14 August 2002
Text: Has History Restarted Since September 11?
(Fukuyama account of how the world has changed since 9-11) (8430)
Following is text of Fukuyama lecture:
(begin text)
The Centre for Independent Studies
The Nineteenth Annual
John Bonython Lecture
The Grand Ballroom
The Grand Hyatt, Melbourne
Thursday 8 August, 2002
Has History Restarted Since September 11?
Francis Fukuyama
I would like to begin by expressing my gratitude to The Centre for
Independent Studies and its director, Greg Lindsay, for inviting me to
Australia and giving me the opportunity to deliver the prestigious
John Bonython Lecture. I follow in a line of extraordinarily
distinguished lecturers, and am humbled by the expectations they have
established. I would also like to express a special word of gratitude
to Owen Harries, who, early on in his tenure as Editor of The National
Interest, encouraged me to write the article that eventually became
'The End of History?' It was he who gave it prominence and encouraged
debate over it, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Like many Americans, I have been preoccupied since September 11 trying
to understand the meaning of this event and how the world has changed
as a result of it. An accounting has been demanded of me in
particular, since I argued 12 years ago that we had reached the 'end
of history'. September 11 would seem to qualify, prima facie, as an
historical event, and the fact that it was perpetrated by a group of
Islamic terrorists who reject virtually all aspects of the modern
Western world, lends credence, at least on the surface, to Samuel
Huntington's 'clash of civilisations' hypothesis.
I have developed a standard answer to this challenge, which
incidentally will not be the subject of my talk tonight. The standard
answer goes something like this. The 'end of history' hypothesis was
about the process of modernisation. Progressive intellectuals around
the world spent much of the last century and a half believing that
historical progress would result in an evolution of modern societies
toward socialism. In more recent years, they have held that societies
could modernise and yet remain fundamentally different culturally. My
hypothesis was that there was such a thing as a single, coherent
modernisation process, but that it led not to socialism or to a
variety of culturally -- determined locations, but rather to liberal
democracy and market-oriented economics as the only viable choices.
The process of modernisation was, moreover, a universal one that would
sooner or later drag all societies in its train.
Understood in this fashion, September 11 represents a real challenge,
but not an ultimately convincing one. Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, the
Taliban, and radical Islamism more generally, do in fact represent
ideological challenges to Western liberal democracy that are in
certain ways sharper than those offered by communism. But in the long
run, it is hard to see that Islamism offers as much of a realistic
alternative as a governing ideology for real world societies. Not only
does it have limited appeal to non-Muslims; it does not meet the
aspirations of the vast majority of Muslims themselves. In the
countries that have had recent experience of living under an actual
Muslim theocracy -- Iran and Afghanistan -- there is every evidence
that it has become extremely unpopular. Thus, while fanatical
Islamists armed with weapons of mass destruction pose a severe threat
in the short-run, the longer-term challenge in the battle of ideas is
not going to come from this quarter. September 11 represents a serious
detour, but in the end modernisation and globalisation will remain the
central structuring principles of world politics.
I want, however, to explore another important issue that is related to
the question of the end of history that has been raised by events
since September 11, namely, whether the 'West', which was in my
earlier account the ultimate goal of the historical process, is really
a coherent concept, and whether the United States and its foreign
policy might themselves become the central issues in international
politics.
Reactions to September 11
In the immediate aftermath of September 11, the French sociologist
Jean Baudrillard published a long piece in Le Monde in which he argued
that 'Ultimately, it is they [i.e., the terrorists] who've done the
deed, but it is we who have wanted it.... Terrorism is immoral, and it
responds to a globalisation that is itself immoral'. His image is one
of France, and Europe more generally, as an island of civilisation
caught in a struggle between two morally equivalent fundamentalisms,
that of the United States and of the radical Islamists.
Baudrillard does not, of course, speak for all Frenchmen, and his
piece was quickly denounced in Le Monde by Alain Minc who said that it
reflected 'the French intelligensia's traditional inability to
recognise that a hierarchy of values exists'. But Baudrillard's view,
while phrased in an offensive way unique to French intellectuals,
represents more of an undercurrent in Europe than many Americans
realise or are inclined to admit. The idea that the United States was
only getting what it deserved in the Word Trade Center/Pentagon
attacks was a far from uncommon view, not just in Europe but in many
other parts of the world.
