iis • context, thai between capital and labor, and this contradiction has constituted the chief ^ accusation against liberalism ever since. But surely, the class issue has aetuallvjw^--' , successfully resolved in the West. As Kojevc (among others) noted. thecgalUarianism of - modern America represents the essential achievement of the classless society envisioned by Marx. This is not to say thai there are not rich people and poor people to the United Slates, or thai the gap between them has not grown to recent years. But the root causes of "; economic inequality do not have to do with the underlying legal and social structure of ; our society, which remains fundamentally egalitarian and moderately redistributionisi. so . ouch as with the cultural and social characteristics of the groups thai make it up. which " are to turn the historical legacy of premodcrn conditions. Thus Mack poverty in the !' United Stales is not the inherent product of liberalism, but is rather the -legacy of slavery and racism" which persisted long after the formal abolition of slavery. As a result of the receding of the class issue, the appeal of communism in the developed Western worid. it is safe to say. is lower today than any time since the end of tne first World War. This can be measured in any number of ways. to the declining membership and electoral pull of the major European communist panics, and their evenly revisionist programs: in the corresponding electoral success of conservative ; paaes from Bniain and Germany to ihe L-ni-.ed Siaies and Jjpan. which are unabashedly i 032 28 • ii pro-market and anti-statist; and to an intellectual dimate whose most "advanced* • members no longer believe that bourgeois society is something that ultimately needs to be overcome. This is not to say that the opinions of progressive intellectuals to Western countries are not deeply pathological to any number of ways. But those who believe that (he future must inevitably be socialist tend to be very old. or very marginal tb the real political discourse of their societies. One may argue that the socialist alternative was never terribly plausible for the North Atlantic worid. and was sustained for the last several decades primarily by its success outside of this region. But it is precisely in the non-European worid that one is most suuck by the occurrence of major ideological transformations. Surely the most remarkable changes have occurred to Asia. Due to the strength and adaptability of the indigenous cultures there. Asia became a battleground for a variety of imported Western ideologies early in this ccmury. Liberalism in Asia was a very weak reed in the period after Worid War I; it is easy today to forget how gloomy Asia's political future looked as recently as ten or fifteen years ago. It is easy to forget as well how momentous the outcome of Asian ideological struggles seemed for world political development as a whole. The first alternative to liberalism to be decisively defeated was the fascist one {. represented by Imperial Japan. Japanese fascism (like its German version) was defeated by the force of American arms in the Pacific war. and liberal democracy was imposed on •; Japan by a victorious United States. Western capitalism and political liberalism when |f transplanted to Japan were adapted and transformed by the Japanese to such a way as to ^ be scarcely recognizable.13 Many Americans are now aware that Japanese industrial k organization is very different from that prevailing in the United States or Europe, and it is ^ questionable what relationship the factional maneuvering that takes place with the J • governing Liberal Democratic Party bears to democracy. Nonetheless, the very fact that the essential elements of economic and political liberalism have been so successfully grafted onco uniquely Japanese traditions and institutions guarantees their survival in the long run. More important is the contribution that Japan has made in turn to world history by following in the footsteps of the United Stales 10 create a truly universal consumer culture that has become bo'Ji a symbol and an underpinning of the universal "I use the example of Japan with come caution, since Kojevc late to his life came to conclude thai Japan, with its culture based on purely formal ans. proved thai the universal homogeneous state was not victorious and thai history had perhaps not ended. Sec Ac long note at the end of the second edition of Introduction a la Le:we de Hcscl. Pp..i6:-3. b. 033 29 I j I'homogeneous state. V. S. Naipaul travelling to Khometoi's Iran shonly after the * Irevolution noted the omnipresent signs advertising the products of Sony. Hitachi, and , IJVC. whose appeal remained virtually irresistible and gave lie to the regime's pretensions 1 •of restoring a state based on the nue of the Shariah. Desire for access to the consumer |culture created to large measure by Japan has played a crucial role tofosiertag the spread ; |of economic liberalism throughout Asia. and hence to promoting political liberalism^ IwelL |The economic success of the other Newly Industrializing Countries (NICs) to Asia * Ifollowing on the example of Japan is by now a familiar story. What is imponani from a , •Hegelian standpoint is that political liberalism has been following economic liberalism. 