Lecture 12a:Beyond bipolarity:

the “End of History” and the “Clash of Civilisations”

“The End of History?”

Francis Fukuyama published his article, “The end of history?”, in the journal National Interest in the summer of 1989

He expanded his ideas in the book The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992

The context of the “End of History”

• When Fukuyama wrote his article in 1989, the Cold War was close to finishing

• Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had started to soften the USSR’s Marxist-Leninist ideology

1989

• During that year, the Soviet Union allowed its satellite countries in Eastern Europe to break away

• October 1989 saw the opening of the Berlin Wall, for 28 years a symbol of the Cold War

New democracies

• Most of the former Soviet satellites became parliamentary democracies, with anti-Soviet heroes, like Vaclav Havel in Czechoslovakia and Lech Walesa in Poland, becoming the new leaders

The end of the Soviet Union

• The Cold War ended definitively in December 1991, when the Soviet Union was dissolved by its own leaders

• Millions welcomed the passing of the Soviet Union and its Marxist ideology

“The End of History?”• Fukuyama claimed that the end

of Marxism-Leninism in the USSR meant the end of a serious ideological challenge to Western values – this challenge had been central to the Cold War

• Marxism had once claimed it would be the logical culmination of history; Fukuyama argued that Marxism had clearly failed, and instead proclaimed the victory of Western liberal values

“The End of History?” (2)• Fukuyama claimed that

alternatives to democracy were either discredited or too weak to pose a serious challenge to Western values in the long term

• Democracy had proved to be a more efficient system, and would become more common in the future

“The End of History?” (3)

• Fukuyama acknowledged that future wars and conflicts were possible, but claimed that with the absence of serious alternatives, Western values would eventually become accepted as universal

Critics of Fukuyama• Many disagreed with Fukuyama’s claim that

Western values would become universal• Those outside the West resented the claim that

Western values had proved superior• Marxists, who once claimed that their ideology lay

at the “end of history”, resented the argument that their vision of the future was not a credible alternative

• Others, notably Huntingdon, did not share Fukuyama’s optimism about a future without major conflicts

“The Clash of Civilisations”

• Samuel Huntingdon expressed his ideas about the Clash of Civilisations at a lecture in 1992. He published an article in 1993 and expanded his ideas into a book in 1996

“The Clash of Civilisations”:the context

• Millions of people greeted the end of the Cold War with jubilation, but the end of the world of the Cold War meant the unfreezing of many ethnic conflicts that had been dormant for many years

Nagorno-Karabakh

• Ethnic rivalries between the former Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan, suppressed in Soviet times, erupted into full-scale fighting in 1992

• Relatively few died, but hundreds of thousands became refugees

Georgia and Abkhazia

• In 1992-93, Abkhazian separatists fought a war to break away from Georgia, which had become independent after the break-up of the Soviet Union

The break-up of Yugoslavia

• The break-up of Yugoslavia was the worst of the conflicts that followed the end of the Cold War. Serbian attempts to limit the territory lost to Croatia and Bosnia led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands

Huntingdon’s pessimism

• Huntingdon’s did not share Fukuyama’s optimism after the end of the Cold War

• He observed the bloody conflicts caused by ancient rivalries

• Rather than looking forward to an optimistic future, he worried that the problems of the past would return as the problems of the future

• Above all, he questioned Fukuyama’s claim that modernisation meant Westernisation

The “civilisations” (1)

• Huntingdon believed that the conflicts of the future would be cultural, rather than political or economic

• These conflicts were likely to take place between what he described as “civilisations”, and identified eight main civilisations in the modern world

The “civilisations” (2)

Islam and the West

• Huntingdon claimed the most likely conflict would be between the Christian West and the Islamic world

• He said this was because:• Islam and Christianity had been engaged in a

cultural war since the Crusades• After the end of the colonial era, Arab

nationalism and fundamentalism had risen• Islam is antithetical to democracy and Western

values

Huntingdon and Western values

• Unlike Fukuyama, Huntingdon did not believe that Western values were universal, and felt it was dangerous for the West to believe that other civilisations would accept them

• Huntingdon stressed that any attempt to spread Western values would provoke resistance, and urged the West to stay out of conflicts involving non-Western civilisations

Huntingdon vindicated?

• Some claim that the rise of Islamist groups and al-Qaeda, responsible for the 2001 attacks on the United States, shows that Huntingdon was right to warn of a future clash between the West and the Islamic world

• Others have refused to accept this

Critics of Huntingdon: Edward Said

• Edward Said, the Palestinian-American cultural critic, mocked Huntingdon’s idea of conflict between Islam and the West as suggesting a “cartoonlike world where Popeye and Pluto bash each other mercilessly”, and dismissed his civilisations as meaningless labels

Critics of Huntingdon:Fred Halliday

• Fred Halliday, a renowned expert in Middle Eastern affairs, criticised Huntington’s realist assumption that states conflict because the world is anarchical

• He also dismissed the claim that culture or civilisation is a major factor in international relations

Halliday on Huntingdon

• Halliday stressed that few wars in the past were fought over culture

• He also stressed that the Islamic countries may share a degree of pan-Islamic solidarity, but this is not the determining factor in their policy

• Halliday claims Huntingdon “has thrown fat into a fire that was to some extent already there, and just allowed it to burn”, and notes that Huntington’s thesis “is very popular with Islamists, as it is with Hindu nationalists and radical Shintoists in Japan”

Islam: diversity or monolith?

Sunni and Shia