0.6 The end of the west  (Page 9/19)

This confluence of views allowed the two men to agree, at their first Summit in Reykjavik in 1986, to reduce strategic forces by 50 percent in five years and to eliminate all ballistic missiles in ten. Although the agreement fell apart because Gorbachev tried to link it to a ten-year ban on SDI tests, which Reagan refused, it illustrates the spirit of the time. As the import of the abandonment of world revolutionary struggle as the leitmotiv of Soviet policy became clear, Soviet and US diplomats were able to work together to extricate themselves from, and help resolve, regional proxy conflicts.

As Kissinger earlier observed, two factors worked against Gorbachev: His new rationale undercut the Brezhnev Doctrine and encouraged the Poles, Hungarians and Czechs who sought autonomy to use the new uncertainty to press more aggressively. His message was also too new and unfamiliar to induce either Washington or Beijing to grant the respite that Moscow needed to avert economic collapse. Accelerated liberalization hastened fragmentation, leading to the dismantling of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and NATO’s extension to Poland’s borders. When Gorbachev fell in 1991, it was at the hand of the President of Russia, whose act dissolved the Soviet Union and dismembered the Russian Empire.

The end of history, or only an era?

It was a remarkable moment, but one that was misunderstood by many in the West. A triumphalist sense was abroad. Francis Fukuyama’s evocative “The End of History and the Last Man” embodied the spirit. In his earlier article in National Interest in 1989, he argued not only that “a remarkable consensus concerning the legitimacy of liberal democracy had emerged…over the past few years… [but that] liberal democracy may constitute the ‘end point of mankind’s ideological evolution’ and ‘the final form of human government’.”

In 1992, Fukuyama asked “…whether there is such a thing as a Universal History …” as Hegel and Marx had postulated, and concluded that there was.

He suggested firstly that “the unfolding of modern natural science” in its technological applications, both enables and requires modernization of the defensive and productive capabilities of all states and thus “…guarantees an increasing homogenization of all human societies regardless of their historical origins or cultural inheritances.” Fukuyama concluded from the collapse of the Soviet Union that “the logic of modern natural science would seem to dictate a universal evolution in the direction of capitalism.”

Secondly, he suggested – relying on Hegel’s view of history as the aggregation of the individual human ‘struggle for recognition’, and relating this to Plato’s thymos (the ‘spirited’ part of the soul, supplementing desire and reason) – that liberal democracy represents a second component of the end state of history. Hegel had argued that early struggles for dominance that led to relationships of “lordship and bondage”, from slavery through monarchical or aristocratic control, failed to satisfy either party and resulted in “a contradiction that engendered further stages.” For Hegel, the end of history was the French revolution (to which Fukuyama appends that of America in 1776), for the principles of popular sovereignty and the rule of law that emerged, resulted in every citizen recognizing “the dignity and humanity of every other citizen, [which the State also did]through the granting of rights.” For Hegel history had come to an end because “[n]o other arrangement of human social institutions is better able to satisfy…[the]longing [for recognition], and hence no further progressive historical change is possible.”