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The Nineteenth Annual

John Bonython Lecture 


The Grand Ballroom
The Grand Hyatt, Melbourne
Thursday 8 August, 2002 

Has History Restarted
Since September 11? 

Francis Fukuyama 

  

I WOULD LIKE TO BEGIN by expressing my gratitude to The Centre for
Independent Studies and its director, Greg Lindsay, for inviting me to
Australia and giving me the opportunity to deliver the prestigious John
Bonython Lecture. I follow in a line of extraordinarily distinguished
lecturers, and am humbled by the expectations they have established. I would
also like to express a special word of gratitude to Owen Harries, who, early
on in his tenure as Editor of The National Interest, encouraged me to write
the article that eventually became 'The End of History?' It was he who gave
it prominence and encouraged debate over it, and the rest, as they say, is
history.

Like many Americans, I have been preoccupied since September 11 trying to
understand the meaning of this event and how the world has changed as a
result of it. An accounting has been demanded of me in particular, since I
argued 12 years ago that we had reached the 'end of history'. September 11
would seem to qualify, prima facie, as an historical event, and the fact
that it was perpetrated by a group of Islamic terrorists who reject
virtually all aspects of the modern Western world, lends credence, at least
on the surface, to Samuel Huntington's 'clash of civilisations' hypothesis. 

I have developed a standard answer to this challenge, which incidentally
will not be the subject of my talk tonight. The standard answer goes
something like this. The 'end of history' hypothesis was about the process
of modernisation. Progressive intellectuals around the world spent much of
the last century and a half believing that historical progress would result
in an evolution of modern societies toward socialism. In more recent years,
they have held that societies could modernise and yet remain fundamentally
different culturally. My hypothesis was that there was such a thing as a
single, coherent modernisation process, but that it led not to socialism or
to a variety of culturally-determined locations, but rather to liberal
democracy and market-oriented economics as the only viable choices. The
process of modernisation was, moreover, a universal one that would sooner or
later drag all societies in its train.

Understood in this fashion, September 11 represents a real challenge, but
not an ultimately convincing one. Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, the Taliban,
and radical Islamism more generally, do in fact represent ideological
challenges to Western liberal democracy that are in certain ways sharper
than those offered by communism. But in the long run, it is hard to see that
Islamism offers much of a realistic alternative as a governing ideology for
real world societies. Not only does it have limited appeal to non-Muslims;
it does not meet the aspirations of the vast majority of Muslims themselves.
In the countries that have had recent experience of living under an actual
Muslim theocracy-Iran and Afghanistan-there is every evidence that it has
become extremely unpopular. Thus, while fanatical Islamists armed with
weapons of mass destruction pose a severe threat in the short-run, the
longer-term challenge in the battle of ideas is not going to come from this
quarter. September 11 represents a serious detour, but in the end
modernisation and globalisation will remain the central structuring
principles of world politics.

I want, however, to explore another important issue that is related to the
question of the end of history that has been raised by events since
September 11, namely, whether the 'West', which was in my earlier account
the ultimate goal of the historical process, is really a coherent concept,
and whether the United States and its foreign policy might themselves become
the central issues in international politics. 

Reactions to September 11

In the immediate aftermath of September 11, the French sociologist Jean
Baudrillard published a long piece in Le Monde in which he argued that the
'Ultimately, it is they [i.e., the terrorists] who've done the deed, but it
is we who have wanted it . . . Terrorism is immoral, and it responds to a
globalisation that is itself immoral'. His image is one of France, and
Europe more generally, as a island of civilisation caught in a struggle
between two morally equivalent fundamentalisms, that of the United States
and of the radical Islamists. 

Baudrillard does not, of course, speak for all Frenchmen, and his piece was
quickly denounced in Le Monde by Alain Minc who said that it reflected 'the
French intelligensia's traditional inability to recognise that a hierarchy
of values exists'. But Baudrillard's view, while phrased in an offensive way
unique to French intellectuals, represents more of an undercurrent in Europe
than many Americans realise or are inclined to admit. The idea that the
United States was only getting what it deserved in the Word Trade
Center/Pentagon attacks was a far from uncommon view, not just in Europe but
in many other parts of the world. 

