Hussein Has Not Revived History

Toward the end of his life, the French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau descended into a state of unhappy paranoia, believing that there was an international conspiracy to defame him and to deliberately distort his ideas.

I sometimes feel a little bit like Rousseau. Since the publication of my article, “The End of History?” I have become associated with the view that nothing further will happen in world politics, that we are entering an age of permanent, self-regulating peace and that life will henceforth be extremely boring. Every major world event, from the fall of the Berlin Wall to Iraq’s recent invasion of Kuwait, has consequently become the occasion for some commentator to say that I have been proved wrong and that history is not over.

My definition of history can best be understood as the history of ideas, particularly about the just organization of our social and political life. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the throwing over of communism by the people of Eastern Europe just confirm my view that liberal democracy is the only legitimate ideology left in the world. Iraq’s challenge is not that of a higher idea: It simply reflects the age-old impulse of grabbing someone else’s land and money.

In the past generation, there have been two developments of truly world historical significance: the emergence of liberal democracy as the only universalistic ideology left in the world; and the victory of market principles of economic organization. These two revolutions are closely connected with each other, and represent a larger, secular pattern of evolution.

The worldwide democratic revolution is a phenomenon much broader than the reform movements in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Democracy has made headway in virtually everywhere.

We will plainly see more setbacks in democracy in the future, perhaps in countries like the Philippines or Peru, whose democratic governments are laboring under seemingly insuperable obstacles. But setbacks in themselves do not change the remarkable fact that liberal democracy is the only broadly accepted source of legitimacy in the world today.

No less remarkable has been the parallel revolution in economics. This is directly attributable to the spectacular growth of East Asia since World War II. This growth demonstrates that latecomers to the process of economic development are in no way disadvantaged and, in fact, can achieve the highest levels of technology and consumption, provided they remain connected to world markets and permit free competition at home.

The East Asian experience completely debunks leftist views like dependencia theory in Latin America, which blame the Third World’s failure to grow on the international capitalist system. Indeed, there is a broad recognition taking root in Latin America that this region’s economic problems do not stem from capitalism but rather from the lack of capitalism there.

There is now a unique conjunction of leaders in Latin America--President Carlos Saul Menem in Argentina, President Fernando Collor de Mello in Brazil and President Carlos Salinas de Gortari in Mexico--all of whom have committed themselves to free-market principles and have begun the task of freeing their economies from the legacy of statism and protectionism.

The liberal democratic revolution and the capitalist revolution are related to one another, and are part of a much longer-term pattern of historical evolution. There is a very tight relationship between liberal democracy and advanced industrialization, with the former following the latter inexorably.

The dominant view among foreign policy professionals, in Washington and in Europe, is one that goes under the label of “realism,” “ Realpolitik “ or “power politics.” “Realism” maintains that conflict and competition are inherent in international politics, due to the anarchic character of the state system. Insecurity, fear and aggression are therefore universal to all nation-states, regardless of their ideology or domestic form of government. The only way out of the security dilemma created by the international system is maintenance of a balance of power, meaning a balance of military power.

For most of this century, realism has been a good guide to foreign policy because the world behaved according to realist premises. This was due to the existence of serious ideological cleavages among great powers.

But realism is becoming increasingly less useful as a guide in many parts of the world. We cannot evade questions of democracy and human rights, and treat nations as if they were identical billiard balls in a game of global snooker. In the first place, there is a very close connection between power and legitimacy.

In the past few decades, the world’s peace has been disturbed by authoritarian states that looked impregnable right up until they collapsed from internal decay. But soldiers won’t drive tanks or fly planes if they don’t believe in the basic legitimacy of what they are doing.

Ideology affects foreign policy in a second way, because of the remarkable tendency for liberal democracies not to fight one another. The political scientist Michael Doyle has pointed out that in the 200 or so years that modern liberal democracies have existed, there is not one single instance of one liberal democracy fighting another.

The reasons for this were given by Immanuel Kant in his essay, “Perpetual Peace”: liberal states are infected with a certain bourgeois and commercial spirit to which war is quite foreign. We might add that democratic principles of popular sovereignty make it very difficult for one liberal state to attack another whose government it regards as legitimate.

This is not to say that liberal democracies cannot fight non-liberal democracies, or that undemocratic states can’t fight each other. The liberal democratic United States and the liberal democratic United Kingdom are in the process of piling up a mighty military machine in Saudi Arabia to confront Iraq, trying in effect to oust a bunch of 16th-Century Italian condottieri in order to protect the domains of a 14th-Century ecclesiastical family.

But this, in a way, just proves my point: Had Iraq and Kuwait both been modern societies with modern democratic institutions, the original invasion would most likely never have occurred.

Among developed democracies, the nature of great-power status has been changing slowly and imperceptibly since 1945. Great-power status is increasingly defined in economic terms rather than by the traditional power politics. In this world, the ability to remain competitive, to handle trade and budget deficits, to grow and innovate are more important than the ability to move divisions around the world.

The changes in world politics suggest two broad policy conclusions for the post-Cold War world. The older, established and prosperous democracies will have a continuing interest in the promotion of new democracies and of liberal human rights around the world, even after the disappearance of the military threat posed by the old Soviet Union. A world with more democracies will be more peaceful and prosperous than one with fewer. This is an important conclusion for the United States, where isolationist voices urging a very narrow view of the national interest have been heard for the first time since before World War II.

The second is that we have to get used to a world bifurcated not along East-West lines, but into what I have called a post-historical and a historical part. Each part will play by a completely different set of rules: economics will dominate the former, traditional measures of military power will reign in the latter.

These two worlds will come into collision along several points: oil is one, terrorism is another and the third is refugees. Indeed, the movement of large populations fleeing countries that are poor to ones that are rich and secure will constitute one of the chief forms of global interdependence in the years to come.

Post-historical countries like the United States and Britian will continue to have to play power politics when dealing with a region like the Middle East, many of whose states have only recently been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 16th Century.

The current gulf crisis was greeted in Washington with a certain sense of relief, not because someone had a good idea about how to extract Iraq from Kuwait, but because it seemed to restore at a stroke the old world of geopolitics.

We must keep in mind, however, that, despite our nostalgia trip into the world of geopolitics, the old world of competitive great powers has not been restored. But in the future, international effectiveness will depend increasingly on domestic politics, on the strength of a nation’s domestic base and its ability to create decent and prosperous lives for its citizens under the twin principles of liberty and equality. Doing this ourselves and helping other aspiring liberal democrats to achieve this as well, will be the task of the future.