1989 and all that, or, why history didn't end
The fall of communism was an exhilarating time, but even as the walls came down the seeds of the West's own contradictions were already being sown.
IN THE FALL OF 1989 I had just started my first year of a BA in political science at McGill, and some of my professors were absolutely losing their minds. Entire course outlines were being re-written on the fly, whole chunks of the syllabus jettisoned, as academics tried to figure out what was going on in Eastern Europe. By early November the Berlin Wall had fallen, and everyone was trying desperately to shoehorn the emerging new world order into long-standing research programmes and professional commitments.
Given everything (gestures vaguely at the world), this is probably as good a time as any to think about what went wrong with the end of history. More specifically, about what is wrong with “The End of History?”, the bombshell of an essay by Francis Fukuyama that detonated in the pages of the National Interest in the summer of 1989.
Published at the height of Gorbachev-era glasnost, Fukuyama argued that what we were seeing were not just some long-overdue reforms to the workings of the Soviet Union, but in fact the ultimate victory of the combination of Western forms of liberal democracy and consumer capitalism. For Fukuyama, this victory marked "the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." As the title of his essay put it, this meant the end of history as such, where history is understood as the working out of grand ideological narratives: the second coming of Christ, the establishment of the Islamic Caliphate, the revolt of the proletariat and the withering of the state, and so on.
Fukuyama was roasted by many at the time for what was seen as blind arrogance, largely because of a line in the essay where he describes what was going on as nothing less than “the triumph of the West, of the Western idea.” Not only did this sort of triumphalism go over poorly with those whom we would now call tankies, it also seemed quite clearly premature.
Yet just four months after the essay was published, the Berlin Wall came down. A year later, Germany was reunified; a year after that, the Soviet Union ceased to exist as a sovereign state.
It is hard, today, to describe or even recapture in memory what an incredible time that was. If our profs were struggling, for us students it was just wild. The division of the world into two opposing ideologies, and the entire cultural, social, economic and military apparatus that went along with that, was the water in which we had swum for our entire lives. Living with the constant threat of nuclear annihilation was just the price of admission to the human race. And then in a blink, it was gone. The Iron Curtain was raised, and within a few years, Gorbachev was appearing in an ad for Pizza Hut.
Needless to say, triumph of the West has proven to be more elusive than some of us expected at the time. And while Fukuyama himself has conceded that he might have been a little over-optimistic, he has remained committed to the idea that we have reached the end of history, in the specific sense he intended: to say that we have reached the end of history is not to say that there will be no more wars, no more jockeying for status or domination between individuals, or groups, or states. What it does mean is that once a society has reached the "universal and homogeneous state" — liberal democracy in the political sphere, and free market consumer culture in the private sphere — there is nowhere left for that society to go, ideologically, and that all of its apparent "ideological" ambitions will, henceforth, be framed within the tight ambit of political individualism and consumer culture.
To make the argument, Fukuyama drew on a specific reading of Hegel, which saw the struggle for recognition as the locomotive of history. Being recognized by others is how our identity or sense of self develops; but this can lead to conflict as individuals strive to be recognized as valuable and independent agents, often at the expense of others. That is, people seek status based on unequal relations with others.
This is the central problem with all “isms”, all grand ideologies: They privilege one group, colour, gender, class, race, language, what have you, at the expense of others. And so in each ideology, there are contradictions at the level of unequal recognition, which makes these ideologies intrinsically unstable. The only stable outcome is a society based on mutual recognition, where individuals acknowledge each other's self-consciousness and intrinsic equality and independence, leading to a more just and free society. This society is both liberal and democratic: liberal, because it recognizes and protects individual rights and equality; and democratic because it is legitimized through the consent of the governed.
On this view, the end of history is the resolution of all contradictions in the “universal homogeneous state”; liberalism in the democratic sphere, and consumer capitalism in the economic. There is no struggle, no conflict, just liberal democracy combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos.
This is why Fukuyama was convinced that we had reached the end of history. Not because there would not still be wars, and not because we had seen the end of conflict or crackpot messiahs, but because there were no remaining ideologies that had not been discredited as fundamentally unstable. As Fukuyama insisted, even dictators would seek to justify their actions using the language of rights and democratic legitimacy, however fraudulent it was in practice.
The first inkling of what is wrong with this argument was actually at play way back in the early 1990s. During that period, even as the liberal democracy/consumer capitalism end of history argument was playing itself out at the level of geopolitics and of grand ideological narratives, a strong countercurrent was emerging inside the West itself, in the form of identity politics. The Cold War might have ended, but a vicious culture war had broken out between conservatives and progressives. Largely driven by differences over values, the war that raged on campuses and in society more broadly had wide-ranging battlefronts: abortion, gender, sexual orientation, identity politics, the school curriculum, the Western canon, Christmas, the family, popular culture… If it all sounds familiar, it’s because it is. What is going on right now, notably in the United States, but across the entire Western world to varying degrees, is a hypertrophied elaboration on that earlier culture war, juiced by social media and the enormously transformed tech and economic landscape.
The question is, why is liberal democratic consumer capitalism so prone to culture wars? The answer is actually buried in the middle of Fukuyama’s original essay. In a passage where he raises the possibility of alternatives to liberalism, he notes the rise of religious fundamentalism only to dismiss it as a serious competitor: As he puts it: “Yet while the emptiness at the core of liberalism is certainly a defect in the ideology… it is not at all clear that it is remediable through politics” – then he goes on to claim that the impulses that drive religiosity are most successfully satisfied within the personal space that liberalism carves out.
It is increasingly clear that not all demands for recognition can be resolved at the level of individuals and safely tucked away in the private sphere. There are forms of community, types of identity, that put public demands on others in the way of group rights and collective recognition. But demands for group rights are themselves intrinsically invidious, insofar as they are always disguised forms of status seeking and privilege. At the very least, they are bound to be interpreted that way by those upon whom the claims for recognition are being made.
The upshot is that liberalism itself might be fundamentally unstable, to the extent that it can neither fully accommodate nor entirely eliminate the demands for unequal recognition. Instead of a steady state of stable liberal democracy and consumer capitalism, what could be on offer is a constant pendulum swing between liberalism and forms of perfectionism, with relentless identity politics and culture war as the only steady state.
From the X-Files:
Goodbye, Lenin remains the definitive take on the nostalgia many felt, and still feel, for the old communist order.
Did the CIA write “Winds of Change,” the Scorpions power ballad that ended the Cold War? This podcast is incredible.
For my money, the best end of history song was this one:
Right Here, Right Now absolutely nails the vibe of 1991! It unfailingly transports me right back to that heady moment.
I was in Germany that summer after grad school, and that song was truly everywhere (along with REM's Losing my Religion).
Laat fall, I was in Germany again, listening to friends concerned about rising costs of the Ukraine war, rising costs of fuel, and the rising far-right.
Thud.
Europe is once again heavy with history: similar complex geopolitics, insecurity, tension.
And that was before Trump 2.0 was unleashed!
I do recall hearing of Fukuyama's assertive title and considering it both in a literal sense and in a figurative sense. Now, that said, I must add that I am not nearly as well educated as you, Professor Potter (I say that with great humility) and I have notably more than two decades of age on you, so my perspective is somewhat different.
I further recall noting to some friends that, while I was not present at the previous time, THIS time reminded me greatly of the events of 1848. Again, I was not present at that earlier time and could comment only from reading history books; I was simply noting that the (then current) disruption - albeit not resulting from war but from immense civil unrest and ferment - was similar to that of the previous period, i.e. 1848. Strangely, I have had no reason in the more than three decades since to change my comparison. Odd, that.