1 •more slowly than many had hoped but with seeming inevitability. Here again we sec the Ivictory of the idea of the universal homogeneous state. Souih Korea had developed into i Ma modern, urbanized society with an increasingly large and well-educated middle class Ithai could not possibly be isolated from ihe larger democratic trends around them. Under j Ithese circumstances it seemed intolerable to a large pan of this population that it should i Jbe ruled by an anachronistic military regime while Japan, only a decade or so ahead in •economic terms, had parliamentary institutions for over fony years. Even the former •socialist regime to Burma, which for so many decades existed in splendid isolation from |the larger trends dominating Asia. was buffeted in the past year by pressures to liberalize •both its economy and political system. It is said that unhappincss with strongman Nc JWin began when a senior Burmese officer went to Singapore for medical treatment and Jbroke down crying when he saw how far socialist Burma had been left behind by its ' •ASEAN neighbors. |But the power of the liberal idea would seem much less impressive if it had not : JInfected the largest and oldest culture to Asia. China. The simple existence of ICommunist China created an alternative pole of ideological attraction, and as such ( |constituted a threat to liberalism. But the past fifteen years have seen an almost total Idiscrediting of Marxism-Leninism as an economic system. Beginning with the famous ( JThird Plenum of the Tenth Ccmral Committee in 1978. the Chinese Communist Pany";: ' Jabout decollcctivizing agriculture for the SCO million Chinese who still lived in the ^ .J.countryside. The role of the siate in agriculture was reduced 10 thai of a ux collector.- ; Hwhile production of consumer goods was sharply increased in order 10 give peasants a Itaste of the universal homogeneous siaic and thereby an incentive to work. The reform Idoubled Chinese grain output in only five years, and in the process created for Deng •Xiao-ping a solid political bass from which he was able 10 extend the reform :a o;*:;- 034 30 i '•- " . '. • 1 pans of the economy. Economic statistics do not begin to descnbe the dynamism. initiative, and openness evident in China since the reform began. •. China could not now be described to any way as a liberal democracy. At present. no more than 20 percent of its economy has been markeuzed. and most importantly it i continues tobe ruled by a self-appointed Communist Party which has given no hint of ; wanting to devolve power. Deng had made none of Gorbachev's promises^regarotog democratizaiion of the political system and there is no Chinese •quivalent ofgtaiwjr'. ; The Chinese leadership has to fact been much more circumspect to criticizing Mao and Maoism than Gorbachev with respect to Brezhnev and Stalin, and the regime continues to 1 . pay Up service to Marxism-Leninism as its ideological underpinning. But anyone familiar with the outlook and behavior of the new technocratic elite now governing China j knows that Marxism and ideological principle have become vinually irrelevant as guides to policy, and that bourgeois consumerism has a real meaning in that country for the first time since the revolution. The various slowdowns to the pace of reform, the campaigns | against "spiritual pollution" and crackdowns on political disscm are more properly seen as tactical adjustments made in the process of managing what is an extraordinarily I difficult political transition. By ducking the question of political reform while putting the economy on a new fooling, Dcng has managed to avoid the breakdown of authority that j has accompanied Gorbachev's peresiroika. Yet the puU of the liberal idea continues to • be very strong as economic power devolves and the economy becomes more open to the outside world. There are currently over 20.000 Chinese students studying in the U.S. and , other Western countries, almost all of them the children of the Chinese elite. It is hard to believe that when they return home to run the country they will be content for China