Word: fukuyama
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...summer issue of the neoconservative quarterly National Interest carries an article titled "The End of History?" After 16 densely argued pages, the hedging question mark is all but forgotten, by reader and author alike. History, in the view of Francis Fukuyama, was a Manichaean struggle between ! the forces of light and darkness. The bad guys -- first fascists, now Communists -- have lost, the good guys have triumphed. But if the fight is over, so is the fun. The remainder of life on earth, frets Fukuyama, may be a bit of a bore. If there are no more world-class evils...
...article has become a hot topic, partly because Fukuyama is deputy director of the State Department's in-house think tank, the policy-planning staff. His article is being studied for possible insights into the cerebral underpinnings of the Bush Administration. Forty-three years ago, the founding director of the policy-planning staff, George Kennan, wrote an article in another erudite quarterly, Foreign Affairs, on the need for the West to pursue a policy of "containment" against Soviet Communism. President Bush has spoken of moving "beyond containment." Fukuyama has gone his boss one better, proclaiming that we may be witnessing...
...credit, Fukuyama is grappling with important and difficult ideas. But his boldness misfires. To ruminate about "the end of history" in the present tense is the philosophical equivalent of that cheerful banality "Today is the first day of the rest of your life." Fukuyama is not really addressing the subject of history at all. He is looking through the wrong end of the telescope at current events, at a period barely twice his age (he is 36). Whether it is dead, dying or merely having a bad decade, Communism, in the sense that Fukuyama and almost everyone else thinks about...
...Fukuyama, like too many others in the Bush Administration, seems convinced that the reformist, liberalizing trends sweeping the Communist world are essentially irreversible, requiring little more than the applause of the West. Even if updated to take account of the massacre in Tiananmen Square and the Politburo warnings of a crackdown in the Baltics, Fukuyama's thesis will probably not persuade Lech Walesa that history has yet reached a happy ending in Poland...
Believing that the main event may be over, Fukuyama depicts whatever troubles lie ahead as little more than nuisances, devoid of ideological content and context, therefore lacking historical standing. That notion adds insult to the injuries of the masses starving in Africa and Asia, the basement dwellers of Beirut and the victims of narco-terror in Latin America. While the prospects for capitalism and democracy may look pretty good from Japan, Italy, Holland and France, where translations of Fukuyama's article will soon appear, they are less bright in places like Peru and Bangladesh -- and even Mexico and Israel...