TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/091189/09118900.035

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.5 KB | 104 lines

                                                                                WORLD, Page 39

America Abroad

The Beginning of Nonsense


By Strobe Talbott


    The emergence of a Solidarity Prime Minister in Poland is
only the latest they-said-it-couldn't-happen event in the
Communist world. Confronted with so much that was so recently
unthinkable, some Western intellectuals are showing signs of
giddiness bordering on nuttiness.

    The summer issue of the neoconservative quarterly National
Interest carries an article titled "The End of History?" After
16 densely argued pages, the hedging question mark is all but
forgotten, by reader and author alike. History, in the view of
Francis Fukuyama, was a Manichaean struggle between the forces
of light and darkness. The bad guys -- first fascists, now
Communists -- have lost, the good guys have triumphed. But if
the fight is over, so is the fun. The remainder of life on
earth, frets Fukuyama, may be a bit of a bore. If there are no
more world-class evils to inspire "daring, courage, imagination,
and idealism," we could be reduced to fine-tuning economic
prosperity and tinkering with "technical problems" and
"environmental concerns."

    The article has become a hot topic, partly because Fukuyama
is deputy director of the State Department's in-house think
tank, the policy-planning staff. His article is being studied
for possible insights into the cerebral underpinnings of the
Bush Administration. Forty-three years ago, the founding
director of the policy-planning staff, George Kennan, wrote an
article in another erudite quarterly, Foreign Affairs, on the
need for the West to pursue a policy of "containment" against
Soviet Communism. President Bush has spoken of moving "beyond
containment." Fukuyama has gone his boss one better, proclaiming
that we may be witnessing "not just the end of the Cold War, or
the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the
end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's
ideological evolution and the universalization of Western
liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

    To his credit, Fukuyama is grappling with important and
difficult ideas. But his boldness misfires. To ruminate about
"the end of history" in the present tense is the philosophical
equivalent of that cheerful banality "Today is the first day of
the rest of your life." Fukuyama is not really addressing the
subject of history at all. He is looking through the wrong end
of the telescope at current events, at a period barely twice his
age (he is 36). Whether it is dead, dying or merely having a bad
decade, Communism, in the sense that Fukuyama and almost
everyone else thinks about it, has been around for only 70-odd
years. There were plenty of predatory tyrannies before Lenin
arrived at the Finland Station, and there will be plenty more
even if a Romanov is restored to a Kremlin throne. Genghis Khan
and Caligula didn't need a course in dialectical materialism to
make their periods of history interesting, and neither do
today's bad actors -- or tomorrow's.

    Fukuyama, like too many others in the Bush Administration,
seems convinced that the reformist, liberalizing trends
sweeping the Communist world are essentially irreversible,
requiring little more than the applause of the West. Even if
updated to take account of the massacre in Tiananmen Square and
the Politburo warnings of a crackdown in the Baltics, Fukuyama's
thesis will probably not persuade Lech Walesa that history has
yet reached a happy ending in Poland.

    Believing that the main event may be over, Fukuyama depicts
whatever troubles lie ahead as little more than nuisances,
devoid of ideological content and context, therefore lacking
historical standing. That notion adds insult to the injuries of
the masses starving in Africa and Asia, the basement dwellers
of Beirut and the victims of narco-terror in Latin America.
While the prospects for capitalism and democracy may look pretty
good from Japan, Italy, Holland and France, where translations
of Fukuyama's article will soon appear, they are less bright in
places like Peru and Bangladesh -- and even Mexico and Israel.

    Never mind, Fukuyama seems to say: "For our purposes, it
matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in
Albania or Burkina Faso, for we are interested in . . . the
common ideological heritage of mankind." This passage, almost
a throwaway line amid the references to Hegel and the main
strands of Fukuyama's argument, stands out nonetheless. It will
be particularly embarrassing when "post-history" produces its
first ugly spectacular, whether it is a nuclear war between two
backward and strange-thinking countries that never cared much
for Karl Marx or Adam Smith, or an ecological disaster that is
beyond the micromanagement of the technocrats who Fukuyama
predicts will inherit the earth.

    In one melancholy respect, there is nothing new in
Fukuyama's pernicious nonsense. In the bad old days of Stalin
and Brezhnev, too many Americans were preoccupied with the
threat of Communism to attend adequately to Third World problems
(overpopulation, underdevelopment, sectarian strife), as well
as First World blights such as drugs and homelessness. Now, in
the heady era of Gorbachev, some Western strategists may have
redefined the challenge as coping with the decline of Communism,
but their world view remains afflicted by a peculiar combination
of arrogance and shortsightedness.