to be j the only country to Asia unaffected by the larger democratizing trend. The student demonstrations to Bcijing that took place in December 1986 were only the beginning of " what will inevitably be mounting pressure for change in the political system as weU. What is imponant about China from the standpoint of worid history is notthc , present state of the refonn or even its future prospects. The central issue is the fact that the People's Republic of China can no longer act as a beacon for illiberal forces around the world. wheAcr they be guerrillas in some Asian jungle or -.iddle class stu^er-is in Paris. Maoism, rather than being the pattern for Asia's futa-;. became an anachronism. _--"-- - - - and it was the mainland Chinese who in fact were decisively innucnced by the prosperity j and dynamism of their overseas co-ethnics •• the ironic ultimate victory of Taiwan. I Important as these changes in China have been. however, it is developments in the ^ Soviet Union - the original "homeland of the world proletariat' ~ thai haw p-i i^ final i 035 31 I "___________________________________ i InailtolhccofrinoflheMarxist-Leninistalternativelolibcraldcmocracy. lishouldbc Iveryclearlhattotennsoffonnalinstitutions.veryliulehaschangedinthefouryears [ |sinceCorbachevhascomelopowcr free markets and the cooperative movement . •represent only a small pan of Soviet economy, which remains centially planned; the ] |political system is still dominated by the Communist Pany. which has neither ' IdemocratizcdinternaUynorsharedpowerwithoihergroupKthcregimecontinuesio I^enihatilissccktogonlyio^odcrnizcsocialismandthatitsidcologicalbasisremams * |Marxism-Leninism; and. finally. Gorbachev faces a potentially powerful conservative Iopposition that could undo many of the changes thai have taken place to date. Moreover. J IU is hard to be too sanguine about the chances for success of Gorbachev's proposed Ireforms, either in the sphere of economics or politics. But my purpose here is not 10 1 Ianalyze events in the shon-icrm. or to make predictions for policy purposes, but 10 look * Jat underlying trends in the sphere of ideology and consciousness. And in thai respcc- :l l Jis clear thai an astounding transformation has occurred. 1 |Emigres from the Soviet Union have been roponing for at leasi the last generic:! Inow thai vinually nobody in thai country imly believed in Marxism-Lcninism any iMger. | Iand thai this was nowhere more true than among the Soviet cliic. which continued 10 Imouth Marxist slogans out of sheer cynicism. The corruption and decadence of the late. j •Brezhnev era Soviet siatc seemed to matter little, however, for as long as the state itself • Jrefused 10 throw into question any of the fundamental principles underlying Soviet • Isodciy. the system was capable of functioning adequately out of sheer inertia and could ! |even muster some dynamism in the realm of foreign and defense policy. Marxism- . |Leninism was like a magical incantation which, however absurd and devoid of meaning. ( Iwas the only common basis on which the elite could agree to rule Soviet society. •• - What has happened in the four wars since Gorbachev's coming to power is a \ |revolutionary assault on the most fundamental institutions and principles of Sialinism. Jand their replacement by other principles which do not amount to liberalism per se but •(whose only connecting thread is liberalism. This is most evident in •Ae ccc-.om-.e n-.^- |where the reform economists around Gorbachev have hcccme ste2d::y -.;^ r=^c~:-. ; • - - -iheir suppon for free markets, to the point where some like Nikolay S^T.;:;-. iic T.:\ -.:-.- i Bbeing compared in public to Milton Fricdman. There is a vinual conser-^? ur.cr^ •--.; Bcurrently dominant school of Soviet economists now thai central planning wd ihe i Bccmmandsyncm of allocation are the rool cause of economic incfnciency.snd-1:;:--!-1--!: ' BSoviet system is ever 10 heal itself, it must pcrmil free and >ieccnirai:7;J ^e::sirn---w- j |wiCi re-pc.-: 10 investment, labor, anil prices. After a co-jr'c of ini;:-::. ;-•< si i.;."