There was, of course, a large spontaneous outpouring of support for the
United States and for Americans around the world after September 11, with
European governments lining up immediately to help the US prosecute its 'war
on terrorism'. But with the demonstration of total American military
dominance that came with the successful rousting of al-Qaeda and the Taliban
from Afghanistan, new expressions of anti-Americanism began to pour forth.
After President Bush's denunciation of the 'axis of evil' in his late
January State of the Union address, it was not just European intellectuals
but European politicians and publics more generally that began to criticise
the United States on a wide variety of fronts. According to Will Hutton, the
Labourite journalist, Britain's US ally is 'not the same good America . . .
that reconstructed Europe and led an international liberal economic and
social order.'(1) Rather, it had been taken over by a group of crazed
conservatives and was now the chief source of global instability. In France,
a book became a bestseller arguing that September 11 was not the work of
Muslim extremists but of a cabal of conservatives within the US
government.(2) According to one poll, some 30% of French people regard the
United States as France's chief enemy. While many Americans regard September
11 as a broad attack on Western civilisation, Europeans are much more likely
to regard it as a response to specifically American policies, representing a
risk from which they are largely immune. 

What is going on here? The end of history was supposed to be about the
victory of Western, not simply American, values and institutions. The Cold
War was fought by alliances based on shared values of freedom and democracy.
And yet an enormous gulf has opened up in American and European perceptions
about the world, and the sense of shared values is increasingly frayed. Does
the concept of the 'West' still make sense in the first decade of the 21st
century? Is the fracture line over globalisation actually a division not
between the West and the Rest, but between the United States and the Rest? 

And where will Australia fit in such a divided world? It is historically
tied more closely to Europe than to America, but as a land of new settlement
it shares many characteristics with the United States. It is situated,
moreover, in a part of the world in which American power and influence
matter greatly in the maintenance of peace and an open international trading
order.

In my view, the idea of the West remains a coherent one, and there remain
critical shared values, institutions, and interest that will continue to
bind the world's developed democracies, and Europe and the United States, in
particular. But there are some deeper differences emerging between Western
democracies that will be highly neuralgic in America's dealings with the
world in the coming years that need critical attention by policymakers and
by, yes, statesmen.

The nature of the rift between America and its allies

In the remainder of this lecture I will refer repeatedly to differences
between Europe and the United States. But it should be kept in mind that
'Europe' in this context is more of a placeholder for global attitudes
critical of American foreign policy. Europeans, of course, are themselves
divided in their views of the US; the views I characterise as typical of
them are often broadly representative of left-of-centre opinion in a variety
of countries around the world, including Australia and New Zealand. Asian
countries from Japan to Malaysia have voiced similar misgivings about
American unilateralism in the wake of September 11. Some views, however,
related to the need to devolve sovereignty to supranational organisations
are peculiar to the historical experience of members of the European Union. 

The ostensible issues raised in the US-European disputes since the 'axis of
evil' speech for the most part revolve around alleged American unilateralism
and international law. There is by now a familiar list of European
complaints about American policy, including but not limited to the Bush
Administration's withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, its
failure to ratify the Rio Pact on biodiversity, its withdrawal from the ABM
treaty and pursuit of missile defence, its opposition to the ban on land
mines, its treatment of al-Qaeda prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, its opposition
to new provisions of the biological warfare convention, and most recently
its opposition to the International Criminal Court. 

The most serious act of US unilateralism in European eyes concerns the Bush
Administration's announced intention to bring about regime change in Iraq,
if necessary through a go-it-alone invasion. The axis of evil speech did
indeed mark a very important change in American foreign policy from
deterrence to a policy of active preemption of terrorism. This doctrine was
further amplified in Bush's West Point speech in June, in which he declared
'the war on terror will not be won on the defensive. We must take the battle
to the enemy, disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they
emerge. In the world we have entered, the only path to safety is the path of
action.' 

The European view is that Europe is seeking to create a genuine rule-based
international order suitable to the circumstances of the post-Cold War
world. That world, free of sharp ideological conflicts and large-scale
military competition, is one that gives substantially more room for
consensus, dialogue, and negotiation as ways of settling disputes. They are
horrified by the Bush Administration's announcement of a virtually
open-ended doctrine of preemption against terrorists or states that sponsor
terrorists, in which the United States and the United States alone decides
when and where to use force.

