Why Liberalism Means Empire
Democracy isn't the end of history, it's a product of power.
History ended on October 14, 1806. That was the day of the Battle of Jena, the turning point, as far as philosopher G.W.F. Hegel was concerned, in humanity’s struggle for freedom. Once Napoleon triumphed over the reactionary forces of Prussia, the ideals that post-revolutionary France represented—not just liberté, égalité, and fraternité, but the modern state and its legal order—would serve as the model for Europe and world.
When Francis Fukuyama revisited this idea in “The End of History?”—with a question mark—in the pages of The National Interest a quarter century ago, he had to remind readers what Hegel had meant. Events would still happen, including big events like wars. What had ended was a sequence of political and cultural forms whose internal contradictions each gave rise to the next step in freedom’s development: from the ancient world to medieval Christendom to, finally, what one 20th-century interpreter of Hegel called “the universal homogeneous state.” Or as Fukuyama called it, “liberal democracy.”
By 1989 it was obvious that Hegel had been right: the long series of rear-guard actions attempted by Europe’s reactionary powers came to an end after World War I. Fascism and Soviet Communism thereafter proposed themselves as alternative endings to history—competing modernities—but neither could prevail against liberal democracy, whether on the battlefield or in the marketplace.
This was welcome news to America’s foreign-policy elite. Fukuyama had not set out to justify a “unipolar moment” or America’s world role as the “indispensable nation”—indeed, he thought boredom lay ahead for those unlucky enough to live beyond history’s end—yet his essay could not help but add to the triumphalism of the time. The Cold War was over; henceforth, the American way of life would be everyone’s way of life: inevitably, forever, from Moscow to Beijing to Baghdad.
“The victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas of consciousness,” Fukuyama wrote, “and is as yet incomplete in the material world.” America’s mission would hence be to complete it, through international trade agreements, promotion of human rights, and of course war.
But what if Fukuyama was wrong and liberal democracy is not the end of the history after all? What if, on the contrary, the American way of life is an accident of history—one made possible only by a special kind of global security environment?
What in fact has triumphed over the last 250 years—not since the Battle of Jena in 1806 but since the end of the Seven Years’ War in 1763—is not an idea but an institution: empire. Successive British and American empires created and upheld the world order in which liberalism could flourish. Fukuyama’s “liberal democracy” turns out to be a synonym for “the attitudes and institutions of a world in which Anglo-American power is dominant.”
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- Liberal democracy is unnatural.
- It is a product of power and security, not innate human sociability.
- It is peculiar rather than universal, accidental rather than teleologically preordained.
- And Americans have been shaped by its framework throughout their history; they have internalized liberalism’s habits and rationales.
- Not surprisingly, they have also acquired the habits and rationales of empire—and now they must understand why.
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