Professor Fukuyama is famous for having told us at the end of the Cold War that history was at an end. By this he meant that the slow advance of liberal democracy was inevitable. As he explains in his latest book he did not mean that we should try to accelerate the process by killing thousands of Iraqis and creating a political context in which Iraqis kill each other every day while American occupation forces look on. Saddam too was a killer; but Saddam is on trial for his life.
Fukuyama now carries his thinking forward into the world after the poisonous flowering of the neocon doctrine which he once favoured in more innocent form. Not everyone in Britain will want to read his account of the academic origins of the neocon movement or his detailed prescriptions for reorganising the Washington bureaucracy. What is left is thoroughly worthwhile and will give many thoughtful people a sensible path forward.
Fukuyama does not want to return to what he describes as Kissinger realism, which takes no interest in the freedom of states but only in stable relationships between them. Inside the last British government we had this argument when discussing political reform in Hong Kong. We backed Chris Patten’s proposals for increasing democracy even at the expense of a short-term worsening of our relations with Beijing. In the Middle East there is no room to doubt the famous UN Development report of 2002 which attributed the present weakness of the Arab world to the lack of acceptable forms of government and civil society.
Progress in this direction can be encouraged but not dictated from outside. It has to grow from the roots of each society. President Bush in his first term tried to apply instead the doctrine of what Fukuyama calls ‘benevolent hegemony’.
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