Robert Kagan, in a brilliant recent article in Policy Review,(3) put the
current difference between the United States and Europe as follows. The
Europeans are the ones who actually believe they are living at the end of
history, that is, in a largely peaceful world that to an increasing degree
can be governed by law, norms, and international agreements. In this world,
power politics and classical realpolitik have become obsolete. Americans, by
contrast, think they are still living in history, and need to use
traditional power-political means to deal with threats from Iraq, al-Qaeda,
and other malign forces. According to Kagan, the Europeans are half right:
they have indeed created an end-of-history world for themselves within the
European Union, where sovereignty has given way to supranational
organisation. What they don't understand, however, is that the peace and
safety of their European bubble is guaranteed ultimately by American
military power. Absent that, they themselves would be dragged backwards into
history.

Is the rift genuine?

This, at least, is the popularly accepted account of American unilateralism
and European emphasis on international law and institutions. We need to ask,
however, whether it is in fact accurate, and whether the US has consistently
been more unilateralist than Europe. The truth of the matter here is far
more complicated, with the differences between the US and Europe being much
more nuanced.

Liberal internationalism, after all, has a long and honoured place in
American foreign policy. The United States was the country that promoted the
League of Nations, the United Nations, the Bretton Woods institutions, the
GATT/WTO, and a host of other international organisations. There are a huge
number of international governance organisations in the world today in which
the US participates as an active, if not the most active member, from
standards-setting, nuclear power safety, and scientific cooperation, to
aviation safety, bank settlements, drug regulation, accounting
standards/corporate governance, and telecommunications. 

It is useful here to make a distinction between those forms of liberal
internationalism that are primarily economic, and those that have a more
political or security dimension. Particularly in recent years, the United
States has focused on international institutions that have promoted
international trade and investment. It has put substantial effort into
creating a rule-based international trade and investment regime with
stronger and more autonomous decision-making authority. The motives for this
are obvious: Americans benefit strongly from and indeed dominate the global
economy, which is why globalisation bears a 'made in the USA' label.

In the realm of economics, the Europeans don't have all that great a record
with regard to respect for multilateral rules when compared to the United
States. They have been on their high horse this year because of American
actions with regard to steel and agricultural subsidies, and they are right
to complain about American hypocrisy with regard to free trade. But this I
regard as kind of normal hypocrisy: all countries act in contradiction of
declared free trade principles, and the Europeans have been notorious for,
among other things, agricultural subsidies maintained at higher levels and
over longer periods of time than American ones. America is guilty only of
the most recent outbreak of hypocrisy.

There are a number of areas where the Europeans have acted unilaterally in
economic matters, and in ways that at times contravene the existing legal
order. The EU resisted unfavourable decisions against them on bananas for
nine years, and beef hormones for even longer. They have announced a
precautionary principle with regard to genetically modified foods, which is
very difficult to reconcile with the WTO's sanitary and phytosanitary rules.
Indeed, the Europeans have been violating their own rules with regard to GM
foods, with certain member states setting standards different from those of
the community itself. The European Competition Commission under Mario Monti
successfully blocked the merger of GE and Honeywell, when the deal had been
approved by American and Canadian regulators, in ways that promoted
suspicions that the EU was simply acting to protect specific European
interests. Finally, the EU has succeeded in exporting its data privacy rules
to the United States through its safe harbour arrangements. 

For all their talk of wanting to establish a rule-based international order,
the Europeans haven't done that well within the EU itself. As John van
Oudenaren has argued, the Europeans have developed a decision-making system
of Byzantine complexity, with overlapping and inconsistent rules and weak
enforcement powers.(4) The European Commission often doesn't have the power
even to monitor compliance of member states with its own directives, much
less the ability to make them conform. This fits with an attitude towards
law in certain parts of Europe that sees declarative intent often of greater
importance than actual implementation, and which Americans tend to see
instead as undermining the very rule of law.

It should be noted that Australia and New Zealand are actually in a much
better position to criticise American hypocrisy on trade issues than are the
Europeans, since neither one has anything like a Common Agricultural Policy
or the clout to enforce unilaterally safety or privacy rules on other
countries. Both countries, being highly dependent on agricultural exports,
have been strong supporters of free trade in recent years and are
particularly vulnerable to American agricultural subsidies. New Zealand in
particular since the mid-1980s has moved to one of the lowest levels of
agricultural protection of any country in the world.

