Liberté Egalité Fraternité

     At Jenna in 1806 Napoleon Bonaparte defeated a Prussian army in a crucial victory that would enshrine the emperor in history. For German philosopher Georg Hegel, who lost his job when French troops closed the local university, it was the end of history. It wasn’t Napoleon’s martial success that impressed Hegel. It was the idea behind it. Hegel is credited with the notion that from the beginning man has been on a predestined journey. The end would come when he found the set of governing principles that resolved all contradictions. There would no longer be master and slave. All men would be free to pursue their deepest human needs. Hegel thought the French revolution, imperfect as it was, represented the final step. Its ideals could not be improved. What remained was a matter of implementation.
     In the summer of 1989, shortly before the Berlin Wall fell, Francis Fukuyama argued in Foreign Affairs magazine that Hegel was right. What had become known as liberal democracy had triumphed; liberal because the rights of all are protected as a matter of law, democracy because government rules with the consent of the governed and triumphant because there was no longer a competing global ideology. Absolute monarchy was dead. So were fascism and communism. Liberal democracy was the sole ideology left standing with worldwide appeal. The world still had its despots but nobody seriously thought theirs was the better way. History was indeed over.
     Well not quite. Four years later Samuel Huntington observed that the post cold war world had settled out not on the lines of ideology but on those of civilization, defined primarily by religion. Huntington divided the globe along fault lines with Catholic Western Europe and America opposing the Orthodox East (Protestant and Catholic share the same civilization. Those wars are over.) Then there is Japanese Shinto, East Asian Buddhist, Indian Hindu, the world of Islam and a smattering of others. Huntington contended in Clash of Civilizations that conflict among the cultures would define world order for the foreseeable future.
     It would appear Huntington overstated the case. It was certainly true that the breakups of Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union produced some serious strife but that is by and large behind us. None of it produced any major international wars. The only really significant inter-civilization conflict to have emerged is that between Islam and the rest of the world. I will maintain that it too will prove to be relatively minor, eventually reduced to a few footnotes in the history books. Islam has broad popular appeal but the desire of radicals to reestablish the caliphate with themselves at its head does not. The caliphs had fourteen hundred years of history to demonstrate that theirs was not a sound governing mechanism that would satisfy the masses. Radical claims that they will get it right this time ring hollow.
     I don’t agree that liberal democracy represents the end of history. It is a conceit to think no one will ever have a better idea. But I do agree that for now liberal democracy has triumphed. At the moment no one does have a better idea. Aside from a few crackpots and elderly leftist professors nobody believes in communism anymore. We still have critics of capital vs. labor, the gap between rich and poor. There are those who think government should be larger or smaller, and those who believe we are destroying the planet. But the fundamental revolutionary ideals of freedom and equality under the law have proven to be an enduring and universal bond. Hegel was right about that much.