All professions have their private jokes. Among political scientists, “Francis Fukuyama” and “The End of History” is one of them. Whenever you put these two sentences together, there is always understanding laughter and the fatal sentence: “The story ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall and then came 9/11.” The laughter gets louder.
I am clueless: I have participated in the debauchery several times. But between us, the parody is based on a misunderstanding: Fukuyama didn’t say that the story ends with the end of the Cold War. He merely stated that the liberaldemocratic model was superior to all others. And it isn’t?
I don’t discuss abstractions. I discuss migrations. Liberal democracies have their competitors in Cuba, Russia, Turkey, China. But I don’t see many people wanting to emigrate there.
On the contrary: Desire is the opposite. Run away from there and come here. Is some part of humanity seriously wrong?
If you listen to our left and right extremists, there is nothing of value in these parts. Liberalism is a fraud: it creates inequality, moral relativism, and only masks relationships of submission and power where elites rule the people (rightwing version) or where reactionary people slow down progress (leftwing version). Time to abandon ship?
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The aggrieved Francis Fukuyama advises a little more calmly in his most recent book: “Liberalism and its Discontents”. It is one of Fukuyama’s best books.
Let’s start with the basics: Liberalism is a political doctrine that arose in the second half of the 17th century with a worthy ambition to limit government power and protect the rights of individuals.
But before it becomes a doctrine, it is also a discovery: individuals are not defined by the group they belong to, but by the autonomy they are able to make their decisions and live their lives.
It is a noble thought, not always respected throughout history, but realized with great difficulty in defending tolerance in the face of diversity, protecting the market economy and fighting for equal rights for all.
Coincidentally, over the past halfcentury, both right and left have radicalized the notion of autonomy—thus distorting the virtues of liberalism.
For Fukuyama, the neoliberal right places the market above any other social value while demonizing the role of the state.
This fanaticism paid off with inequality, massive unemployment in the traditional industries of the West and, of course, devastating financial crises that opened the door to the populism of the moment.
The identity left has also committed itself to a reinterpretation of “identity politics”. Originally, the idea was to complete liberalism by integrating marginalized groups into the same social contract. The struggle for civil rights in the United States is one of the best examples.
However, the author writes that the radicalization of the concept of autonomy by a section of the left had two seemingly contradictory effects: on the one hand, it led to individuals looking for their authentic existence, detached from social ties; On the other hand, it led the same people to conclude that the bonds were stronger than the essence promised and never found.
The universalistic dimension of liberalism, in which we all have the same rights and duties, gave way to a new tribalization of society in which groups, rather than individuals, reject the basic assumptions of the liberal model.
That’s how we are, says Fukuyama. The right and the left reject liberalism for its supposed economic and social pathologies, without understanding that the greatest pathology of all is the drastic way in which liberalism has been applied.
This conceptual confusion produces its monsters: on the right, a nationalism that seems imported from the 19th century, as if it were possible to go back in time and restore moral, ethnic, or religious uniformity.
On the left, the same reactionary attitude that seeks to lock individuals into static, essentialist, and premodern identities.
In both cases the same censoring and paranoid instincts. Who will save us from this madhouse? Reading Fukuyama is a saving principle: the diagnosis of the problem already contains the outline of a therapy. In other words, defending liberal democracies means not throwing the baby out with the bath water. Liberalism is not to be confused with the abuses committed in its name.
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