[In the following review, Gray offers unfavorable assessment of The End of History and the Last Man.]

In his brilliant, ingenious, but nevertheless deeply unhistorical and ultimately absurd book, Francis Fukuyama argues that History—understood, in Hegelian-Marxist terms, to mean ideology—is over. With the collapse of Communism, there remains no legitimate alternative to liberal democracy, which is therefore the final form of human government. Wars and revolutions, tyrannies and dictatorships, may yet come and go, so that history understood as the events historians study will doubtless drag on; but History as the contestation over economic and political systems has come to an end. Only liberal democracy can satisfy the universal human need for self-recognition, or thymos—the Platonic virtue of spiritedness. Fukuyama acknowledges fundamentalism and nationalism to be powerful forces currently at large in the world; but he interprets them as reactive phenomena, responses to oppression or to over-rapid modernization, with little power of their own. We need not fear another century of global wars, as we creep nervously into the new millennium. We have more to fear, according to Fukuyama—following Nietzsche and perhaps Weber—from the boredom that flows from the rationalization of the world. It is Nietzsche's Last Men, not his blond beasts, that herald the mild and gentle Apocalypse to come.

Fukuyama is right that we are seeing the end of ideology—that is to say, of those secular religions, or political faiths, that we inherited from the Enlightenment and from its nineteenth-century followers, such as Marx. He does not notice, however, that the end of ideology encompasses the euthanasia of liberalism—that tottering political faith his book is devoted to propping up. The post-Soviet peoples have not shaken off one nineteenth-century ideology, Marxism, to adopt another, liberalism; none of them ever accepted the former, and few the latter. They have instead returned to their immemorial ethnic and cultural identities, national and religious, with all the ancient enmities they carry with them. The post-Communist peoples do not express their thymos by wishing to become producers and consumers in a global market, or rights-bearers in a universal liberal democracy; they express it by the demand for nationhood, as Armenians or Georgians, Lithuanians or Russians, and by the reassertion (as in the former Soviet Central Asia) of their traditional religious identities. For the post-Communist peoples, history has not ended. Instead, after decades of interruption, it has been resumed.

Our author—referred to in Japan, pointedly, as “the American writer Fukuyama”—is able to pass over these evident facts because, despite himself, he is propounding a secular theodicy, a directional and teleological interpretation of history—in which history's telos is, of course, us. The notion that human history has a goal or telos, and the related notion that it is possible to write a Universal History of Mankind, makes sense, if at all, only when based on religious suppositions, such as the Christian idea of Providence that animates Edmund Burke's whiggish interpretation of history. Yet religion is wholly absent from Fukuyama's thought, except as an inconvenient (and ephemeral) impediment to the global tranquilization he thinks is our fate. (The banal and insipid quality of the godlessness that pervades Fukuyama's book is in stark contrast with the atheism of one of his mentors, Nietzsche, which is—rightly—suffused with anguish and despair.) Fukuyama tells us that “liberalism vanquished religion in Europe”—a statement that will come as a surprise to the ordinary denizen of Belfast, but may be unsurprising coming from one who, in his lectures in Britain, referred to the English Civil War as a conflict between Protestants and Catholics. The idea that religious faith has been domesticated and privatized, and thereby nullified as a force in political life, may well have some plausibility in England today; but it is not true of contemporary Germany, say, and it is ludicrously false in respect of the United States, whose public and political life is pervaded by religious ideas and values.

The Mechanism (his term) that Fukuyama invokes to sustain the directionality of history is, in fact, a compound of two ideas: Hegel's morality tale of the dialectic of Master and Slave, as interpreted by Fukuyama's other mentor, and interpreter of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève; and what Fukuyama himself describes as “a kind of Marxist interpretation of history that leads to a completely non-Marxist conclusion”—namely, an economic interpretation of history that explains the growth of human productive powers by the development of scientific knowledge and its exploitation by human beings to satisfy their desires.

The trouble with this Mechanism of Fukuyama's is the trouble with Marxism—it is monocausal and overly deterministic. It is true that the Communist regimes fell partly because of the ruinous poverty they presided over, but it is also true, as the author himself admits, that they fell because their subject peoples perceived them as illegitimate, and their rulers had lost the will to rule by terror. The same point may be put in more general and more philosophical terms. While it is true that human history exhibits tendencies and perhaps even cycles, these are always subject to contingency, to the forces of chance and accident. (Would the Bolshevik regime have survived if the bullet fired at Lenin by his would-be assassin, Fanny Kaplan, had in fact killed him?) Cleopatra's nose is a better guide to history than Fukuyama's Mechanism.