The second type of liberal internationalism has to do with politics and
security. With the exception of the two environmental agreements (Rio and
Kyoto), all of the US-European disputes in recent months have concerned
security-related issues (the International Criminal Court may not seem like
a security matter, but the reason that the United States does not want to
participate in it is out of fear that its soldiers and officials may be held
criminally liable by the ICC in the conduct of their duties.) It is in this
realm that the tables are turned and European charges of American
unilateralism are made. 

It is possible to overstate the importance of these disputes. A great deal
of European irritation with the United States arises from stylistic matters,
and from the Bush Administration's strange failure to consult, explain,
justify, and cajole in the manner of previous administrations. The
administration could have let ratification of Kyoto languish in Congress as
the Clinton administration did, rather than casually announcing withdrawal
from the pact at a luncheon for NATO ambassadors. Europeans did not like the
religious language of the 'axis of evil', nor the fact that this major
policy shift was announced as it were on the fly without prior notification
or explanation. The United States has had a consistent record of using
strong-arm tactics to shape international agreements to its liking, and then
to walk away from them at the last moment. This pattern goes all the way
back to Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations, and was continued in
negotiations over the Rio Pact, Kyoto, and the ICC. Even if you are
sceptical about the value of international institutions, it is not difficult
to see why non-Americans might get a little irritated at this kind of
behaviour.

The foregoing suggests that much of the European-American rift concerns
style rather than substance. The Clinton administration talked a
multilateralist game, while the Bush administration has at times asserted
what amounts to a kind of principled unilateralism; in fact, policy between
the two administrations didn't differ in substance all that much. Clinton
may have signed the Kyoto and ICC treaties, but he knew he wouldn't spend
much political capital in a hopeless effort to get them through Congress. On
the other hand, the US effort in Afghanistan made use of a reasonably broad
coalition of forces.

But while it is tempting to say the problem is simply stylistic, I think
that it is fundamentally wrong. There is in fact a deeper issue of principle
between the United States and Europe that will ensure that transatlantic
relations will remain neuralgic through the years to come. The disagreement
is not over the principles of liberal democracy, which both sides share, but
over where the ultimate source of liberal democratic legitimacy lies. 

To put it rather schematically and over-simply, Americans tend not to see
any source of democratic legitimacy higher than the constitutional
democratic nation-state. To the extent that any international organisation
has legitimacy, it is because duly constituted democratic majorities have
handed that legitimacy up to them in a negotiated, contractual process. Such
legitimacy can be withdrawn at any time by the contracting parties;
international law and organisation has no existence independent of this type
of voluntary agreement between sovereign nation-states.

Europeans, by contrast, tend to believe that democratic legitimacy flows
from the will of an international community much larger than any individual
nation-state. This international community is not embodied concretely in a
single, global democratic constitutional order. Yet it hands down legitimacy
to existing international institutions, which are seen as partially
embodying it. Thus, peacekeeping forces in the former Yugoslavia are not
merely ad hoc intergovernmental arrangements, but rather moral expressions
of the will and norms of the larger international community.

One might be tempted to say that the stiff-necked defence of national
sovereignty of the type practiced by Sen. Jesse Helms is a characteristic
only of a certain part of the American Right, and that the Left is as
internationalist as are the Europeans. This would be largely correct in the
security-foreign policy arena, but dead wrong with regard to the economic
side of liberal internationalism. That is, the Left does not grant the WTO
or any other trade-related body any special status with regard to
legitimacy. They are very suspicious of the WTO when it overturns an
environment or labour law in the name of free trade, and are just as jealous
of democratic sovereignty on these issues as Sen. Helms. 

Between these two views of the sources of legitimacy, I would say that the
Europeans are theoretically right, but wrong in practice. They assert that
they and not the Americans are the true believers in liberal universal
values. It is in fact impossible to assert as a theoretical matter that
proper liberal democratic procedure by itself inevitably results in outcomes
that are necessarily legitimate and just. A constitutional order that is
procedurally democratic can still decide to do terrible things to other
countries that violate human rights and norms of decency on which its own
democratic order is based. Indeed, it can violate the higher principles upon
which its of legitimacy is based, as Lincoln argued was the case with
slavery. The legitimacy of its actions are not in the end based on
democratic procedural correctness, but on the prior rights and norms which
come from a moral realm higher than that of the legal order. 

