Francis Fukuyama Still Thinks History Is Over

In a piece at The Atlantic, More Proof That This Really Is the End of History, Francis Fukuyama doubles down:

The philosopher Hegel coined the phrase the end of history to refer to the liberal state’s rise out of the French Revolution as the goal or direction toward which historical progress was trending. For many decades after that, Marxists would borrow from Hegel and assert that the true end of history would be a communist utopia. When I wrote an article in 1989 and a book in 1992 with this phrase in the title, I noted that the Marxist version was clearly wrong and that there didn’t seem to be a higher alternative to liberal democracy.

But why should there be only two alternatives, Hegel-Fukuyama and Marxism? When I first posted about Mr Fukuyama here, I suggested that Osama bin Laden needed to hear that message but clearly didn't. And although Marxism has reverted to the parlor and the faculty lounge where it had been before 1917, this hasn't cured the problem of big-state authoritarianism, something the Ukraine war highlights. Fukuyama more or less acknowledges this when he continues,

We’ve seen frightening reversals to the progress of liberal democracy over the past 15 years, but setbacks do not mean that the underlying narrative is wrong. None of the proffered alternatives look like they’re doing any better.

The Russo-Ukraine War provides a distraction that lets him pull a sleight of hand. Marxism turns into Russia like a knife turns into a fork:

Putin’s bad decision making and shallow support has produced one of the biggest strategic blunders in living memory. Far from demonstrating its greatness and recovering its empire, Russia has become a global object of ridicule, and will endure further humiliations at the hands of Ukraine in the coming weeks.

But Russian military weakness is nothing new; it was illustrated in the Crimean War, the 1905 war with Japan, and again in 1914. Just because Russia didn't blunder in living memory doesn't mean it's never blundered, and if anything, it was more effective militarily under Marxism than under the alternatives.

My own thinking as it's developed here is that the process we're seeing is a reversion to the power structure in northeast Europe before the rise of the Russian state, a domination by Swedish-Nordic, Lithuanian, and Polish empires that will assert economic control over Belarus, Ukraine, and likely western Russia. But wait: doesn't this actually mean that history will continue, it isn't over?

And another, related question: will the EU expand into some sort of uber-liberal continental or even world democracy? And will that vindicate Hegel-Fukuyama? I have two reservations. One is that Brexit has already shown there are fissures in that consensus. The second is that even if it's claimed that the Russo-Finnish War has strengthened the EU, there are bothersome questions that will emerge once it's settled. For instance, the EU has adopted policies that not only discourage fossil fuels, but they now wish to discourage use of nitrate fertilizer, which has caused conflict with farmers in the Netherlands. How will President Zelensky react when Ukraine defeats Russia and joins the EU, only to find the EU seeking actively to reduce Ukraine's agricultural prosperity in the name of climate? How will this differ from Putin's aim to reduce Ukraine's prosperity in the name of Russia?

This brings us to the issue of whether there are alternate credible end states to an inevitable worldwide liberal democracy, which is Fukuyama's conclusion. (And isn't this just a variation on the old chestnut of the Whig Interpretation of history?) At this point, we might say there's a globalist consensus in favor of what I would call neo-Malthusianism. Classical Malthusianism is "the idea that population growth is potentially exponential while the growth of the food supply or other resources is linear, which eventually reduces living standards to the point of triggering a population die off."

Neo-Malthusianism is an attempt to deal with the proven falsity of the premise that the growth of the food supply is linear -- development of fertilizer and pesticides, improved preservation and transportation, and modern cultivation have shown conclusively that this is not the case. Neo-Malthusianism is an attempt to revert to the notion that other resources besides the food supply are linear, except that to avoid a population die-off (i.e., the death of the planet), we now need to reduce either global population or global prosperity in an artificial and not fully specified but drastic way (at least, not specified explicitly right now).

And there are other conflicts that have yet to be resolved. We're witnessing the collapse of Protestantism. Will fallout from the Russo-Ukraine war lead to a schism within Orthodoxy that has an equivalent effect? What will it be? And whatever the outcome, isn't the study of such trends as they continue the legitimate province of historians? So beyond Mr Fukuyama's questionable argument that history is leading inevitably to worldwide liberal democracy, there's a whole separate question of what possible systems and their concomitant disasters we'll encounter on the way.

Heck, things are only just now starting to get interesting.