Conversations With History - Francis Fukuyama

[Music] welcome to a conversation with history I'm Harry Kreisler of the Institute of International Studies our guest today is Francis Fukuyama who is a senior fellow at Stanford University his new book is the origins of political order Francis welcome to Berkeley thank you very much where were you born and raised I was born in Chicago but I basically grew up in New York City and looking back how did your parents shape your thinking about the world uh well I think probably the reason I'm an academic is because of them my father was a professor and my grandfather and my father's side was actually a fairly prominent economist at university president in Japan and so it seems to me it was almost for ordained that I'd end up you know getting a PhD in and going into a university and your father work was in religious studies yes although he was trained as an empirical sociologist so I actually inherited his collection of Max Weber and Emile Durkheim books so that the tradition lives on and it was a good start for you was there discussion of world events and and and politics and international affairs at dinner yes well definitely I you know my political views were different from his he was always actually a lot more liberal than I was and so we'd have lots of arguments over you know a whole range of subjects after I got to after I got to university and where did you do your undergraduate work I went to Cornell and at Cornell were there any teachers that you had who influenced probably the most important was Alan bloom the political theorist that's why I became a classics major so I could learn in Greek and read Plato and Aristotle and you know he shaped my interest in Western philosophy I think very deeply and it's a background that I I really you know I'm very happy I had and then go you went on to graduate school at Harvard and what led to the switch from classes philosophy to to political science well I took this detour in the early seventies when I was in college post-modernism hit the u.s. in a big way and so I actually spent a year in Paris studying with Jacques Derrida and role embarked and you know folks like that and actually having studied with them and read their books I decided it wasn't for me and so I had this kind of reaction where I went you know in a much more practical direction and ended up doing international relations in at Harvard in the Harvard government department and who there were influential in your education my dissertation advisors were Nadav saffron and Adam who LOM who did Middle East and Soviet studies respectively and then that's also where I met Samuel Huntington who was in the Carter Administration for much of my period there but had come back and so we intersected and he was probably the second after bloom probably the second important influence over my intellectual development and what was special about Huntington was it the power of the MA of his mind and the problems that he grappled with well I think so I think that you know the trouble with a lot of academics is that they focus on really narrow issues and they use a lot of jargon and it's very hard to actually relate it to any real problems Huntington was just the opposite he always picked big issues the other thing was his scope because he wrote with in political science on a whole range of topics so that included comparative politics and development national security issues of civil military relations and then later on you know about religion and so I think the range of his interest was really quite quite astonishing how important was the fact that he wrote and also was involved in policy issues that is that he theoretically he focused on issues that had policy implications well it was quite important I think that it meant that his theory was always grounded in a appreciation for real-world political issues and and I think a lot of what you do when you study policies you realize what your limitations are as a you know as a pure theorist you can imagine all sorts of possible worlds that would be great to live in but you can't actually get there and I think you know having that realistic sense was was quite important now your dissertation was on international relations what in particular at that time I was a specialist in Soviet foreign policy and I focused on Soviet foreign policy in the Middle East it's a topic that's completely disappeared so I had to find something else to do in life after that and then after completing your degree at Harvard you went where well I bounced back and forth I was in the State Department a couple of times on the policy planning staff and then my first job was with the think-tank the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica where I also did Soviet basically analyzed Soviet foreign policy and it was in between Rand and the State Department when you wrote the essay the the end of history that created such an impact and to talk a little about the the circumstances and the the setting historically the that led you to write that piece which really became a an international phenomenon well I was actually working on a couple of ran projects on the changes going on inside the Soviet Union not in foreign policy but just Gorbachev and perestroika glaze knows these big developments in the late 1980s and at one point I read a speech of Gorbachev's in which he said well the essence of socialism is competition and at that point I called up one of my political theorists friends and I said look this is the end of history if Gorbachev is saying that socialism amounts to competition there's really no meaningful difference between us and them the end of history of course referring to the Hegelian Marxist view that history or the end as a as a goal or a direction rather than a termination and that's the moment you know at some point you know