لنستخرج كنوزا من المعرفة و الإبداع و العلم و الأفكار
Professor Francis Fukuyama, currently Bernard L Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University, was born in Chicago in 1952, and has a BA from Cornell and a doctorate in political science from Harvard. He has worked with the RAND Corporation, the Department of State specialising on the Middle East, and continues to serve on several significant boards such as the President’s Council on Bioethics and the National Endowment for Democracy. Something of the range of his interests can be gauged from the fact that he has written monographs on Russia and the Third World, the consequences of the biotechnology revolution, and social capital. He became widely known with the publication of The End of History and the Last Man in 1992. Translated into many languages, the head of bestseller lists and awarded major international prizes, The End of History and the Last Man provoked popular and academic debates; but his two most recent books, State Building: Governance and World order in the TwentyFirst Century (2004) and After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads (2006) have more immediate relevance to Australia. His shift from identifying as a neoconservative to asserting that neoconservatism was ‘something’ he ‘could no longer support’, has been reported widely in Australia.2 He had contributed to the neoconservatist underpinning of the war in Iraq and he had joined the initial celebration at the fall of Sadam Hussein, but he has concluded that the American theoretical justification for the war was wrong and its execution incompetent, and he has called for a new direction in American foreign policy, a ‘Realistic Wilsonianism’.3 While Fukuyama’s changing evaluation of the arguments of his one-time neocon colleagues has illuminated major issues about American policy and the war in Iraq, his general thinking about failed or weak states and foreign intervention has received less attention in Australia. And it is those considerations that have implications for Australian policies in East Timor, Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and the other islands where Australia has primary responsibility for any external interventions requiring personnel and cash. Where there have been debates in Australia, they have tended to be concerned with the immediate and practical, not the long-term and theoretical, but as Fukuyama and others have demonstrated, much foreign aid and intervention has been determined by theoretical assumptions that are unproven or false. Fukuyama writes on the theoretical frontier of state building, but his language is without jargon, and when he uses metaphors they are deployed to illustrate not obscure. He has an awareness of a long tradition of western philosophy, and he frequently acknowledges or comments on other writers. He is not a zealot. He does not believe he has discovered a coherent new explanation for individual or national behaviour and been able to make all else subordinate to his all-embracing insight. Fukuyama sets out problems, considers current explanations put forward within various disciplines, evaluates them against counter arguments and the empirical evidence from case studies, and - consistent with the evidence - some of his conclusions are tentative. Few of his sentences are marked by wit or compressed wisdom: he is not a maker of the memorable quote. But because his writing is
always accessible, and because he defines critical questions, provides a guide to relevant material, draws useful conclusions, and is conscious of the practising public servants who have to implement policy, he is to be valued as an international public intellectual. The End of History was a book of its time. It developed from an article written in 1989, the year that the Berlin Wall came down, and it was published in 1992, after the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was effectively disbanded. Fukuyama was not, as some naïve commentators who read only title thought, predicting an apocalyptic end of the world, or the end of great events, or the end of history as a discipline, but the end of history as it had been conceived by Hegel and Marx – a process of societies moving through various ways of organising themselves as theocracies, feudal states or monarchies etc. Throughout history there have been dominant contests about how peoples should organise themselves so that they are best able to secure their needs. In the 1930s there seemed to be three possible models: Marxist, Fascist and Capitalist. But suddenly it seemed to Fukuyama that there was just one: it was liberal democracy as realised predominantly in Western Europe and North America, and with liberal democracy Fukuyama added economic theories that placed faith in the free market. There was, said Fukuyama, a consensus that liberal democracy had defeated all its rivals; the ideal of liberal democracy was not going to be improved; liberal democracy was the aspiration of most of mankind; and it could be realised universally – it was not an outcome of a culture and history peculiar to the West. The world in 1992 could, Fukuyama thought, be divided into those who got to the end of history (they lived in liberal democracies), and those who were still somewhere in history. Fukuyama conceded that man had the potential to destroy his liberal democracy and so start somewhere in history again. Fukuyama wrote before Samuel Huntington published The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order in 1996, before the sustained, rapid economic growth of India and China, before 11 September 2001 and the horror of the World Trade Centre, before the assaults on Afghanistan and Iraq, and before the War on Terror, jihadists, Taliban and al-Qa’ida entered popular consciousness.