There was, of course, a large spontaneous outpouring of support for
the United States and for Americans around the world after September
11, with European governments lining up immediately to help the US
prosecute its 'war on terrorism'. But with the demonstration of total
American military dominance that came with the successful rousting of
al-Qaeda and the Taliban from Afghanistan, new expressions of
anti-Americanism began to pour forth. After President Bush's
denunciation of the 'axis of evil' in his late January State of the
Union address, it was not just European intellectuals but European
politicians and publics more generally that began to criticise the
United States on a wide variety of fronts. According to Will Hutton,
the Labourite journalist, Britain's US ally is 'not the same good
America ... that reconstructed Europe and led an international liberal
economic and social order.'(1) Rather, it had been taken over by a
group of crazed conservatives and was now the chief source of global
instability. In France, a book became a bestseller arguing that
September 11 was not the work of Muslim extremists but of a cabal of
conservatives within the US government.(2) According to one poll, some
30% of French people regard the United States as France's chief enemy.
While many Americans regard September 11 as a broad attack on Western
civilisation, Europeans are much more likely to regard it as a
response to specifically American policies, representing a risk from
which they are largely immune.
What is going on here? The end of history was supposed to be about the
victory of Western, not simply American, values and institutions. The
Cold War was fought by alliances based on shared values of freedom and
democracy. And yet an enormous gulf has opened up in American and
European perceptions about the world, and the sense of shared values
is increasingly frayed. Does the concept of the 'West' still make
sense in the first decade of the 21st century? Is the fracture line
over globalisation actually a division not between the West and the
Rest, but between the United States and the Rest?
And where will Australia fit in such a divided world? It is
historically tied more closely to Europe than to America, but as a
land of new settlement it shares many characteristics with the United
States. It is situated, moreover, in a part of the world in which
American power and influence matter greatly in the maintenance of
peace and an open international trading order.
In my view, the idea of the West remains a coherent one, and there
remain critical shared values, institutions, and interest that will
continue to bind the world's developed democracies, and Europe and the
United States, in particular. But there are some deeper differences
emerging between Western democracies that will be highly neuralgic in
America's dealings with the world in the coming years that need
critical attention by policymakers and by, yes, statesmen.
The nature of the rift between America and its allies
In the remainder of this lecture I will refer repeatedly to
differences between Europe and the United States. But it should be
kept in mind that 'Europe' in this context is more of a placeholder
for global attitudes critical of American foreign policy. Europeans,
of course, are themselves divided in their views of the US; the views
I characterise as typical of them are often broadly representative of
left-of-centre opinion in a variety of countries around the world,
including Australia and New Zealand. Asian countries from Japan to
Malaysia have voiced similar misgivings about American unilateralism
in the wake of September 11. Some views, however, related to the need
to devolve sovereignty to supranational organisations are peculiar to
the historical experience of members of the European Union.
The ostensible issues raised in the US-European disputes since the
'axis of evil' speech for the most part revolve around alleged
American unilateralism and international law. There is by now a
familiar list of European complaints about American policy, including
but not limited to the Bush Administration's withdrawal from the Kyoto
Protocol on global warming, its failure to ratify the Rio Pact on
biodiversity, its withdrawal from the ABM treaty and pursuit of
missile defence, its opposition to the ban on land mines, its
treatment of al-Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, its opposition to
new provisions of the biological warfare convention, and most recently
its opposition to the International Criminal Court.
The most serious act of US unilateralism in European eyes concerns the
Bush Administration's announced intention to bring about regime change
in Iraq, if necessary through a go-it-alone invasion. The axis of evil
speech did indeed mark a very important change in American foreign
policy from deterrence to a policy of active preemption of terrorism.
This doctrine was further amplified in Bush's West Point speech in
June, in which he declared 'the war on terror will not be won on the
defensive. We must take the battle to the enemy, disrupt his plans,
and confront the worst threats before they emerge. In the world we
have entered, the only path to safety is the path of action.'
The European view is that Europe is seeking to create a genuine
rule-based international order suitable to the circumstances of the
post-Cold War world. That world, free of sharp ideological conflicts
and large-scale military competition, is one that gives substantially
more room for consensus, dialogue, and negotiation as ways of settling
disputes. They are horrified by the Bush Administration's announcement
of a virtually open-ended doctrine of preemption against terrorists or
states that sponsor terrorists, in which the United States and the
United States alone decides when and where to use force.
