I: 1989
In the summer of 1989, an article by famous political theorist Francis Fukuyama seemed to capture the spirit of the times and reflected on “The End of History?”, followed by his 1992 book “The End of History and the Last Man.” Frequently, and maybe with some justification, it was and continues to be received and all too easily dismissed as a bravado piece celebrating the victory of the West over Communism. Yes, the Soviet Union fell, yes, democracy won, but hasn’t it been a short-lived victory; have we not seen the return of dictatorship; has the West not suffered setbacks; has history not continued?
Such facile criticism falls too short of the argument and misses the point. Certainly, at the time, the neoconservative movement was on the rise, a project which could be described as the attempt to now finally push democracy into the world in what seemed to be the activist phase of the American Revolution. Suddenly, it seemed possible to dethrone dictators all over the world to push democratic change. Especially after 9/11/2001, with the campaigns against the Taliban in Afghanistan (who had allied with Al-Qaida) and against Saddam Hussein in Iraq (who was not deterred by any coalition attempts to stop his war against his own people), attempts were made to violently transform dictatorial regimes and transition them to democracy in a process called nation-building.
II: 2022
Most if not all of these attempts failed spectacularly, tragically, and – one could argue – criminally. One cause for this failure seems to be that ironically, the proponents of democratic change did not have a solid understanding of democracy and the developments leading towards it. Another cause has been the insufficient patience and follow-through to actually support these countries in their path to democracy.
The United States and its allies withdrew from Afghanistan in 2022 not because they had failed, but because they (mostly the US) were unwilling to continue actually building the institutions and social and economic frameworks necessary for democracy. As usual, the United States opted to prioritize domestic politics over international commitments.
The same attention given to Germany after World War II by France, the UK and the United States to build a democratic and de-nazified society in West Germany was not extended to either Iraq or Afghanistan, and the wrong lessons were learnt from the German example.
West Germany (and, arguably, unified Germany later) succeeded because the old Nazi and (later also Socialist) elites were integrated into the new state if they were not too far up in the hierarchy. This integration was later criticized within Germany in the 1968 movement, for the right moral reasons but failing to understand the practical point that you need to work with the entire population and not just coalitions of the willing. The exclusion of Ba’ath party members in Iraq, and the refusal to seriously work with the Taliban in Afghanistan – however distasteful that may have been – laid the seeds of failure. Especially the Americans should have known better, not just from their experience in Germany, but also from their post-Civil War history. But I guess we are seeing that even these lessons have been unlearnt, and it has become easier to demonize the “other side” than to work with them.
Furthermore, Russia has slid back into dictatorship after some attempts at democratic reform, and we are seeing a global movement against democracy (and against modernity) taking shape around the globe. So how, possibly, could Fukuyama have been correct? Is not his idea of an “end of history” and any triumph of the concept of liberal democracy blatantly ridiculous?
III: Telos and History
Part of the misunderstanding regarding Fukuyama’s thesis is due to the ambiguity in terminology. As a political philosopher, Fukuyama did not really write for a lay audience, but was contributing to a long-standing philosophical debate. His ideas were, however, received as if they were easily understandable in normal political discourse. (This is a problem regularly affecting much of the work done in the humanities and social sciences. Particularly in philosophical discourse, but sometimes also in science, words do not have the same meaning as in everyday language. Examples are legion, and pertain even to everyday words such as idea, idealism, representation, energy, etc.)
The first problem is that the word “end” has a dual meaning, both in English and Greek (τέλος / telos): it can be read as “ending / finality” and “purpose / trajectory / destiny.” Fukuyama is also not the originator of this discussion, he merely continues a line of argument already taken up by Aristotle, Hegel and Kojève.
The second problem concerns the definition of “history.” In the Hegelian understanding, history does not just flow aimlessly but progresses towards a destination. Simply put, the “spirit” of history is aiming towards a resolution. In Aristotelian terms, history – the accumulation of human events – has a telos, a destiny, which defines it in the end. Aristotle here refines and modifies the Platonian understanding of “ideas” or “forms”: For everything on Earth there exists an “ideal form” beyond our material reality. Every chair is a shadow of an ideal chair, every bird a shadow of an ideal bird, and everything we understand as reality is merely a shadow of a metaphysical reality that we can only see – to use the Neoplatonic phrasing by Paul in 1 Corinthians – “through a glass, darkly.” As a philosopher who is arguably more interested in nature than metaphysics, Aristotle de-mystifies this theory by shifting the definition of a thing from being a shadow of an “ideal form” to its purpose, its telos. A chair is defined by its purpose: Something to sit on. Some chairs are better than others because they fulfill this function better than others.
