the United Kingdom or Marine Le Pen in France. In the light of these events, Fukuyama’ s end of history appears as naïve as the presupposed end of all warfare in 1918.
In Fukuyama’ s defence, the original Hegelian idea of an end of history does not literally mean that the whole world will immediately embrace a single political system without any exceptions. Reducing it to this interpretation would be as fatal as reducing it to the end of historical events, as some might wrongly do. However, both of these understandings are flawed – the end of history is, in Fukuyama’ s own words,‘ the end point of mankind’ s ideological evolution’, the moment when one system proves to be the victor of history, being universally applicable and therefore an ultimate end to political and economic development of any country. From this perspective, the thesis can be true even if there are exceptions to it, because some countries simply might not have yet reached the final stage of development, or possess some specific characteristics that distinguish them from the rest of the world.
A frequent critic of Francis Fukuyama’ s theory was the late President of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez. He considered his own political ideology, Chavismo, a rival to the ideas of liberal democracy, believing that he had created a new and alternative political system for the 21 st century, a next step in the ideological evolution which Fukuyama considered ended. Using the language of Hegel’ s dialectic, Chávez believed Chavismo represented the compromise, Hegelian synthesis or concrete between the abstract( thesis) and negative( antithesis), extreme outbursts of liberal democracy on one side, and‘ old’ 20 th century socialism on the other. But this idea of the‘ postmodern left’ did not fulfil the most basic criterion of the end of history – universal applicability. In Francis Fukuyama’ s own words, it was nothing but‘ oil, oil, and oil’ that allowed Chavismo to survive. In his 2006 essay, he further predicted that‘ the postmodern authoritarianism of Chávez’ s Venezuela is durable only while oil prices remain high’, expecting the regime to inevitably collapse in the near future. And indeed, ten years later, this is just what we are witnessing. As oil prices fell rapidly in the past two years, the Venezuelan government under the new President Nicolás Maduro was unable to provide even the most essential goods for its citizens, leading to mass demands for a reform of the constitution: reforms that would lead the country to become a free-market, liberal democracy. The example of Venezuela is not a unique one, but it serves well to illustrate why certain models of government, even though they might be temporarily successful under certain conditions, cannot be used as a counterargument to Francis Fukuyama’ s thesis about the dominance of liberal democracy.
‘ Democracy’ s only real competitor in the realm of ideas today is radical Islamism’ wrote Francis Fukuyama in 2008, referring to the cases of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’ s Iran and Osama bin Laden’ s Al Qaeda, sources of the fundamentalism that was quickly spreading around the Middle East by that time. As he himself admitted, the war in Iraq and the country’ s later development had a great influence on him, making him reassess many of his political views. But even though Fukuyama was doubtful when encountering the question of Islam, it does not necessarily possess a danger to the liberal democracy. In the words of Israeli historian Yuval Harari,‘ God is dead – it just takes a while to get rid of the body.’ Affirming Nietzsche’ s thesis, he argues that there is no future for fundamental ideologies that are based on an orthodox belief in God, as these have detached themselves from the development of society and technological progress. In other words, radical Islam has nothing relevant to say about the problems, dangers and opportunities of the 21 st century. Not only is it unable to answer the necessary questions of ethics in the field of biomedicine or computer science, it even lacks the potential to understand them. The Kafkaesque images of Islamic clerics refereeing a football match using sharia law in the Syrian strongholds of the Islamic State are a simple but strong example of the absurdity of such an ideology. Radical Islamism might be an appealing‘ anchor of certainty’ to some, but has nothing to offer globally as it fails to provide answers and guide people through the unprecedentedly quickly developing and changing world of scientific and technological progress.
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