Robert Kagan, in a brilliant recent article in Policy Review,(3) put
the current difference between the United States and Europe as
follows. The Europeans are the ones who actually believe they are
living at the end of history, that is, in a largely peaceful world
that to an increasing degree can be governed by law, norms, and
international agreements. In this world, power politics and classical
realpolitik have become obsolete. Americans, by contrast, think they
are still living in history, and need to use traditional
power-political means to deal with threats from Iraq, al-Qaeda, and
other malign forces. According to Kagan, the Europeans are half right:
they have indeed created an end-of-history world for themselves within
the European Union, where sovereignty has given way to supranational
organisation. What they don't understand, however, is that the peace
and safety of their European bubble is guaranteed ultimately by
American military power. Absent that, they themselves would be dragged
backwards into history.
Is the rift genuine?
This, at least, is the popularly accepted account of American
unilateralism and European emphasis on international law and
institutions. We need to ask, however, whether it is in fact accurate,
and whether the US has consistently been more unilateralist than
Europe. The truth of the matter here is far more complicated, with the
differences between the US and Europe being much more nuanced.
Liberal internationalism, after all, has a long and honoured place in
American foreign policy. The United States was the country that
promoted the League of Nations, the United Nations, the Bretton Woods
institutions, the GATT/WTO, and a host of other international
organisations. There are a huge number of international governance
organisations in the world today in which the US participates as an
active, if not the most active member, from standards-setting, nuclear
power safety, and scientific cooperation, to aviation safety, bank
settlements, drug regulation, accounting standards/corporate
governance, and telecommunications.
It is useful here to make a distinction between those forms of liberal
internationalism that are primarily economic, and those that have a
more political or security dimension. Particularly in recent years,
the United States has focused on international institutions that have
promoted international trade and investment. It has put substantial
effort into creating a rule-based international trade and investment
regime with stronger and more autonomous decision-making authority.
The motives for this are obvious: Americans benefit strongly from and
indeed dominate the global economy, which is why globalisation bears a
'made in the USA' label.
In the realm of economics, the Europeans don't have all that great a
record with regard to respect for multilateral rules when compared to
the United States. They have been on their high horse this year
because of American actions with regard to steel and agricultural
subsidies, and they are right to complain about American hypocrisy
with regard to free trade. But this I regard as kind of normal
hypocrisy: all countries act in contradiction of declared free trade
principles, and the Europeans have been notorious for, among other
things, agricultural subsidies maintained at higher levels and over
longer periods of time than American ones. America is guilty only of
the most recent outbreak of hypocrisy.
There are a number of areas where the Europeans have acted
unilaterally in economic matters, and in ways that at times contravene
the existing legal order. The EU resisted unfavourable decisions
against them on bananas for nine years, and beef hormones for even
longer. They have announced a precautionary principle with regard to
genetically modified foods, which is very difficult to reconcile with
the WTO's sanitary and phytosanitary rules. Indeed, the Europeans have
been violating their own rules with regard to GM foods, with certain
member states setting standards different from those of the community
itself. The European Competition Commission under Mario Monti
successfully blocked the merger of GE and Honeywell, when the deal had
been approved by American and Canadian regulators, in ways that
promoted suspicions that the EU was simply acting to protect specific
European interests. Finally, the EU has succeeded in exporting its
data privacy rules to the United States through its safe harbour
arrangements.
For all their talk of wanting to establish a rule-based international
order, the Europeans haven't done that well within the EU itself. As
John van Oudenaren has argued, the Europeans have developed a
decision-making system of Byzantine complexity, with overlapping and
inconsistent rules and weak enforcement powers.(4) The European
Commission often doesn't have the power even to monitor compliance of
member states with its own directives, much less the ability to make
them conform. This fits with an attitude towards law in certain parts
of Europe that sees declarative intent often of greater importance
than actual implementation, and which Americans tend to see instead as
undermining the very rule of law.
It should be noted that Australia and New Zealand are actually in a
much better position to criticise American hypocrisy on trade issues
than are the Europeans, since neither one has anything like a Common
Agricultural Policy or the clout to enforce unilaterally safety or
privacy rules on other countries. Both countries, being highly
dependent on agricultural exports, have been strong supporters of free
trade in recent years and are particularly vulnerable to American
agricultural subsidies. New Zealand in particular since the mid-1980s
has moved to one of the lowest levels of agricultural protection of
any country in the world.
