Conflict or Cooperation?
Three Visions Revisited
Article Summary and Author Biography
After the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, and John Mearsheimer each presented a bold vision of what the driving forces of world politics would be. The world in 2010 hardly seems on a more promising track -- a reminder that simple visions, however powerful, do not hold up as reliable predictors of particular developments.
RICHARD K. BETTS is Director of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University and an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. His latest book is Enemies of Intelligence.
"Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slave of some defunct economist," John Maynard Keynes once wrote. Politicians and pundits view the world through instincts and assumptions rooted in some philosopher's Big Idea. Some ideas are old and taken for granted throughout society. For most Americans, it is the ideas of the liberal tradition, from John Locke to Woodrow Wilson, that shape their thinking about foreign policy. The sacred concepts of freedom, individualism, and cooperation are so ingrained in U.S. political culture that most people assume them to be the natural order of things, universal values that people everywhere would embrace if given the chance.
In times of change, people wonder more consciously about how the world works. The hiatus between the Cold War and 9/11 was such a time; conventional wisdom begged to be reinvented. Nearly a century of titanic struggle over which ideology would be the model for organizing societies around the globe -- fascism, communism, or Western liberal democracy -- had left only the last one standing. After a worldwide contest of superpowers, the only conflicts left were local, numerous but minor. What would the driving forces of world politics be after the twentieth century, the century of total war?
Among the theorists who jumped into the market for models of the future, three stood out: Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, and John Mearsheimer. Each made a splash with a controversial article, then refined the argument in a book -- Fukuyama in The End of History and the Last Man, Huntington in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, and Mearsheimer in The Tragedy of Great Power Politics. Each presented a bold and sweeping vision that struck a chord with certain readers, and each was dismissed by others whose beliefs were offended or who jumped to conclusions about what they thought the arguments implied. (Reactions were extreme because most debate swirled around the bare-bones arguments in the initial articles rather than the full, refined versions in the later books. This essay aims to give the full versions of all three arguments their due.)
None of the three visions won out as the new conventional wisdom, although Fukuyama's rang truest when the Berlin Wall fell, Huntington's did so after 9/11, and Mearsheimer's may do so once China's power is full grown. Yet all three ideas remain beacons, because even practical policymakers who shun ivory-tower theories still tend to think roughly in terms of one of them, and no other visions have yet been offered that match their scope and depth. Each outlines a course toward peace and stability if statesmen make the right choices -- but none offers any confidence that the wrong choices will be avoided.
CONVERGENCE OR DIVERSITY?
Most optimistic was Fukuyama's vision of the final modern consensus on democracy and capitalism, the globalization of Western liberalism, and the "homogenization of all human societies," driven by technology and wealth. Some were put off by his presentation of a dense philosophical interpretation of Hegel and Nietzsche, but of the three visions, Fukuyama's still offered the one closest to mainstream American thinking. It resonated with other testaments to the promise of American leadership and Western norms, such as Joseph Nye's idea of soft power, G. John Ikenberry's global constitutionalism, and the democratic peace theory of Michael Doyle and others. And it went beyond the celebration of economic globalization exemplified by the works of pundits such as Thomas Friedman. Fukuyama's version was deeper, distinguished in a way that would ultimately qualify his optimism and make his forecast more compatible with Mearsheimer's and Huntington's. Fukuyama de-emphasized mainstream liberalism's focus on materialism and justice by stressing "the struggle for recognition," the spiritual quest for human dignity and equality (or sometimes for superiority), as a crucial ingredient in the transformation.
Understood properly, Fukuyama was nowhere near as naive as his critics assumed. He did not claim that history (in Hegel's sense of a progression of human relations from lordship and bondage to freedom, equality, and constitutional government) had fully ended; rather, he argued that it was in the process of ending, with the main obstacles overcome but loose ends still to be tied up. His main point was that "liberal democracy remains the only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions and cultures across the globe," but he recognized that illiberal politics and conflict would persist for some time in the developing world, which remains "stuck in history."
Fukuyama likened the process of history to a strung-out wagon train, in which some wagons get temporarily stopped, damaged, or diverted but eventually arrive at the same destination. With no more fundamental disagreements about how societies should be organized, there would be nothing important to fight about. Fukuyama's original essay in The National Interest in 1989 was quite ahead of its time, written before Mikhail Gorbachev ended the Cold War. Even many who mistakenly saw the message as simplistic assumed that the collapse of communism left Western values as the wave of the future, and catastrophic war a relic of the past.
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