How the Neocons Misread History

The apostate neoconservative writer and intellectual Francis Fukuyama has a piece on the Open Democracy Web site about his 1992 influential  book The End of History and the Last Man – often mentioned as the neocon manifesto – where he makes the claim that it was misunderstood by many as a triumphalist brief for American hegemony over the rest of the world.  Nothing could be further from the truth, Fukuyama now says. In fact, the end of history is best manifested in the European Project.  And Germany (!) is its most perfect realization:

Anyone familiar with Kojève and the intellectual origins of his version of the end of history would understand that the European Union is a much fuller real-world embodiment of the concept than is the contemporary United States. In line with Kojève, I argued that the European project was in fact a house built as a home for the last man who would emerge at the end of history. The European dream – most fully felt in Germany – is to transcend national sovereignty, power politics, and the kinds of struggles that make military power necessary (about this, more later); Americans, by contrast, have a rather traditional understanding of sovereignty, applaud their military, and like their patriotic Fourth of July parades.

However, rereading The End of History it is easy to see how one could interpret it as a declaration of American triumphalism.  This passage, for example, deals with the American defense build-up in the Reagan presidency, which pressured the Soviet Union:

"Perhaps the most recent example of defensive modernization was the initial phase of Mikhail Gorbachev’s own perestroika.  It is quite clear from his speeches and those of other senior Soviet officials that one of the chief reasons that they initially considered undertaking a fundamental reform of the Soviet economy was their realization that an unreformed Soviet Union was going to have serious problems remaining competitive, economically and militarily, into the twenty-first century.  In particular, President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) posed a severe challenge because it threatened to make obsolete an entire generation of Soviet nuclear weapons, and shifted the superpower competition into areas like microelectronics and other innovative technologies where the Soviet Union had serious disadvantages.  Soviet leaders, including many in the military, understood that the corrupt economic system inherited from Brezhnev would be unable to keep up in an SDI-dominated world, and were willing to accept short-run retrenchment for the sake of long-run survival."

(The End of History and the Last Man, p. 75)

As a corrective to this misreading of history, I strongly recommend Tony Judt’s magnificent book Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945.  The book is so broad in its scope that it provides enough material for years of blogging.  But Judt is particularly good on the demise of the Soviet empire in eastern Europe.  The Soviet Union collapsed under its own contradictions, exacerbated by its ill-conceived invasion of Afghanistan.  It was Gorbachev – not Reagan – that hastened its end:

"By introducing first one element of change and then another and then another, Gobachev progressively eroded the very system through which he had risen. Employing the vast powers of a Party General Secretary, he eviscersated the Party dictatorship from within. […] In retrospect it has become tempting to concluded that (Gorbachev’s) ascent was uncannily timely – as the Soviet system was tottering, so there emerged a leader who understood what was happening and successfully sought an exit strategy from empire." Postwar p. 603

If anything, Reagan’s aggressive arms build-up "probably helped shore up the regime" (Judt)  One thing needs to be remembered: Eastern Europe freed itself from Communism without bloodshed.  This remarkable feat was possible not through any action by Reagan or his successor George H. W. Bush but rather because Mikhail Gorbachev chose not to intervene when he easily might have.

Fukuyama Tony Judt Neoconservatism Neoconservatives Gorbachev