The problem with the European position is that while such a higher realm of
liberal democratic values might theoretically exist, it is very imperfectly
embodied in any given international institution. The very idea that this
legitimacy is handed downwards from a willowy, disembodied international
level rather than handed upwards from concrete, legitimate democratic
publics on a nation-state level virtually invites abuse on the part of
elites who are then free to interpret the will of the international
community to suit their own preferences. 

The second important practical problem with the European position is that of
enforcement. The one power that is unique to sovereign nation-states and to
them alone, even in today's globalised world, is the power to enforce laws.
Even if existing international laws and organisations did accurately reflect
the will of the international community (whatever that means), enforcement
remains by and large the province of nation states. A great deal of both
international and national law coming out of Europe consists of what amount
to social policy wish lists that are completely unenforceable. Europeans
justify these kinds of laws saying they are expressions of social
objectives; Americans reply, correctly in my view, that such unenforceable
aspirations undermine the rule of law itself.

The only way that this circle of theory and practice could be squared would
be if there were genuine democratic government at a level higher than that
of the nation-state. Such global democratic government could then be said to
truly embody the will of the international community, while containing
procedural safeguards to make sure that that will was not willfully
misinterpreted or abused by various elites or interest groups. It would also
presumably have enforcement powers that do not today exist, apart from the
specific ad hoc arrangements made for peacekeeping and multilateral
coalitions.

Some Europeans may believe that the steady accumulation of smaller
international institutions like the ICC or the various agencies of the
United Nations will some day result in something resembling democratic world
government. In my view, the chance of this happening is as close to zero as
you ever get in political life. What will be practically possible to
construct in terms of international institutions will not be legitimate or
democratic, and what will be legitimate and democratic will not be possible
to construct. For better or worse, such international institutions as we
possess will have to be partial solutions existing in the vacuum of
international legitimacy above the level of the nation-state. Or to put it
differently, whatever legitimacy they possess will have to be based on the
underlying legitimacy of nation-states and the contractual relationships
they negotiate.

Why do these differences exist?

Robert Kagan in the article mentioned earlier provides a realpolitik
explanation for US-European differences with regard to international law.
The Europeans like international law and norms because they are much weaker
than the United States, and the latter likes unilateralism because it is
significantly more powerful than any other country or group of countries
(like the EU) not just in terms of military power, but economically,
technologically and culturally as well. 

This argument makes a great deal of sense as far as it goes. Small, weak
countries that are acted upon rather than influencing others naturally
prefer to live in a world of norms, laws, and institutions, in which more
powerful nations are constrained. Conversely, a 'sole superpower' like the
United States would naturally like to see its freedom of action be as
unencumbered as possible. 

But while the argument from the standpoint of power politics is correct as
far as it goes, it is not a sufficient explanation of why the US and Europe,
not to mention other countries around the world, differ. As noted above, the
pattern of US unilateralism and European multilateralism applies primarily
to security/foreign policy issues and secondarily to environmental concerns;
in the economic sphere, the US is enmeshed in multilateral institutions
despite (or perhaps because of) its dominance of the global economy. 

Moreover, to point to differences in power is merely to beg the question of
why these differentials exist. The EU collectively encompasses a population
of 375 million people and has a GDP of nearly $10 trillion, compared to a US
population of 280 million and a GDP of $7 trillion. Europe could certainly
spend money on defence at a level that would put it on a par with the United
States, but it chooses not to. Europe spends barely $130 billion
collectively on defence-a sum that has been steadily falling-compared to US
defence spending of $300 billion, which is due to rise sharply. The
post-September 11 increment in US defence spending requested by President
Bush is larger than the entire defence budget of Britain. Despite Europe's
turn in a more conservative direction in 2002, not one rightist or
centre-right candidate is campaigning on a platform of significantly raising
defence spending. Europe's ability to deploy the power that it possesses is
of course greatly weakened by the collective action problems posed by the
current system of EU decision-making. But the failure to create more useable
military power is clearly a political and normative issue.

Moreover, not every small, weak country is equally outraged by American
unilateralism. In a curious role reversal from Cold War days, the Russians
were actually much more relaxed about the American withdrawal from the ABM
Treaty than were many Europeans, since it makes possible deep cuts in
offensive strategic nuclear forces. Australia and New Zealand of course want
the US to abide by international trade rules since they are directly
affected by American agricultural subsidies, but have generally expressed
less moral outrage over the American failure to subordinate its security
policy to international norms than most members of the European Union. 