I conceived of writing this article as I was on my way out of Rand and into the first Bush administration as a you know as a state department of policy planner now you were 26 years old what about this time well no when I the first time I was at that point I was I was in my 30s you you were you okay so so were you surprised by the reaction or well of course I you know I expected a few of my specialist friends would would read it and yeah so I wasn't prepared at all for the reaction you know it was just a remarkable time because this was 1989 when the whole world changed so dramatically and I think it was the conjunction of having anticipated that change by a few months and and being able to put it in a larger context that really set off this big discussion and looking back what what enabled you to to to have these insights what was it the background in theory and philosophy that you think put you in a position to see the larger well okay so the you know the the references to Hegel into this French russian philosopher Alexander Kosovo which is extremely important in France during the 1930s and 40s I think allowed me to have a more theoretical view of you know the problem of history itself but I think actually what did it for me was just paying attention to contemporary politics because things were happening very very rapidly in the Soviet Union I remember at the time going to various conferences of Soviet specialists and in a sense they're so wedded to a certain view of you know the way that political system worked that when they saw things you know changing they just didn't believe that that was happening and they they couldn't take a board you know this new reality and so I think you know in a sense just as willingness to you know look at the facts as they unroll Unruh you know unfold on the ground and being able to adjust that you know given your own priors and prejudices I think was was important now looking back at that work events have happened after the writing of that initial essay and and and of course the essay was misinterpreted people were saying oh he's saying history is over they're not going to be any more historical events which wasn't what you were saying at all and and so what would have you learned from both the reaction and and the way the world has changed since well I guess from the reaction I I guess it's just you know there's a kind of limit in public discourse as to you know the degree to which you can bring in serious philosophical ideas I think the more important question is about the way the world has changed because obviously a lot has happened in terms of you know what Huntington called the third wave of democratization this is a period that began in the 1970s with southern Europe and went on through Latin America them the fall of the Berlin Wall you know where a lot of the world became democratic I think that the thing that I took away from that whole period that is reflected in my new book on political order is the importance of institutions and the fact that you know these initial transitions to democracy actually don't yield stable democracy unless you have institutions and without a state without a government that can actually enforce rules without a you know rule of law that's really rooted in a you know set of legal institutions it's very hard to sustain a democratic practice and I think the difficulty of getting to that point is is something that I probably initially underestimated but when we talk about the book let me ask you this question what do you think is the skill set that enables a scholar a thinker to be able to confront these very great changes you know in the world and think about them in a rigorous systematic way well it's it's complicated I you know had basically a humanities background rather than a social science background I didn't spend a lot of time early on doing quantitative methods and so forth and I you know the humanities is not in great shape in modern academia but I think that's too bad because I actually think that confronting you know great thinkers of the past and understanding the world you know through their perspectives actually allows you to put things into a much broader context that then you get from the kind of pre-professional compartmentalized ways that universities tend to teach subjects and so I think that you know I'm really glad that I had a liberal arts you know a broad liberal arts education when I was an undergraduate a good example of that point seems to be in both in the end of history and then in this new book you talk about the the concept of recognition which which had emerged out of Hegel which which actually seems critical in these times that want to see that important talk a little about that I mean because that that is an idea that one doesn't find often in the literature on public policy well you know the economists think that everybody is basically motivated by material self-interest but recognition is something different recognition is between you and another person that person's recognition of your status and your dignity as a human being and if you think about it a huge part of our modern politics is about the politics of recognition so I'm a you know a woman a gay you know a Ukrainian nationalist of all of these identities are things that you know in the past were undervalued Ukraine wasn't an independent nation you know women were held in subordinate positions and a lot of the demands and politics are actually not so much demands for material resources as demands for recognition and I think you know you look at what what happened in Tunisia with this vegetable seller Mohamed Bouazizi who tried to you know he had his vegetable cart confiscated he complained to the authorities they didn't do anything he was slapped by a policeman insulted and you know essentially the regime was not recognizing his