The second type of liberal internationalism has to do with politics
and security. With the exception of the two environmental agreements
(Rio and Kyoto), all of the US-European disputes in recent months have
concerned security-related issues (the International Criminal Court
may not seem like a security matter, but the reason that the United
States does not want to participate in it is out of fear that its
soldiers and officials may be held criminally liable by the ICC in the
conduct of their duties.) It is in this realm that the tables are
turned and European charges of American unilateralism are made.
It is possible to overstate the importance of these disputes. A great
deal of European irritation with the United States arises from
stylistic matters, and from the Bush Administration's strange failure
to consult, explain, justify, and cajole in the manner of previous
administrations. The administration could have let ratification of
Kyoto languish in Congress as the Clinton administration did, rather
than casually announcing withdrawal from the pact at a luncheon for
NATO ambassadors. Europeans did not like the religious language of the
'axis of evil', nor the fact that this major policy shift was
announced as it were on the fly without prior notification or
explanation. The United States has had a consistent record of using
strong-arm tactics to shape international agreements to its liking,
and then to walk away from them at the last moment. This pattern goes
all the way back to Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations, and was
continued in negotiations over the Rio Pact, Kyoto, and the ICC. Even
if you are sceptical about the value of international institutions, it
is not difficult to see why non-Americans might get a little irritated
at this kind of behaviour.
The foregoing suggests that much of the European-American rift
concerns style rather than substance. The Clinton administration
talked a multilateralist game, while the Bush administration has at
times asserted what amounts to a kind of principled unilateralism; in
fact, policy between the two administrations didn't differ in
substance all that much. Clinton may have signed the Kyoto and ICC
treaties, but he knew he wouldn't spend much political capital in a
hopeless effort to get them through Congress. On the other hand, the
US effort in Afghanistan made use of a reasonably broad coalition of
forces.
But while it is tempting to say the problem is simply stylistic, I
think that it is fundamentally wrong. There is in fact a deeper issue
of principle between the United States and Europe that will ensure
that transatlantic relations will remain neuralgic through the years
to come. The disagreement is not over the principles of liberal
democracy, which both sides share, but over where the ultimate source
of liberal democratic legitimacy lies.
To put it rather schematically and over-simply, Americans tend not to
see any source of democratic legitimacy higher than the constitutional
democratic nation-state. To the extent that any international
organisation has legitimacy, it is because duly constituted democratic
majorities have handed that legitimacy up to them in a negotiated,
contractual process. Such legitimacy can be withdrawn at any time by
the contracting parties; international law and organisation has no
existence independent of this type of voluntary agreement between
sovereign nation-states.
Europeans, by contrast, tend to believe that democratic legitimacy
flows from the will of an international community much larger than any
individual nation-state. This international community is not embodied
concretely in a single, global democratic constitutional order. Yet it
hands down legitimacy to existing international institutions, which
are seen as partially embodying it. Thus, peacekeeping forces in the
former Yugoslavia are not merely ad hoc intergovernmental
arrangements, but rather moral expressions of the will and norms of
the larger international community.
One might be tempted to say that the stiff-necked defence of national
sovereignty of the type practiced by Sen. Jesse Helms is a
characteristic only of a certain part of the American Right, and that
the Left is as internationalist as are the Europeans. This would be
largely correct in the security-foreign policy arena, but dead wrong
with regard to the economic side of liberal internationalism. That is,
the Left does not grant the WTO or any other trade-related body any
special status with regard to legitimacy. They are very suspicious of
the WTO when it overturns an environment or labour law in the name of
free trade, and are just as jealous of democratic sovereignty on these
issues as Sen. Helms.
Between these two views of the sources of legitimacy, I would say that
the Europeans are theoretically right, but wrong in practice. They
assert that they and not the Americans are the true believers in
liberal universal values. It is in fact impossible to assert as a
theoretical matter that proper liberal democratic procedure by itself
inevitably results in outcomes that are necessarily legitimate and
just. A constitutional order that is procedurally democratic can still
decide to do terrible things to other countries that violate human
rights and norms of decency on which its own democratic order is
based. Indeed, it can violate the higher principles upon which its
claim of legitimacy is based, as Lincoln argued was the case with
slavery. The legitimacy of its actions are not in the end based on
democratic procedural correctness, but on the prior rights and norms
which come from a moral realm higher than that of the legal order.
