international and global communication cm2001 | ibcom ba year II - term I (2020-2021) [by gycc]
INTERNATIONAL AND GLOBAL COMMUNICATION
(summary + reading notes)
compulsory literature;
multiple articles by multiple authors
WEEK ONE | 07.09.2020
The End of History? - Francis Fukuyama, 1989
Introduction
The author thinks that the end of the Cold War is not just a passing of a particular incident in history
but the end of history itself. He thinks that it is the end point of man’s ideological evolution and where
it was decided that the Western ideology of liberal democracy has to be implemented universally and
that it is the ideal form of human government.
PART I
The notion of the end of history is not a new one and its most well-known promoter was Karl Marx
who believed that the direction in which the human race developed was dictated by material forces
and if the work reached the “communist utopia” then all the conflicts in the world would be resolved.
Karl Marx’s ideas were actually borrowed from his predecessor, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.
Hegel was the first philosopher to speak the language of modern social science, where it carries the
belief that man is the product of his historical and social environment and not as a result of his
‘natural’ attributes, as philosophers before him believed in. The transformation of man’s environment
through the application of science and technology was not originally a Marxist concept but a Hegelian
one. There were many interpreters of Hegel’s work, one of whom was Alexandre Kojeve.
Kojeve sought to resurrect the idea of Hegel’s that claimed that history ended in 1806. Kojeve insisted
that Hegel was correct and that the end of history was marked with the Battle of Jena, the vanguard of
humanity that concreted the principles of the French Revolution. There was much more work to be
done after 1806, such as abolishing slavery, women’s rights, racial equality. But the principles of the
liberal democratic state could not be improved any further. The state that comes out at the end of
history is a one that is liberal in the sense that it protects people’s universal right to freedom and
democratic in the sense that it exists with the consent of the governed. In the universal homogeneous
state, all previous contradictions are resolved and all of human needs are met. There should be no
large conflicts and what should remain is economic activity.
PART II
According to Hegel the contradictions exist first of all on the level of human consciousness, in the
form of ideas. Ideas here mean large ideas that unify a view of the world and how it should run.
These ideologies are not restricted to politics but can also include culture, religion and other complex
social values. Hegel did not believe that the real world could ever conform to the ideological world of
philosophers in a simple-minded way. He distinguished the ‘material’ world from that of the
world of ideologies. For example, Hegel himself could not work temporarily due to the Battle of
Jena, here we can say that the bullet from the material world stopped Hegel’s writing but the hand that
pulled that trigger was motivated by the ideas of liberty and equality. To Hegel, all human activity and
behaviour in the material world is rooted in a state of consciousness. This is an idea similar to the one
expressed by John Maynard Keynes, where he said that people’s point of view usually derives from
the ideologies of the academics and economists of the earlier generations. This consciousness again
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, international and global communication cm2001 | ibcom ba year II - term I (2020-2021) [by gycc]
does not necessarily take the form of a political doctrine but may also come in the shape of religion or
simple cultural values. These consciousnesses can take the form of many things such as simple
cultural or moral habits but in the long run it becomes a part of the material world.
The author thinks that the problem with Marx’s ideology was that he explained historical phenomena
through materialist or utilitarian explanations. HE did not believe in the autonomous power of ideas.
Such as how a highly productive society may choose to spend its national revenue on military and
weapons instead of producing consumer goods is that society’s political priority which is determined
in the realm of consciousness.
Now, moving on to Max Weber’s work whose main aim was to prove that Marx was wrong and that
the material world was not the ‘base’ but more so a ‘superstructure’ that has its roots in religion and
culture. He believed that to understand modern capitalism we have to look into its history and the
ideological evolution that led to it. To have a well performing capitalist country there must be a free
market and stable political system - that is one explanation for it. However, when you look at middle
eastern countries, they have many trade restrictions to prohibitions from Islam and other deeply
ingrained moral values, so there must be some other explanation for their economic success.
Fukuyama says that nobody addresses how economic behavior is often rooted from cultural beliefs.
He claims that the failure to understand that the roots of economic behaviour lies in the realm of
consciousness and culture leads to the mistake of attributing material causes to phenomena instead of
idealistic ones, which they most likely are.