status as a as a citizen you know it was treating him as a nobody and so I think that that's what provoked his enormous anger over offended dignity and I think you know much of human politics has been driven by by this kind of anger and the desire that political systems recognize are our basic status and Worth is as human beings now building on this tradition of Huntington and also on the tradition of your own work and then you know events what what is the the problem in political development that you wanted to answer with your new book which is let me show it again the origins of political order well you know in a sense especially living here in the United States we take politics and political institutions for granted in fact we've got this anti status tradition in the United States where we don't like the government we don't trust it we wish it would go away or get smaller or whatnot and we don't appreciate the fact that it's actually important to have a state and not every country has that so you go to a place like you know Somalia or Afghanistan or Haiti you know the reason that they are so disorganized and chaotic is that they don't have a basic state that can enforce laws and I think you know I've been working in developing issues you know for some time and I think there's a general recognition now that the reason that most poor countries in the world are poor is not necessarily that they lack resources but that they don't have good institutions they don't have property rights they don't have a state that can maintain order you know Nigeria for example has had I don't know hundreds of billions of dollars in oil revenues over the past generation and it's had declining incomes because of the level of corruption and the failure of you know the Nigerian state to actually deliver good services to its population and so in thinking about all of this I said well okay so where does the state come from where do these basic you know things come from is a political scientist you'd think that there'd be a textbook that you could open up that would explain all of this and I you know I don't think that you know that kind of a straightforward account existed and so that's part of the reason I decided that you know I'd have to write one myself and importantly what you're trying to see politics and political development is autonomous and then ask how do we account for three institutions that are central to the establishment of liberal democracy which harkens back to your end of history essay because there you were saying well this is the world view that is literal democracy that we try out mmm-hmm that's right well so the three institutions are the state itself the rule of law and political accountability and I think part of the miracle of modern politics is that you can get states that are really about power and the use of power but that are simultaneously limited by law and limited by political accountability and so the question is how do you account for the emergence of these three in a single package and I think that you know Huntington's original his first book political order in changing societies was written in 1968 and from that I drew the single important lesson that political institutions you know have their own internal logic they may be related to economic development and to social change but not the same thing they're not so in other words modernization is not one total package and the political parts of it really need to be broken out and so that's really the issue where does the state rule of law and political accountability what was you know their their historical origin now now in addition to being rich very rich in history and looking at history and comparative terms you you draw on biological insights divides about the insights of biological theory for understanding political institutions that's kind of new that's that's that's kind of very important and what what it is through biology that you help us understand the importance of kinship and patrimonial ism is on top explain that to our audience because that is key to the evolution of the state well sure so I think that one of the big revolutions in biology over the last 50 years is the restoration of a belief in human nature if you go back to the mid 20th century most social scientists would have said human behavior is completely socially constructed human beings are almost infinitely plastic you know biology counts for nothing and I think one of the consequences of the whole genetic revolution and and what we've learned about evolutionary biology suggests that that's actually not true that all human beings actually share certain faculties cognitive faculties you know the faculty for language the two that are most important I think in politics have to do with sociability and so one is the principle with biologists called kin selection where we're altruistic and proportion to the genes that we share so in other words nepotism is biologically rooted and then the other principle of reciprocal altruism which in which we exchange favors on a direct face-to-face basis with friends essentially so friends and family are a bedrock of human sociability every primitive Society so you know they're bonded in this fashion and part of the default nature of human politics is we go back to friends and families in the absence of modern institutions that make us behave in you know in different ways and so I think understanding that biological foundation is absolutely critical and also as as products of our nature we essentially look for ruled right they look at those we are we are rule following and rule creating animals I you know rules are related to the ability to cooperate socially if you don't have rules you can't cooperate and the reason that they're now whatever it is six billion human beings on earth compared to other species is that human beings are