The problem with the European position is that while such a higher
realm of liberal democratic values might theoretically exist, it is
very imperfectly embodied in any given international institution. The
very idea that this legitimacy is handed downwards from a willowy,
disembodied international level rather than handed upwards from
concrete, legitimate democratic publics on a nation-state level
virtually invites abuse on the part of elites who are then free to
interpret the will of the international community to suit their own
preferences.
The second important practical problem with the European position is
that of enforcement. The one power that is unique to sovereign
nation-states and to them alone, even in today's globalised world, is
the power to enforce laws. Even if existing international laws and
organisations did accurately reflect the will of the international
community (whatever that means), enforcement remains by and large the
province of nation states. A great deal of both international and
national law coming out of Europe consists of what amount to social
policy wish lists that are completely unenforceable. Europeans justify
these kinds of laws saying they are expressions of social objectives;
Americans reply, correctly in my view, that such unenforceable
aspirations undermine the rule of law itself.
The only way that this circle of theory and practice could be squared
would be if there were genuine democratic government at a level higher
than that of the nation-state. Such global democratic government could
then be said to truly embody the will of the international community,
while containing procedural safeguards to make sure that that will was
not willfully misinterpreted or abused by various elites or interest
groups. It would also presumably have enforcement powers that do not
today exist, apart from the specific ad hoc arrangements made for
peacekeeping and multilateral coalitions.
Some Europeans may believe that the steady accumulation of smaller
international institutions like the ICC or the various agencies of the
United Nations will some day result in something resembling democratic
world government. In my view, the chance of this happening is as close
to zero as you ever get in political life. What will be practically
possible to construct in terms of international institutions will not
be legitimate or democratic, and what will be legitimate and
democratic will not be possible to construct. For better or worse,
such international institutions as we possess will have to be partial
solutions existing in the vacuum of international legitimacy above the
level of the nation-state. Or to put it differently, whatever
legitimacy they possess will have to be based on the underlying
legitimacy of nation-states and the contractual relationships they
negotiate.
Why do these differences exist?
Robert Kagan in the article mentioned earlier provides a realpolitik
explanation for US-European differences with regard to international
law. The Europeans like international law and norms because they are
much weaker than the United States, and the latter likes unilateralism
because it is significantly more powerful than any other country or
group of countries (like the EU) not just in terms of military power,
but economically, technologically and culturally as well.
This argument makes a great deal of sense as far as it goes. Small,
weak countries that are acted upon rather than influencing others
naturally prefer to live in a world of norms, laws, and institutions,
in which more powerful nations are constrained. Conversely, a 'sole
superpower' like the United States would naturally like to see its
freedom of action be as unencumbered as possible.
But while the argument from the standpoint of power politics is
correct as far as it goes, it is not a sufficient explanation of why
the US and Europe, not to mention other countries around the world,
differ. As noted above, the pattern of US unilateralism and European
multilateralism applies primarily to security/foreign policy issues
and secondarily to environmental concerns; in the economic sphere, the
US is enmeshed in multilateral institutions despite (or perhaps
because of) its dominance of the global economy.
Moreover, to point to differences in power is merely to beg the
question of why these differentials exist. The EU collectively
encompasses a population of 375 million people and has a GDP of nearly
$10 trillion, compared to a US population of 280 million and a GDP of
$7 trillion. Europe could certainly spend money on defence at a level
that would put it on a par with the United States, but it chooses not
to. Europe spends barely $130 billion collectively on defence -- a sum
that has been steadily falling -- compared to US defence spending of
$300 billion, which is due to rise sharply. The post-September 11
increment in US defence spending requested by President Bush is larger
than the entire defence budget of Britain. Despite Europe's turn in a
more conservative direction in 2002, not one rightist or centre-right
candidate is campaigning on a platform of significantly raising
defence spending. Europe's ability to deploy the power that it
possesses is of course greatly weakened by the collective action
problems posed by the current system of EU decision-making. But the
failure to create more useable military power is clearly a political
and normative issue.
Moreover, not every small, weak country is equally outraged by
American unilateralism. In a curious role reversal from Cold War days,
the Russians were actually much more relaxed about the American
withdrawal from the ABM Treaty than were many Europeans, since it
makes possible deep cuts in offensive strategic nuclear forces.
