TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/091189/09118900.035

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 98 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.