The End Of History vs The Clash of Civilization

In 1992, Francis Fukuyama, Harvard PhD in political science, published “The End of History (and The Last Man)” - I parenthesize the second half of that title because in almost every reference I’ve seen to this book, that part of it is skipped.

It’s just “The End of History” which, according to Fukuyama, meant that with the ascendency of the US and its allies after WWII and the collapse of the Soviet Empire just a few years prior to publication, humanity had reached its “final stage” in the evolution of political economy.

Western liberal democracy was it. There would be no further iterations beyond that form of governance, and from that, an international “rules-based order” (not his phrase) would become the sole organizing framework behind a unified global civilization - and it was all just a matter of looping in the laggards, the throwbacks and the holdouts.

Fukuyama was apparently once a student of Samuel P. Huntington, who was having none of this. When “The End of History” dropped, Huntington gave a lecture at the American Enterprise Institute which was then developed into an article for Foreign Affairs¹ the following year. It was one of the most incendiary articles published in FA - because it challenged the complacency that was setting in amongst Western elites and threatened to disrupt the Cold War victory laps.

There would be no world civilization, Huntington asserted. There were somewhere between five and seven civilizations on Planet Earth, which were:

• The West (Western liberal democracy of North America, Europe and Australia/NZ)

• Sino-Asian: China, Southeast Asia

• Japan was a civilization unto itself

• Islam

• India and the broader Hindu cultural sphere

• Eastern European / Slavic - The Russians, down but not out

• South America / Latin America

• Africa (possibly)²

The West may have emerged as the most economically and militarily powerful one, but make no mistake - the others weren’t going away.

More importantly, these other civilizations were fundamentally different from Western liberal democracy. They would never become like us, so international relations of the future entailed seeking geopolitical equilibrium with these other civilizations.

Huntington went further - he said that future conflict wouldn’t be between nations or political systems like nearly everything that led up to the two world wars, or the Cold War after them.

Future wars would be civilizational wars: between cultures not countries.

He also said that the civilization that threatened ours the most was (wait for it):

Militant Islam.

We have to tread carefully here, because even Huntington has been criticized in the past as generalizing the entirety of Muslims as a geopolitical threat, despite the fact that he himself acknowledged reform-movements and progressive currents within modern Islam.

(It’s worth noting here that Canadian scholar W. R. Clement, whose work on the role of mental abstraction in catalyzing The Enlightenment I cite frequently, published an evenmore obscure book about what Huntington called “the Islamic Resurgence”, titled “Reforming The Prophet”).

To put it bluntly so we can get to the point: nobody is saying “all Muslims are bad”, but what is arguable is that some geopolitical fulcrum points of their world (Iran, Yemen and the sectarian flows of migrants everywhere else) are fanatical militants. Very similar to how there are Western factions dominated by “NeoCons” (many of whom are clinically insane).

Unlike Huntington and Fukuyama, I do not have a degree in political science or international relations, so I’m basically armchair-ing it.

But my suspicion has long been that it was crude and naive to think of political events in terms of clean denominations of countries, nations or even political parties.

There are factions, and tribes and - to Huntington’s point - cultures.

Many have drawn attention to the fact that the events of 9/11 and what happened thereafter seemingly played out a blueprint “Rebuilding American’s Defenses” that was laid out pretty clearly by The Project For A New American Century (PNAC) in September 2000 (but which first appeared in 1996, published in - guess where? A Foreign Affairs piece by William Kristol and Robert Kagan).

It named five nations who were specifically hostile and posed a threat to American hegemony: North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Syria and Libya; and it ruminated that it may take too long to prosecute a long, drawn-out campaign against these forces, absent some reason to accelerate it…

“Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.”

A year later, we get 9/11 and ever since there’s been a lot of speculation around “MIHOP” vs “LIHOP”³. It changed everything, ushered in the Surveillance State, not justin the US but everywhere, and started the process of knocking off the hostile regimes outlined.

This almost brings us to Iran.