Australia and New Zealand of course want the US to abide by
international trade rules since they are directly affected by American
agricultural subsidies, but have generally expressed less moral
outrage over the American failure to subordinate its security policy
to international norms than most members of the European Union.
This brings us to other reasons why Europeans see the international
order so differently from Americans. One critically important factor
has to be the experience of European integration over the past
generation. The loss of sovereignty is not an abstract theoretical
matter to Europeans; they have been steadily giving up powers to
Brussels, from local control over health and safety standards to
social policy to their currency itself. Having lived through this
masochistic experience repeatedly, one imagines that they are like
former smokers who want to put everyone else through the same
withdrawal pains that they have endured.
The final important difference between the United States and Europe
with regard to international order has nothing to do with European
beliefs and practices, but with America's unique national experience,
and the sense of exceptionalism that has arisen from it. The
sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset has spent much of his distinguished
career explaining how the United States is an outsider among developed
democracies, with policies and institutions that differ significantly
from those of Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, or Japan.(5)
Whether in regard to welfare, crime, regulation, education, or foreign
policy, there are constant differences separating America from
everyone else: it is consistently more anti-statist, individualistic,
laissez-faire, and egalitarian than other democracies.
This sense of exceptionalism extends to its own democratic
institutions and their legitimacy. Unlike most of the old societies of
Europe, the United States was founded on the basis of a political
idea. There was no American people or nation prior to the founding of
the country: national identity is civic rather than religious,
cultural, racial or ethnic. There has been only one American regime
which, as the world's oldest continuously existing democracy, is not
viewed as a transient political compromise. This means that the
country's political institutions have always been imbued with an
almost religious reverence that Europeans, with more ancient sources
of identity, find peculiar. The proliferation of American flags across
the country in the wake of September 11 is only the most recent
manifestation of Americans' deeply felt patriotism.
Moreover, for Americans, their Declaration of Independence and
Constitution are not just the basis of a legal-political order on the
North American continent; they are the embodiment of universal values
and have a significance for mankind that goes well beyond the borders
of the United States. The American dollar bill has the inscription
novus ordo seclorum -- 'new order of the ages' -- written under the
all-seeing eye of the great pyramid. When President Reagan repeatedly
quoted Winthrop in speaking of the US as a 'shining city on a hill',
his words had great resonance for many Americans. This leads at times
to a typically American tendency to confuse its own national interests
with the broader interests of mankind as a whole.
The situation of Europe -- as well as developed Asian societies like
Japan, for that matter -- is very different. Europeans were peoples
with shared histories long before they were democracies. They have
other sources of identity besides politics. They have seen a variety
of regimes come and go, and some of those regimes have, in living
memory, been responsible for very shameful acts. The kind of
patriotism that is commonplace in America is highly suspect in many
parts of Europe: Germans for many years after World War II taught
their children not to display the German flag or cheer too loudly at
football matches. While the French and, in a different way, the
British continue to feel a sense of broader national mission in the
world, it is safe to say that few other European countries regard
their own political institutions as universal models for the rest of
the world to follow. Indeed, many Europeans regard their national
institutions as having a much lower degree of legitimacy than
international ones, with the European Union occupying a place in
between.
The reasons for this are not hard to fathom. Europeans regard the
violent history of the first half of the 20th century as the direct
outcome of the unbridled exercise of national sovereignty. The house
that they have been building for themselves since the 1950s called the
European Union was deliberately intended to embed those sovereignties
in multiple layers of rules, norms, and regulations to prevent those
sovereignties from ever spinning out of control again. While the EU
could become a mechanism for aggregating and projecting power beyond
Europe's borders, most Europeans see the EU's purpose as one rather of
transcending power politics. They do, in other words, see their
project as one of finding comfortable accommodations for the last man
at the end of history.
Australia's national experience places it somewhere in between the
United States and Europe. As a loyal colony of Britain, it was not
born in a revolution against state authority as was the United States,
and therefore does not share America's anti-statism and suspicion of
higher authority to nearly the same degree. Though it was also a land
of new settlement, its national identity was less overtly tied to a
set of new democratic political institutions than was that of the
United States. Its size and historical origins moreover have never
allowed Australia to develop a sense that its own institutions were
exceptional.
