‘History Is Over’ Is Only a Siren Song of Retreat and Disengagement

Intellectual fashion in the United States does not lead but follows. When the political class takes up an idea it is because the idea responds to a need. It articulates or rationalizes what people feel or want to believe. This was the case with Paul Kennedy’s argument last year about the decline of empires. It is why Francis Fukuyama’s contention that “history is over” has provoked such a reaction. Mr. Fukuyama, like Kennedy, is telling people something they want to hear.

Fukuyama, a State Department planner formerly with the RAND Corp., says--to state it very briefly--that liberal democracy has won the great battle of ideologies and political institutions, defeating, with a flourish, both fascism and Marxism. There no longer is any challenge to liberal democracy or market capitalism. Hence history--meaning ideological struggle in history--has come to an end.

We are left with the boring tasks of tending the machinery of democracy, adjusting the system--fine-tuning. Fukuyama suggests that centuries of boredom lie ahead. He concedes that he already feels nostalgia for a time when history still existed, the cold war had to be fought, giants struggled. Great tasks made great men. His is an engaging argument, an amusing one, a brilliant one, but Fukuyama’s boredom is unlikely to last as long as he pretends to think. Marxism may be failing, but human perversity and ingenuity are not.

Kennedy said that empires overextend themselves, impoverishing themselves to support their military commitments, and end up in decline. His examples were Spain and Britain, and his conclusion was that something like this is happening to the United States. He made it seem that every empire eventually declines, neglecting the cases of nations that refused to accept decline, battled back, and came back.

Obvious examples in recent years are Japan, Germany, and France, which had reasons as good as Britain’s to resign themselves to the notion that “history” was over for them, after losing terrible wars and being driven out of their conquests or empires. They refused to do so.

Why have these two arguments found such a response in the United States? The last big politico-historical ideas to get this kind of attention were George Kennan’s “containment” argument about the nature of Stalinist Russia and what to do about it, and Arnold Toynbee’s theory of historical challenge and response. Both of those were in the 1940s.

An abridgement of the first six volumes of Toynbee’s “Study of History” was a U.S. best-seller in 1947. Toynbee found himself on the cover of Time Magazine. Kennan’s first public statement of containment was in a Foreign Affairs Quarterly article (signed “X”) that same year.

The reason both men commanded such attention was that explicitly, or implicitly (in the Toynbee case), they told Americans how they should handle the huge new problem of confrontation with the Soviet Union. People were only beginning to grasp that while Hitler’s war was over, another struggle had begun. They were alarmed, confused and challenged. A part of the public--a majority of the Republican Party--wanted to pull back again into America’s own frontiers. The Republicans’ leader, Sen. Robert Taft, was to oppose NATO a few months later as an open-ended foreign entanglement.

Kennan provided, in urgent, eloquent language, a description and interpretation of the Soviet challenge, and a program for what the United States should do about it. Toynbee’s great work offered a scheme of civilization’s advance that allowed Americans to see their own “response” to the “challenge” of communism as not only a test of national will but a step in civilization’s advance. Great nations met great challenges, and overcame them, moving to a higher plane.

The two men provided Americans with an explanation and rationale for international engagement. Fukuyama and Kennedy’s ideas are popular today, it seems to me, because they provide a rationale for disengagement--for a certain retreat from international responsibility and qualified return to the isolationism abandoned in 1947-48. Fukuyama is telling us that we are safe to do this. History is over. We can relax and get on with our private lives. Kennedy seems to tell us that even if things go badly in many parts of American society, and Japan and Western Europe seemed to be overtaking the United States, or pushing ahead of it in important ways, that is all right too, because it happens to everybody. The appeal of the two messages is obvious. Their danger lies in the fact that neither is true. History is not over. No universal law dictates a nation’s decline. Nations decline when people lose the will to go on--when they quit. That seems to me what this is all about. The message people are taking from Fukuyama and Kennedy is that Americans can quit without guilt.