Thirty years ago this past weekend, on November 9, the Berlin Wall came down. Both as a symbol and as a reality, the fall of the wall opened the door to political freedom in that part of the world dominated by communism. It was a time of stunning optimism and hope, or so it seemed.
But the fall of the wall did much more than that, too: It announced the end of the ideological conflict between market capitalism and communism. That was the end of the major world-historical struggle.
It’s fashionable now to say that all of this celebration was premature: Communism has been replaced as a world-historical ideology by religious fanaticism of the sort the crashed airplanes into the Twin Towers.
Alternatively, say those who are au courant: Border walls live on in the form of poisonous nationalism that has spread to the heart of liberal democracies, even in the United States.
But I dissent. Political history really did reach a breaking point in 1989, much as it did in 1806 (or thereabouts), the year in which the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel proclaimed the “end of history” in his Phenomenology of Spirit.
In fact, I celebrate the essential truth of “The End of History” thesis first articulated by Francis Fukuyama in his essay in the summer of 1989, published in the National Interest. Re-reading the piece this weekend, I was struck by how well it has stood up to the test of time.
Experiencing the ‘end of history’ for myself in South Africa
I was living in South Africa and working as a journalist when Fukuyama’s essay was published. Somehow, the buzz about the piece traveled all the way across the Atlantic, and all the way from the northern to the southern hemisphere. I vividly remember that my sister (visiting me in South Africa as we traveled) and I took turns reading the essay to one other, out loud, as we drove the Garden Route from Cape Town to Johannesburg, where I lived.
Fukayama’s piece appears to have been written sometime before the Tiananmen Square massacre on June 4, 1989, in that it goes on at length and speaks positively about the “reform movement” in China. But my reading of the piece certainly came after (and not before) hundreds or more protesters in China were killed and martial law imposed.
Roll back 30 years and remember, however, that China had a much smaller mind-share of world-consciousness. This is, of course, because of subsequent post-Tiananmen developments. China lurched back on the capitalist path toward market-oriented reform in subsequent years. Material benefits have flowed to billions of individuals around the world on the strength of the idea-force that market activity serves human welfare.
What I remembered from reading Fukuyama’s essay is this: Hegel’s view that ideas are more powerful than the material wealth that drives the materialist philosophers’ views.
From the essay:
- For Hegel, all human behavior in the material world, and hence all human history, is rooted in a prior state of consciousness – an idea similar to the one expressed by John Maynard Keynes when he said that the views of men of affairs were usually derived from defunct economists and academic scribblers of earlier generations. This consciousness may not be explicit and self-aware, as are modern political doctrines, but may rather take the form of religion or simple cultural or moral habits. And yet this realm of consciousness in the long run necessarily becomes manifest in the material world, indeed creates the material world in its own image. Consciousness is cause and not effect, and can develop autonomously from the material world; hence the real subtext underlying the apparent jumble of current events is the history of ideology.
Just the blink of an eye
Looking back on the progress and regress of the past three decades, the significance of the Berlin Wall’s collapse still shines brightly.
From the perspective of a single human life, progress comes very slowly. From example, the women who gathered at the Seneca Falls Convention in New York State in July 1848 – the first organized effort to secure women’s suffrage – had a vision to secure the universal vote. Yet it took until August 1920, or 72 years later, before the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution secured women’s right to vote.
Historically speaking, a hundred years is still just the blink of an eye. Or, as Fukuyama, age 67, was quoted last week as saying: “In 100 years, people will still mark 1989 as a really important turning point where Europe reunited and the grip of communism really ended, including, two years later, that with the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.”
Fukuyama is right about the enduring significance of November 9, 1989. And his article – written, of course, before the fall of the wall, yet without directly predicting it – highlighted the truth then emerging in the world’s consciousness: Communism is no match for liberal, democratic, market-oriented economies and societies.
From my perch as a journalist writing about the Group Areas Act and other forms of “petit apartheid” in South Africa, I personally witnessed how the truth about the end of history played out in one nation. The white Afrikaner minority that had dominated a black-majority South Africa for years took this comfort from the end of the Cold War: Democratic change was not quite so scary once the ideological influence of the Soviet Union was out of the picture. That enabled reform-minded Afrikaners, including President Frederik Willem de Klerk, to take a bold step and release Nelson Mandela from prison in February 1990. They began negotiating the political future of South Africa.
Of history, but no longer in history
Fukuyama’s provocative and much-discussed thesis – the “end of history,” really? — was of course parodied and, later criticized. But upon re-reading, the article acquits itself quite well.
What Fukuyama was defending was Hegel’s view that – by Hegel’s own eyewitness of Napoleon’s defeat of the Prussian monarchy at the Battle of Jena in 1806 – the ideals of the American and French Revolutions had already become actualized within the vanguard of humanity.
Certainly, more work remained to be done, between 1806 and 1989, in the culmination of liberal democracy. Among these were the end of slavery, the beginning of civil rights, and the universalization of the franchise.
But for Fukuyama and other defenders of Hegel, these refinements in society only underscored that the liberal democratic state – dominant in the wake of World War II, triumphant after the fall of the Berlin Wall – was and is in fact the culmination of world history.
Fukuyama’s piece explicated the twin challenges to liberal democracy: Fascism defeated in World War II, and communism defeated in the Cold War. He even previewed the “contradictions” potentially unresolvable by liberalism: Nationalism and Islamic theocratism. Certainly, both of these have emerged as flash points both “between states still in history, and between those states and those at the end of history,” as he put it at the time.
The truth remain that we cannot on earth improve upon the liberal democratic ideals of the Enlightenment. That is why it is disconcerting to see our country’s two main political parties each flirting with illiberal ideologies in the form of progressive socialism on the one hand, and nativist nationalism on the other.
The passions aroused by government doing “big things” is, as Fukuyama frankly acknowledged, perhaps the greatest challenge to the end of history. We all want to be a part of history. That will remain true even if we can no longer be “in history.” As he noted:
- The end of history will be a very sad time. The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.
It’s time for someone to stand up and give thanks that history in fact ended in 1989 (or 1806), and I also give thanks for the “post-history” that my children inherit today.
And in acknowledging history’s imperfections that are gradually being made right, we should look back upon the past 200 years as it really was and as it really is: Just two blinks of an eye.