This brings us to other reasons why Europeans see the international order so
differently from Americans. One critically important factor has to be the
experience of European integration over the past generation. The loss of
sovereignty is not an abstract theoretical matter to Europeans; they have
been steadily giving up powers to Brussels, from local control over health
and safety standards to social policy to their currency itself. Having lived
through this masochistic experience repeatedly, one imagines that they are
like former smokers who want to put everyone else through the same
withdrawal pains that they have endured. 

The final important difference between the United States and Europe with
regard to international order has nothing to do with European beliefs and
practices, but with America's unique national experience, and the sense of
exceptionalism that has arisen from it. The sociologist Seymour Martin
Lipset has spent much of his distinguished career explaining how the United
States is an outlier among developed democracies, with policies and
institutions that differ significantly from those of Europe, Canada,
Australia, New Zealand, or Japan.(5) Whether in regard to welfare, crime,
regulation, education, or foreign policy, there are constant differences
separating America from everyone else: it is consistently more anti-statist,
individualistic, laissez-faire, and egalitarian than other democracies. 

This sense of exceptionalism extends to its own democratic institutions and
their legitimacy. Unlike most of the old societies of Europe, the United
States was founded on the basis of a political idea. There was no American
people or nation prior to the founding of the country: national identity is
civic rather than religious, cultural, racial or ethnic. There has been only
one American regime which, as the world's oldest continuously existing
democracy, is not viewed as a transient political compromise. This means
that the country's political institutions have always been imbued with an
almost religious reverence that Europeans, with more ancient sources of
identity, find peculiar. The proliferation of American flags across the
country in the wake of September 11 is only the most recent manifestation of
Americans' deeply felt patriotism. 

Moreover, for Americans, their Declaration of Independence and Constitution
are not just the basis of a legal-political order on the North American
continent; they are the embodiment of universal values and have a
significance for mankind that goes well beyond the borders of the United
States. The American dollar bill has the inscription novus ordo
seclorum-'new order of the ages'-written under the all-seeing eye of the
great pyramid. When President Reagan repeatedly quoted Winthrop in speaking
of the US as a 'shining city on a hill', his words had great resonance for
many Americans. This leads at times to a typically American tendency to
confuse its own national interests with the broader interests of mankind as
a whole.

The situation of Europe-as well as developed Asian societies like Japan, for
that matter-is very different. Europeans were peoples with shared histories
long before they were democracies. They have other sources of identity
besides politics. They have seen a variety of regimes come and go, and some
of those regimes have, in living memory, been responsible for very shameful
acts. The kind of patriotism that is commonplace in America is highly
suspect in many parts of Europe: Germans for many years after World War II
taught their children not to display the German flag or cheer too loudly at
football matches. While the French and, in a different way, the British
continue to feel a sense of broader national mission in the world, it is
safe to say that few other European countries regard their own political
institutions as universal models for the rest of the world to follow.
Indeed, many Europeans regard their national institutions as having a much
lower degree of legitimacy than international ones, with the European Union
occupying a place in between.

The reasons for this are not hard to fathom. Europeans regard the violent
history of the first half of the 20th century as the direct outcome of the
unbridled exercise of national sovereignty. The house that they have been
building for themselves since the 1950s called the European Union was
deliberately intended to embed those sovereignties in multiple layers of
rules, norms, and regulations to prevent those sovereignties from ever
spinning out of control again. While the EU could become a mechanism for
aggregating and projecting power beyond Europe's borders, most Europeans see
the EU's purpose as one rather of transcending power politics. They do, in
other words, see their project as one of finding comfortable accommodations
for the last man at the end of history.

Australia's national experience places it somewhere in between the United
States and Europe. As a loyal colony of Britain, it was not born in a
revolution against state authority as was the United States, and therefore
does not share America's anti-statism and suspicion of higher authority to
nearly the same degree. Though it was also a land of new settlement, its
national identity was less overtly tied to a set of new democratic political
institutions than was that of the United States. Its size and historical
origins moreover have never allowed Australia to develop a sense that its
own institutions were exceptional.