--;---^ i K036 32 '( 15 | * confusion, these principles have finally been incorporated into policy with the promulgation of new laws on enterprise autonomy, cooperatives, and finally in 1988 on ', lease arrangements and family fanning, which effectively implies the de-coUectivization of agriculture. There are. of course, a number of fa&d Haws to the current implementation of the reform, most notably the absence of a thoroughgoing price reform. But the problem is no longer a conceptual one: Gorbachev and Jus lieutenants seem to understand the economic logic ofmarkeuzation well enough, but like the leaders of a Third World country faring the taternafional Monetary Fund. are afraid of Ac serial . consequences of ending consumer subsidies and other forms of dependence on the state j sector. ' In the political sphere, the proposed changes to the Soviet constitution, legal j system, and party rules, amount to much less than the establishment of a liberal state. Gorbachev has spoken of democratization primarily in the sphere of internal pany affairs. I and has shown little intention of ending the Communist Pany's monopoly of power. indeed, the political reform seeks to legitimize and therefore strengthen the CPSU's . rule.14 Nonetheless, the general principles underlying many of the reforms" thai the I "people" should be truly responsible for their own affairs: that higher political bodies should be answerable to lower ones. and not vice versa: thai (he rule of law should j prevail over arbitrary police actions: with separation of powers and an independent judiciary, that there should be legal protection for propcny rights; the need for open j discussion of public issues and the right of public dissent; the empowering of the Soviets ' as a forum to which the whole Soviet people can participate; and of a political culture . that is more tolerant and pluralistic - come from a source fundamentally alien to the I USSR's Marxist-Leninist tradition, even if they are incompletely articulated and poorly implemented in practice. | Gorbachev's repeated assertions that he is doing no more than to trying restore the original meaning of Leninism are themselves a kind of Orwcllian doublespeak. Gorbachev and his allies have consistently maintained that inirapany democracy was somehow the essence of Leninism, and that the various liberal practices of open debase. secret-ballot elections, and nilc of law were all pan of (he Leninist heritage. corr-picd only later by Salin. While almost anyone would look good compared to Stalin, drawing so sharp a line between Lenin and his successor is questionable. The essence of Lenin's democratic centralism was centralism, not democracy - that is. the absolutely rigid. '^This is not true in Poland and Hungary, however, whose Communist panics have taken moves toward true power-sharing and pluralism. 037 33 1 1 ^ monolithic, and disciplined dictatorship of hierarchically organized vanguard communist pany. speaking in the name of the demos. All of Lenin's vicious polemics against Kari ; Kauisky. Rosa Luxemburg, and various other Menshcvik and Social Democratic rivals. ' not to mention his contempt for "bourgeois legality" and freedoms. (U> centered around his profound conviction that a revolution could not be successfully made by a democratically run organization. Gorbachev's daim thai he' is seeking to return to the uue Lento is perfectly easy to understand: having fostered a thorough denunciation of Sialinism and Brezhnevism as the root of the USSR's present predicament, he needs some point in Soviet history on which to anchor the legitimacy of the CPSU's continued rule. But Gorbachev's lanical requirements should not blind us to the fact thai the democratizing and decentralizing principles which he has enunciated in both the economic and political spheres are highly subversive of some of the most fundamental precepts of both Marxism and Leninism. Indeed, if the bulk of the present economic reform proposals were put into effect, it is hard to know how the Soviet economy would be more socialist than those ol' other Western countries with large public sectors. The Soviet Union could to no way be described as a liberal or democratic country now. nor do I think that it is terribly likely Ibatperestroika will succeed so that the label * : will be thinkable any time to the near future. But at the end of history it is not necessary ,- that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely thai they odjhcir ^^coloo'r-ilrTai'P'^'" ^•^"^"^ ^rrrimi and higher-forms of human society. And ' tatfuTrespcct I believe that something very important has happened to the Soviet Union in the past few years: the criticisms of the Soviet system sanctioned by Gorbachev have been so thorough and devastating that there is very little chance of going back to cither Sialinism or Brezhnevism to any simple way. Gorbachev has finally permitted people to say whai they had privately understood for many years, namely, that the magical incantations of Marxism-Leninism were nonsense, that Soviet socialism was not superior to the West in any respect but was in fact a monumental failure. The censcrvauve opposition in the USSR. consisting both of simple workers afraid of unemployment and inflation and of pany officials fearful of losing their jobs and privileges. :s cui?pc