Four challenges

After the “end of history” Francis Fukuyama 2 - 5 - 2006 Francis Fukuyama's "end of history" thesis – proposed in a 1989 essay, elaborated in a 1992 book – was the most influential attempt to make sense of the post-cold-war world. In a new afterword to "The End of History and the Last Man", Fukuyama reflects on how his ideas have survived the tides of criticism and political change.

In the seventeen years that have passed since the original publication of my essay, "The End of History?", my hypothesis has been criticised from every conceivable point of view. Publication of the second paperback edition of the book The End of History and the Last Man gives me an opportunity to restate the original argument, to answer what I regard as the most serious objections that were raised to it, and to reflect on some of the developments in world politics that have occurred since the summer of 1989.

I have been contrasted by many observers to my former teacher Samuel Huntington, who put forward a very different vision of world development in his book The Clash of Civilisations and the Remaking of World Order. In certain respects I think it is possible to overestimate the degree to which we differ in our interpretation of the world. For example, I agree with him in his view that culture remains an irreducible component of human societies, and that you cannot understand development and politics without a reference to cultural values. But there is a fundamental issue that separates us. It is the question of whether the values and institutions developed during the western Enlightenment are

• potentially universal (as Hegel and Marx thought), or
• bounded within a cultural horizon (consistent with the views of later philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger).

Huntington clearly believes that they are not universal. He argues that the kind of political institutions with which we in the west are familiar are the by-product of a certain kind of western European Christian culture, and will never take root beyond the boundaries of that culture. So the central question to answer is whether western values and institutions have a universal significance, or whether they represent the temporary success of a presently hegemonic culture.

Of the many challenges to the optimistic evolutionary scenario laid out in The End of History, correctly understood, there are four that I regard as the most serious.

1. The first is related to Islam as an obstacle to democracy;
2. the second has to do with the problem of democracy at an international level;
3. the third concerns the autonomy of politics;
4. and the last is related to the unanticipated consequences of technology.