Now, what then is the telos, the purpose of history? History is not “natural history” but the history of human affairs on Earth. The primary concern of human beings – as social or political animals – is how to organize their way of living together. History then can be seen as an experiment in finding out the ideal way of such an organization, or, to put it more bluntly, history is the search for the ideal political system.
This is where Hegel comes in: famously, he claims to have witnessed seeing Napoleon ride through his city of Jena, to which he remarked that he saw the “world-spirit” (Weltgeist) riding “on horseback” through the city. Napoleon represented the success of the French Revolution – a revolution that (with all its complications) set out to bring about democracy and the end of the old regime. The path to democracy proved to be more complicated (and had succeeded better in America than in France), but the end of the “ancien régime” was cemented by the dual defeat of both the Holy Roman Empire in 1805 with the Battle of Austerlitz, and the Kingdom of Prussia in 1806 with the Battle of Jena and Auerstedt.
The end of history thus occurred in 1806. The monarchic world order was destroyed. Napoleon provided what we would today call a “proof of concept”: A republican form of government (meaning, a representative democracy with a separation of powers taking inspiration from the Roman Republic) had proved more powerful and effective than an autocratic or monarchic form of government. The principle of popular sovereignty (the realization that the true sovereign are the people upon whose consent rests the power of government) had won the day and would from now on be seen as the only legitimate source of rule. The days of “l’état, c’est moi” (I am the state – the motto of Louis XIV) were over. This cemented a development that already had succeeded in the Anglo-American world, from the times of Magna Carta through the English and finally the American Revolution, and it was now applied to continental Europe as well, and with it, to the world (as European nations were also the overseers of vast colonial empires). A practical implementation of the democratic principle was the end of serfdom, a form of slavery that dominated Europe till it was abolished around the time of the French Revolution – with Russia as the last holdout until 1861.
Now, obviously, history continued after 1806 – but that is not the point. Rather, the theory of the “end of history” means the following: By 1806 at the latest, history had shown that only a democratic republican form of government can be considered as legitimate. This concludes the long-running debate in political theory and settles the matter of sovereignty. (As to the question of republic vs. democracy: both are democracies, but a republic stresses the representative element with a separation of powers, a democracy the direct democracy element).
The question with regards to Fukuyama’s reworking of the theory of the “end of history” is nothing else but to ask whether the Hegelian thesis still holds true. I would argue that it does.
IV: Why a Democratic Republic Is the Only Legitimate System
Fukuyama’s point is not that all countries in the world from now on are true democracies, but that in essence all political systems by now need to claim to be democratic in order to be seen as legitimate. The victory of democracy is thus a discursive victory, not necessarily a factual one.
We see this shift most clearly with the idea of sovereignty. In Ancient Egypt, the Pharaoh was a living god. This may have inspired the Roman Principate, in which the Roman Emperor may not have been a god yet, but he would be a god in waiting – and there are quite a few emperors who were allowed to reach apotheosis (“becoming God”) after death, until Christianity became state religion. In Medieval Europe it was perfectly legitimate to claim that your rule was sanctioned by God – ideally mediated through the Church, where the Pope as the Vicar of Christ acted as God’s proxy. Modernity – which can be defined by the idea of secularization – replaced the idea of God as the supreme authority with the people. This does not necessarily come from an atheistic motivation but primarily from the insight that the ruler is only secure in their rule if those ruled by them agree to that rule (whether through consent or by force).
Again, in the Western tradition, this insight can be said to begin with the Magna Carta, in which the Lords made clear to King John Lackland that he has no power if they don’t agree – and thus, they can force him to concede certain rights to them, which eventually led to the ideas of constitutional monarchy, the Bill of Rights, parliamentary democracy, etc. However, every leader knows this already. It is a truism that should not be too difficult to understand. You may run around screaming “I’ve got the power,” but if nobody accepts this, you won’t have any power after all.
Autocratic systems nowadays tend to still claim to be democratic. This pretense is typically justified by a claim that the ruler is the true extension of their people and channels the will of the people through their actions. Sometimes, this is buffered through a political party that serves as the great unifier of the people. Both fascist and socialist/communist systems have used this idea. There are, of course, still a few outliers today that cling to the model of a divinely sanctioned monarchy, but even they will pretend to represent the will of the people. It simply is not easy anymore to claim that democracy is illegitimate. Thus we see across the globe a spectacle of pretend-elections, falsified elections or elections in name only to continually prove the point that you need to be seen to play the game of democracy in order to be accepted amongst the governments in the world. Populist leaders tend to pursue direct acclamation of the people, denigrating republican elements such as separation of powers and checks and balances as the “deep state.”
This behavior is the theoretical confirmation of the Hegelian/Fukuyaman thesis, but there is another one which we are witnessing right now.
Non-democratic governments simply do not work very well, even though they pretend they do, and in spite of many people believing they do.