On the other hand, national sovereignty is more important to Australia
than to most European countries. Australia has never had the
experience of the unlimited exercise of its own sovereignty leading it
to disaster, as in Central Europe. Rather, it saw its sovereignty
threatened by Japan and needed to rescued from that threat by American
power. The neighbourhood it lives in is highly diverse, politically
and culturally. Traditional power politics remains a fact of life in
East Asia; there is no overarching framework of institutions and norms
comparable to the EU which is capable of regulating relations between
states in the region. As a small power, it depends on larger powers
being constrained by rules and institutions, particularly in the
economic realm, but it also depends ultimately on American power for
its security. It is not surprising, therefore, that Australian
criticisms of the United States since September 11 have been more
muted than those coming from Europe.
Are we at the end of history?
This brings us back full circle to the initial question with which we
started, which is also one of the important sources of US-European
disagreement. The Europeans are certainly right that they are living
at the end of history; the question is, where is the rest of the
world? Of course, much of the world is indeed mired in history, having
neither economic growth nor stable democracy nor peace. But the end of
the Cold War marked an important turn in international relations,
since for the first time the vast majority of the world's great powers
were stable, prosperous liberal democracies. While there could be
skirmishes between countries in history, like Iraq, and those beyond
it, like the United States, the prospect of great wars between great
powers had suddenly diminished.
There are certainly no new non-democratic great powers to challenge
the United States; China may one day qualify, but it isn't there yet.
But a terrorist organisation armed with weapons of mass destruction is
a different matter: although the organisation itself may be a minor
historical player, the technological capability it can potentially
deploy is such that it must be taken seriously as a world-class
threat. Indeed, such an organisation poses graver challenges in
certain ways than nuclear-armed superpowers, since the latter are for
the most part deterrable and not in the business of committing
national suicide.
The question about the threat is then whether the world has
fundamentally changed since September 11, insofar as hostile terrorist
organisations armed with weapons of mass destruction will become an
ongoing reality. Many Americans clearly think so, and believe that
once a leader like Saddam Hussein possesses nuclear weapons he will
pass them on to terrorists as a poor man's delivery system. They, like
President Bush, believe that this is a threat not just to the United
States, but to Western civilisation as a whole. The acuteness of this
threat is what then drives the new doctrine of preemption and the
greater willingness of the United States to use force unilaterally
around the world.
Many Europeans, by contrast, believe that the attacks of September 11
were a one-off kind of event where Osama bin Laden got lucky and
scored big. But the likelihood that al-Qaeda will achieve similar
successes in the future is small, given the heightened state of alert
and the defensive and preventive measures put into place since
September 11. They believe that the likelihood that Saddam Hussein
will pass nuclear weapons to terrorists is small, and that he remains
deterrable. An invasion of Iraq is therefore not necessary;
containment will work as it has since the Gulf War. And finally, they
tend to believe that Muslim terrorists do not represent a general
threat to the West, but are focused on the United States as a result
of US policy in the Middle East and Gulf.
Democracy's future
Assuming we get past these near-term threats, there is a larger
principle at issue in the current US-European rift that will continue
to play an important role in world politics for the foreseeable
future. That principle has to do with the nature of democracy itself.
In an increasingly globalised world, where is the proper locus of
democratic legitimacy? Does it now and forever more exist only at the
nation-state level, or is it possible to imagine the development of
genuinely democratic international institutions? Will the existing
welter of international rules, norms, and organisations some day
evolve into something more than a series of ad hoc arrangements, in
the direction of genuine global governance? And if so, who will design
those institutions?
My own view, as stated earlier, is that it is extremely hard to
envision democracy ever emerging at an international level, and many
reasons for thinking that attempts to create such international
institutions will actually have the perverse effect of undermining the
real democracy that exists at a nation-state level. A partial
exception to this is the European Union, which continues to move ahead
as a political project with the introduction of the Euro and the
planned expansion under the Nice Treaty. But in a way, the experience
of the EU proves my point: there is a significant 'democratic deficit'
at the European level, which exacerbates existing democratic deficits
at the member state level. This is the source of much of the backlash
against further European integration, which is seen as weakening local
powers in favour of unmovable bureaucrats in Brussels. The problem
will become even more severe after the next round of European
expansion, which will bring in states from Eastern Europe with very
different expectations and experiences.