On the other hand, national sovereignty is more important to Australia than
to most European countries. Australia has never had the experience of the
unlimited exercise of its own sovereignty leading it to disaster, as in
Central Europe. Rather, it saw its sovereignty threatened by Japan and
needed to rescued from that threat by American power. The neighbourhood it
lives in is highly diverse, politically and culturally. Traditional power
politics remains a fact of life in East Asia; there is no overarching
framework of institutions and norms comparable to the EU which is capable of
regulating relations between states in the region. As a small power, it
depends on larger powers being constrained by rules and institutions,
particularly in the economic realm, but it also depends ultimately on
American power for its security. It is not surprising, therefore, that
Australian criticisms of the United States since September 11 have been more
muted than those coming from Europe.

Are we at the end of history?

This brings us back full circle to the initial question with which we
started, which is also one of the important sources of US-European
disagreement. The Europeans are certainly right that they are living at the
end of history; the question is, where is the rest of the world? Of course,
much of the world is indeed mired in history, having neither economic growth
nor stable democracy nor peace. But the end of the Cold War marked an
important turn in international relations, since for the first time the vast
majority of the world's great powers were stable, prosperous liberal
democracies. While there could be skirmishes between countries in history,
like Iraq, and those beyond it, like the United States, the prospect of
great wars between great powers had suddenly diminished.

There are certainly no new non-democratic great powers to challenge the
United States; China may one day qualify, but it isn't there yet. But a
terrorist organisation armed with weapons of mass destruction is a different
matter: although the organisation itself may be a minor historical player,
the technological capability it can potentially deploy is such that it must
be taken seriously as a world-class threat. Indeed, such an organisation
poses graver challenges in certain ways than nuclear-armed superpowers,
since the latter are for the most part deterrable and not in the business of
committing national suicide.

The question about the threat is then whether the world has fundamentally
changed since September 11, insofar as hostile terrorist organisations armed
with weapons of mass destruction will become an ongoing reality. Many
Americans clearly think so, and believe that once a leader like Saddam
Hussein possesses nuclear weapons he will pass them on to terrorists as a
poor man's delivery system. They, like President Bush, believe that this is
a threat not just to the United States, but to Western civilisation as a
whole. The acuteness of this threat is what then drives the new doctrine of
preemption and the greater willingness of the United States to use force
unilaterally around the world.

Many Europeans, by contrast, believe that the attacks of September 11 were a
one-off kind of event where Osama bin Laden got lucky and scored big. But
the likelihood that al-Qaeda will achieve similar successes in the future is
small, given the heightened state of alert and the defensive and preventive
measures put into place since September 11. They believe that the likelihood
that Saddam Hussein will pass nuclear weapons to terrorists is small, and
that he remains deterrable. An invasion of Iraq is therefore not necessary;
containment will work as it has since the Gulf War. And finally, they tend
to believe that Muslim terrorists do not represent a general threat to the
West, but are focused on the United States as a result of US policy in the
Middle East and Gulf.

Democracy's future

Assuming we get past these near-term threats, there is a larger principle at
issue in the current US-European rift that will continue to play an
important role in world politics for the foreseeable future. That principle
has to do with the nature of democracy itself. In an increasingly globalised
world, where is the proper locus of democratic legitimacy? Does it now and
forever more exist only at the nation-state level, or is it possible to
imagine the development of genuinely democratic international institutions?
Will the existing welter of international rules, norms, and organisations
some day evolve into something more than a series of ad hoc arrangements, in
the direction of genuine global governance? And if so, who will design those
institutions?

My own view, as stated earlier, is that it is extremely hard to envision
democracy ever emerging at an international level, and many reasons for
thinking that attempts to create such international institutions will
actually have the perverse effect of undermining the real democracy that
exists at a nation-state level. A partial exception to this is the European
Union, which continues to move ahead as a political project with the
introduction of the Euro and the planned expansion under the Nice Treaty.
But in a way, the experience of the EU proves my point: there is a
significant 'democratic deficit' at the European level, which exacerbates
existing democratic deficits at the member state level. This is the source
of much of the backlash against further European integration, which is seen
as weakening local powers in favour of unmovable bureaucrats in Brussels.
The problem will become even more severe after the next round of European
expansion, which will bring in states from Eastern Europe with very
different expectations and experiences.