How can I say this? Are there not plenty of examples where autocratic regimes can set up infrastructure much faster, guide development, and can seemingly be very effective at top-down activity? Surely, but that is almost always a mirage: Such developments and investments are typically faster than in democratic countries because there is less attention paid to the interests of both people and the environment. (The same, sadly, applies to businesses and governments from democratic countries operating within autocratic countries – they can be just as dismissive of ethical concerns and behave in a way that would never be tolerated in their home countries. Examples: Shell in Nigeria, Volkswagen in Xinjiang Province, etc.).
But without key democratic components, autocratic regimes cannot work very well in the long term. Here, a democratic republic is clearly the superior system.
Let us revisit what actually qualifies as a republican or liberal democracy:
- Belief in individual rights (freedom of speech, life, liberty, property, free press, freedom of religion, assembly, etc.) which translates to
- Belief in the sovereignty of the people, which translates to
- A mechanism to regularly elect political leaders and leaders of political institutions freely and fairly, who are subject to a
- Separation of powers (legislative, executive and judicative), with additional rules of
- Checks and balances, in order to
- Protect the rights of political minorities, in order to
- Prevent the dismantling of democracy itself.
What is the purpose of all these different aspects? Just to point out a few:
- Rights: Protection of the true sovereign, of human rights and a functioning public sphere – which allows the sovereign to protect the stability of the state. If their rights and their property are secure, this helps to prevent revolutions.
- Sovereignty of the People: This belief prevents egomaniacs, autocrats and oligarchs from taking power and subverting the state.
- Elections: This creates consensus for a specific time, allows for a “pressure valve” to deal with discontent in a civil manner, and solves the problem of succession.
- Separation of Powers: secures the independence of the justice system, safeguards parliament and creates a functioning government.
- Checks and balances: Holding institutions and leaders accountable for their actions.
- Minority protections: Working against establishing the “tyranny of the majority.”
- Prevent dismantling of democracy: Creating stability.
You can see that in all these in-built protections, creating several levels of legitimacy is key to a democratic republic. The protections of rights, securing free and fair elections, holding state institutions accountable, preventing the tyranny of the majority, and creating stability all help to enhance the legitimacy of the system, in the quite literal sense of legal clarity and legality.
Thus we can see that republican democracy is not an ideological position but a practical solution for real-life political problems.
V: Revolution and Succession
If the legitimacy of a system is in doubt, revolution may occur. This problem arises typically if the powerful ruling group prevents access to power for the next powerful group (the contenders). The contenders will do everything they can to improve their status. The reaction of an autocratic state is typically to prevent this group from organizing in the first place.
This is where private property, free speech, and all the other civil liberties come into play: if they are granted, there will always be new people or groups of people who – through their rising up in the economic spectrum – will want to seek political representation.
In a democracy, this is encouraged, whereas in a dictatorship, it would be suppressed. Now we enter the land of Catch-22: If a dictatorship allows for these rights, it will cease to be a dictatorship for long, as the demand for more freedoms and participation will subvert the dictatorial system and lead to democracy. If it suppresses these rights, unrest may be possible, but even worse, the full economic and intellectual and artistic potential of the population will never be available to benefit the state.
Dictatorships, by necessity, will be the most corrupt systems, riddled with paranoia, lack of productivity, theft and constant subversion. You may crack down on subversion, but the other problems will stay. Eventually, dictatorial or autocratic systems will either decline or be swept away by revolution.
Finally, the primary problem in politics is the problem of succession. You may believe that the best system is one in which a nice, competent, wise and benevolent ruler oversees the fates of the land. Such a “philosopher king” might indeed be preferable to some of our democratically elected leaders. But every rule comes to an end. How can we guarantee that the next ruler will be just as perfect? We can’t, and countless examples from history have shown this. After Augustus and Tiberius, we saw Caligula and Nero; after Marcus Aurelius, Commodus; etc. You may think of more recent examples yourself – I don’t want to complicate things with politics.
Long-term rulers also tend to suffer from the phenomenon called the madness of Caesars: Used to absolute power for too long, they tend to become out of touch with the people – and with their own original ideals and principles.
Democratic systems may not yield perfect rulers, but they don’t have to. In a democratic republic, such rulers are bound and checked by the system, by the law, and finally, by the people themselves – so that when the “good king” dies or gets voted out of office, we do not need to fear a civil war or war of succession as we would have to after the ends of the likes of Saddam Hussein or Muammar Qaddafi.
In conclusion, or rather, in the spirit of coming to a tentative end, I am open to the idea that there could be something better out there than a democratic republic as a political system. Yet given that we have not yet seen anything better having emerged, and all alternatives past and current being worse, I tend to want to continue to insist that Fukuyama has indeed been correct after all.
Erratic Attempts 