Understanding the processes of history requires one to understand the developments in man’s realm of
consciousness which will ultimately rebuild the material world. To say that history ended in 1806
means that mankind’s ideological evolution ended in the ideals that were brought forth by the
French and American Revolutions. Fukuyama thinks that Hegel’s ideas are quite radical, but it
sheds light on the perspective that the problems we face in the material world often is from the
idealistic realm and we have to look for explanations for such things through an idealistic approach as
opposed to a material one.
PART III
Fukuyama says that our job isn’t to look into every single ideology and its challenges brought on by
every person on this planet but to pay close attention to the most important ones. The ones that move
society and politics and therefore play a role in creating world history. We are interested, according to
him, in the common heritage of all of mankind’s ideologies.
Fascism was destroyed as an ideology following the destruction of Nazis. While this is true on a
material level - the Nazis losing the war, the idea pushed by them was destroyed as well. Fukuyama
also claims that the class conflict no longer exists in the West (big lol what). The egalitarian society
of America apparently represents that society that Karl Marx predicted (wth is he talking about...they
have the highest number of homeless people in the West). He doesn’t claim that there are no longer
poor people in the USA, but the root cause of income inequality does not have to do with legal and
social structure of the society and that it remains fundamentally egalitarian (are u kidding me…)
With the success of conservative electoral parties in countries such as Germany, Britain, United States
and Japan, who are pro market and anti-statist, the “intellectual climate” and their members do not
believe that the bourgeois society is something that needs to be overcome. Fukuyama says that the
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, international and global communication cm2001 | ibcom ba year II - term I (2020-2021) [by gycc]
ones who believe in more socialist ideologies are the older generations living in the society and are
quite marginal to the larger political discourse.
Some very remarkable changes have occurred in Asia where the ideologies of the West all come in to
form a battleground. The first ever alternative to liberalism that was found in Asia was Imperial
Japan’s fascist one which was destroyed by the USA. The US then imposed a liberal democracy on
Japan, one that consisted of Western capitalism and political liberalism. Japan then followed the
footsteps of the USA and created a consumer culture in their own country with universally
homogenous brands such as Sony, Hitachi and JVC. According to Fukuyama, Japan played an
important part in bringing economic liberalism into Asia and spreading it. What is important to note
however, is that in Asia economic liberalism is spreading more quickly than political liberalism.
Similarly, South Korea has developed into a modern country with a well-educated middle class that
cannot be isolated from the larger democratic trends around them. But the most impressive of
liberalism’s achievements is China. In China, the role of the state in agriculture was reduced to that of
a tax collector and production of consumer goods was increased (this sounds more like financial
benefits than liberal dude). China still cannot be described as a liberal state by any means as it still
continues to be ruled by a self-appointed communist party and only about 20 percent of its economy is
a free market.
So, what are the challenges to a liberal society if communism and fascism no longer are? Fukuyama
says that it’s religion and nationalism. Religion does not like the impersonality and lack of
spirituality offered by the liberal societies. Modern liberalism was built on the failures of weak
religiously based societies which could not supply a good life and neither peace nor stability.
“In the contemporary world only Islam has offered a theocratic state as a political alter
native to both liberalism and communism. But the doctrine has little appeal for non-Muslims, and it is
hard to believe that the movement will take on any universal significance. Other less organized
religious impulses have been successfully satisfied within the sphere of personal life that is permitted
in liberal societies.”
The other problem is nationalism and other forms of racial and ethnic consciousness. The world
wars took place due to nationalism. However, Fukuyama claims that nationalism does not present a
threat to liberalism per se but only in its most extreme forms. A great deal of the world’s ethnic and
nationalist tension exists due to the unrepresentative political systems that they have not chosen. The
present world confirms that the fundamental principles of socio-political organisation has not changed
much since 1806.
PART IV
Fukuyama claims that the Third World will remain a terrain of conflict for many more years to come
(lol as if the First World countries don’t have any problems, ugh I hate this article so much). He
foresees that Russia and China are not likely to join the West anytime soon. So how will the world be
different? He says it won’t be that different since there is a high level of national interest and
competition and conflict between nations. According to one academically popular school of
international relations theory, conflict in here is in the international system as such, and to understand
the prospects for conflict one must look at the shape of the system — for example, whether it is
bipolar or multipolar — rather than at the specific character of the nations and regimes that constitute
it. This school in effect applies a Hobbesian view of politics to international relations and assumes
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