But if the United States refuses, rightly, to concede the principle that
there is a broader democratic international community providing legitimacy
to international institutions, it needs to consider carefully the
consequences and perceptions of its behaviour as the world's most powerful
democratic nation-state. Its own self-interest dictates the need for
reciprocity across the broad range of cooperative agreements and
institutions within which it finds itself enmeshed. The opportunities for
unilateral action that exist presently in the military realm are not nearly
as broad in the realm of trade and finance. There are a large number of
global public goods, like standards, free trade, financial flows, and legal
transparency, as well as public bads like environmental damage, crime, and
drug trafficking, that create difficult collective action problems. Some of
these problems can be solved only if the world's most powerful country takes
the lead in either providing those public goods, or in organising
institutions to provide them-something the US was eager to do in earlier
periods. 

The enormous margin of power exercised by the United States, particularly in
the security realm, brings with it special responsibilities to use that
power prudently. Robert Kagan speaks of the need to show what the American
founders labelled a 'decent respect for the opinions of mankind'. But for
him that seems to consist of nothing more than not gratuitously rejecting
offers of support for American aims and objectives. It is not clear that
those aims and objectives should themselves in any way be shaped by the
opinions of non-Americans. 

In my view, an appropriately moderate American foreign policy that did show
a real degree of 'decent respect' would involve at least the following
elements. 

First, if the United States is going to shift to a preemptive policy towards
international terrorism, there ought to be a thinking-through and
enunciation of a broader strategy that among other things indicates the
limits of this new doctrine. What kinds of threats, and what standards of
evidence, will justify the use of this kind of power? Presumably, the US is
not thinking of unilaterally attacking at least two of the three legs of the
axis of evil; if this is the case, why not at least spell this out? The
United States is in the process of scaring itself to death with regard to
terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. A more realistic appraisal of
future threats will raise the bar to preemption, while keeping it in the
arsenal. 

Second, the US needs to take some responsibility for global public bads like
carbon emissions. The Kyoto Protocol is a very flawed document for any
number of reasons, and the link between carbon emissions and observed
warming has not been conclusively proven. On the other hand, it has not been
disproven, either, and it would seem only prudent to hedge against the
possibility that it is true. Apart from global warming, there are any number
of good reasons why the United States ought to tax energy use much more
heavily than it does: to pay for the negative externality of having to go to
war every decade or so to keep open access to Middle Eastern oil; to promote
development of alternative energy sources; and to create some policy space
in dealing with Saudi Arabia, which does not seem to be a particular friend
of the United States after September 11. Americans may not ever be convinced
that they should make serious economic sacrifices for the sake of
international agreements, but they may be brought around to an equivalent
position if they see sufficient self-interest in doing so.

Finally, there should be a walking back of the steel and agricultural
subsidy decisions taken earlier this year. No one in Washington ever
pretended that there was a reason for making them in the first place other
than pure political expediency, and there can be no US leadership on any
important issue related to the global economy in their wake.

The US-European rift that has emerged in 2002 is not just a transitory
problem reflecting the style of the current US administration or the world
situation in the wake of September 11. It is a reflection of differing views
of the locus of democratic legitimacy within a broader Western civilisation
whose actual institutions have become remarkably similar. The underlying
principled issue is essentially unsolvable because there is ultimately no
practical way of addressing the 'democratic deficit' at the global level.
But the problem can be mitigated by a degree of American moderation within a
system of sovereign nation-states.

Notes
(1) "Time to Stop Being America's Lapdog," Observer (Feb. 17, 2002).
(2) Thierry Meyssan, L'Effroyable Imposture (The Horrifying Fraud).
(3) Robert Kagan, "Power and Weakness," Policy Review no. 116 (June-July
2002).
(4) John Van Oudenaren, "E Pluribus Confusion," National Interest no. 65
(Fall 2001): 23-36.
(5) Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1995). This theme appears also in his books
Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics, 2nd. Ed. (Baltimore, MD: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1981); The First New Nation (New York: Basic
Books, 1963); and Continental Divide: The Values and Institutions of the
United States and Canada (New York & London: Routledge, 1990).

To Top 
About the Author: 
Francis Fukuyama is the Bernard Schwartz Professor of International
Political Economy at the Paul Nitze School of Advanced International Studies
at Johns Hopkins University. He has a B.A. in classics from Cornell
University and a Ph.D. in Political Science from Harvard. Dr Fukuyama
currently sits on the President's Council on Bioethics. He has written
widely on democratisation and international political economy, and culture
and social capital in modern economic life. His books include the award
winning The End of History and the Last Man, published in over twenty
foreign editions, and most recently Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of
the Biotechnology Revolution.