Whatever slight plausibility the Mechanism might possess derives entirely from the truly fantastic abstractness of Fukuyama's account of recent history. Accordingly, in a table plainly designed to overwhelm the reader with a sense of the virtually irresistible charm of liberal democracy, we learn that among the 61 liberal democracies that existed in 1990 are Rumania and Japan, Bulgaria and Great Britain, Sri Lanka and Papua New Guinea—all listed as examples of a single form of government. It is hardly necessary to comment on the Monty Pythonish character of this categorization. Rumania certainly, and Bulgaria probably, remain ruled by manipulative Bolshevik cliques; Britain retains (so far) an adversarial parliamentary system, but Japan has single-party rule, and the most significant decisions are not taken in the political realm at all; and so on. Again, our author tells us that “Contemporary liberal democracies did not emerge out of the shadowy mists of tradition. Like Communist societies they were deliberately created by human beings at a definite point in time.” But the world's genuine liberal democracies have very different histories: democracy in England did “emerge out of the shadowy mists of tradition,” as it did in the Low Countries and perhaps also in Scandinavia. As at many other points, Fukuyama here implicitly deploys the United States as a paradigm, when it is in truth a limiting case.

It would be easy, but mistaken, to write of Fukuyama's treatise as an exercise in a genre as charmingly dated as heraldry or metaphysical history, and as practically irrelevant. This would be a grave error, since Fukuyama's Panglossian (or Pollyannaish) vision has undoubted appeal to some sectors of conservative opinion, and it has real and dangerous implications for policy. Consider his account of universal convergence on democratic capitalism. This implies that the “systems debate”—the debate about which economic and political institutions' are best for modern industrial societies—is over, when in fact one such debate has merely replaced another. The model of the socialist command economy has indeed been removed from the political and intellectual agenda, and a consensus reached on the indispensability of market institutions as vehicles for the self-reproduction of modern societies. The debate now is over which variety of market institution is to be adopted in the post-Communist states and in the developing world. Is the model of market institutions that of Anglo-American democratic capitalism, or is it that of German neo-corporatism, or East Asian dirigisme under authoritarian political auspices? If present trends are any guide, the new systemic debate is going against the model of democratic capitalism, with China opting for authoritarian development on the Japanese and South Korean models, and Russia oscillating uncertainly between a more or less Chilean model of capitalist development and the East Asian example. The Olympian abstraction of Fukuyama's account obscures this important debate.

Or consider the implications of Fukuyama's tranquilly apocalyptic vision for strategic and security policy. If fundamentalism is transitional and transitory and has no long-range political importance; if nationalism is fated to become a matter of private cultural preference, like tastes in ethnic cuisine; if we can expect a universal convergence on liberal democratic institutions, and these are inherently non-aggressive—if these premises are all granted, what need will the Western powers then have for national defense? If we are entering a world whose chief evil is boredom, it would seem not at all unreasonable to cut defense expenditure to the bone—as is, in fact, currently the trend, especially in the United States. All this assumes that the world after the unraveling of the postwar settlement will be a peaceful world, and it panders to the hopes and illusions of democracies, such as the United States, that lack strong martial traditions. Worse, Fukuyama's argument supports the groundless claim that modern states are by nature post-military societies in which national defense is unnecessary or optional. It is hard to think of a more perilous or debilitating idea.

A far truer, and much darker, picture of our likely future is given in the recent book Le nouveau monde de l'ordre de Yalta au chaos des nations (Paris: Gasset, 1992), by Pierre Lellouche, foreign-policy advisor to Jacques Chirac, leader of the Gaullist opposition in France. For Lellouche, the undoing of the postwar settlement inaugurates a desperately dangerous period for the world—a period in which the United States retreats as a global power and exhibits ever more of the traits of the Latin American states, in which the mirage of a federal superstate in Europe is dissipated by the re-emergence of immemorial national rivalries, and in which most of the post-Communist countries, including Russia, turn to forms of dictatorship and authoritarianism.

If this is so, the coming century looks to be, not the end of history, but a tragic epoch in which history is resumed along traditional lines, but on a far vaster scale—an epoch of Malthusian wars and religious and ethnic convulsions, of ecological catastrophes, forced migrations, and mass deaths overshadowing those of our century. It will be an epoch in which the uncontrolled proliferation of technologies of mass destruction shifts the balance of advantage of nuclear deterrence from the North to the anarchic South and in which (because of their economic success, and because neither of them is emulating the unilateral military self-emasculation of the Western powers) Japan and China are set to overturn the Occidental supremacy of the past few centuries. It is hard to avoid the suspicion that, with these great geopolitical changes afoot, and with the United States seemingly bent on repeating on a grander scale the historical experience of Argentina, but in a context in which the crumbling Leviathan of the Federal Government presides over a Hobbesian anarchy of warring ethnicities, Fukuyama's book will have to endure the mockery of fate, as we shuffle, exhausted and blinking, back onto the classical terrain, harsh but familiar, of history and human tragedy.