But if the United States refuses, rightly, to concede the principle
that there is a broader democratic international community providing
legitimacy to international institutions, it needs to consider
carefully the consequences and perceptions of its behaviour as the
world's most powerful democratic nation-state. Its own self-interest
dictates the need for reciprocity across the broad range of
cooperative agreements and institutions within which it finds itself
enmeshed. The opportunities for unilateral action that exist presently
in the military realm are not nearly as broad in the realm of trade
and finance. There are a large number of global public goods, like
standards, free trade, financial flows, and legal transparency, as
well as public bads like environmental damage, crime, and drug
trafficking, that create difficult collective action problems. Some of
these problems can be solved only if the world's most powerful country
takes the lead in either providing those public goods, or in
organising institutions to provide them -- something the US was eager
to do in earlier periods.
The enormous margin of power exercised by the United States,
particularly in the security realm, brings with it special
responsibilities to use that power prudently. Robert Kagan speaks of
the need to show what the American founders labelled a 'decent respect
for the opinions of mankind'. But for him that seems to consist of
nothing more than not gratuitously rejecting offers of support for
American aims and objectives. It is not clear that those aims and
objectives should themselves in any way be shaped by the opinions of
non-Americans.
In my view, an appropriately moderate American foreign policy that did
show a real degree of 'decent respect' would involve at least the
following elements.
First, if the United States is going to shift to a preemptive policy
towards international terrorism, there ought to be a thinking-through
and enunciation of a broader strategy that among other things
indicates the limits of this new doctrine. What kinds of threats, and
what standards of evidence, will justify the use of this kind of
power? Presumably, the US is not thinking of unilaterally attacking at
least two of the three legs of the axis of evil; if this is the case,
why not at least spell this out? The United States is in the process
of scaring itself to death with regard to terrorism and weapons of
mass destruction. A more realistic appraisal of future threats will
raise the bar to preemption, while keeping it in the arsenal.
Second, the US needs to take some responsibility for global public
bads like carbon emissions. The Kyoto Protocol is a very flawed
document for any number of reasons, and the link between carbon
emissions and observed warming has not been conclusively proven. On
the other hand, it has not been disproven, either, and it would seem
only prudent to hedge against the possibility that it is true. Apart
from global warming, there are any number of good reasons why the
United States ought to tax energy use much more heavily than it does:
to pay for the negative externality of having to go to war every
decade or so to keep open access to Middle Eastern oil; to promote
development of alternative energy sources; and to create some policy
space in dealing with Saudi Arabia, which does not seem to be a
particular friend of the United States after September 11. Americans
may not ever be convinced that they should make serious economic
sacrifices for the sake of international agreements, but they may be
brought around to an equivalent position if they see sufficient
self-interest in doing so.
Finally, there should be a walking back of the steel and agricultural
subsidy decisions taken earlier this year. No one in Washington ever
pretended that there was a reason for making them in the first place
other than pure political expediency, and there can be no US
leadership on any important issue related to the global economy in
their wake.
The US-European rift that has emerged in 2002 is not just a transitory
problem reflecting the style of the current US administration or the
world situation in the wake of September 11. It is a reflection of
differing views of the locus of democratic legitimacy within a broader
Western civilisation whose actual institutions have become remarkably
similar. The underlying principled issue is essentially unsolvable
because there is ultimately no practical way of addressing the
'democratic deficit' at the global level. But the problem can be
mitigated by a degree of American moderation within a system of
sovereign nation-states.
Notes
(1) "Time to Stop Being America's Lapdog," Observer (Feb. 17, 2002).
(2) Thierry Meyssan, L'Effroyable Imposture (The Horrifying Fraud).
(3) Robert Kagan, "Power and Weakness," Policy Review no. 116
(June-July 2002).
(4) John Van Oudenaren, "E Pluribus Confusion," National Interest no.
65 (Fall 2001): 23-36.
(5) Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged
Sword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1995). This theme appears also in his
books Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics, 2nd. Ed.
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981); The First New
Nation (New York: Basic Books, 1963); and Continental Divide: The
Values and Institutions of the United States and Canada (New York &
London: Routledge, 1990).
About the Author:
Francis Fukuyama is the Bernard Schwartz Professor of International
Political Economy at the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International
Studies at Johns Hopkins University. He has a B.A. in classics from
Cornell University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard. Dr
Fukuyama currently sits on the President's Council on Bioethics. He
has written widely on democratisation and international political
economy, and culture and social capital in modern economic life. His
books include the award winning The End of History and the Last Man,
published in over twenty foreign editions, and most recently Our
Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution.
(end text)
(Distributed by the Office of International Information Programs, U.S.
Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)
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