able to cooperate on a large scale and and you know that's where they derive their their survival success so the generation of rules is something again that human beings don't need to be taught the actual content of the rules you know like don't eat pork or or you know respect your ancestors those are variable but the faculty for creating rules and the emotions that are associated with rule following and rule breaking are absolutely biologically grounded and then finally the propensity for violence basic yeah well unfortunately that's I think been one of the big drivers of human progress because in essence we learn to cooperate in order to compete with other human groups part of the reason that we've got these enormous you know brains compared to other primates is I think the requirements of social cooperation in competition with other groups of human beings and you can see this at every step in the development of social complexity that it's the need to compete over security you know military competition that has driven the evolution of more and more complex forms of social organization so so where we're walking through the bill blocks of your book and in history is there the biological basis of human nature but also I the whole power of ideas in moving history human beings have this tremendous capacity again a natural capacity for abstraction so we are constantly imagining of invisible forces that explain you know behavior in the real world so today these invisible forces are things like gravity or you know the laws of physics in the past they tended to be religious ideas about gods or spirits that explain you know why the Sun came up in the morning why you know you want to battle and I think that without this ability to abstract we wouldn't be able to master the world in the way that that we do you know other primates don't generate abstract ideas about causation and theories about causation but but human beings do that and that's you know the basis of religion basically all human societies have religious ideas except for maybe modern Western Europeans and now think that they're beyond that but but it is a you know it is a clear characteristic of the way human beings understand the world if if I compare the the end of history with this current book I have a sense that in your intellectual growth you are more aware or it's more obvious that you are aware of the complexity of the evolution of institutions now partly this may be the difference between doing philosophy and then kind of doing historical sociology and so so as you as you put these pieces together one one has the sense that you you really come to the conclusion that there that although you can identify what needs to be there the notion that there's some magic a package that can come via FedEx that would put all this together in a particular place you you you you no longer believe that and that's partly what this is about yeah I think so I think that there's a huge amount of accident and contingency in historical development that that explain why we get to the kind of institutions we have it's it's important for developing countries because we sometimes assume well because Britain or the United States went through the following stages of growth and everybody else is going to simply replicate that and I think what you realize is that those patterns of development are actually quite peculiar and the idea that other countries or other societies are going to replicate that is really a false expectation for example why do we have modern democracy today it really has to do with the survival of a feudal institution which was the estate or the Parliament into modern times it didn't survive in most European countries in France or Spain or Russia but it did survive in England and the reason we have parliamentary democracy today is the very specific accidental almost conditions by which the English Parliament managed to survive and be a dominant force in English politics but you can't take that for granted in other societies one of the virtues of your book for somebody like me who read a lot of this comparative literature say in the 60s and the 70s is that that you really added new flesh to the bones of comparative studies that you're bringing in cases like China and India to the front obviously there were area studies in the past but but they these two examples were not in the middle of the work being done on the grand theorizing I think that there's a big problem with contemporary multiculturalism you know we have to be multicultural all of our societies are de facto multicultural and we live in a globalized world where you deal with other cultures but there is a kind of political correctness involved in studying other civilizations and so the Eurocentric or anglocentric narrative that would have been taught to American schoolchildren a you know a century ago has now been displaced by one that you know that that looks at other civilizations but I think that even today they're not act adequately you know comparative I mean they really don't ask hard questions about why certain institutions evolved in certain places and they're absent in others or what the real impact of a certain set of religious beliefs was in you know the contemporary evolution of a political order before we talk a little about what you have to say about China and India I I want to bring up one other concept that you bring in the concept of spandrels which originally emerges in biology explain what that is and and how it helps us understand for accept for example the contribution of the medieval Catholic Church that's right well so spanger this is there's a famous article by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin that talked about the spandrels of San Marcos so a spandrel is an architectural space that's created by intersecting arches in a dome it actually isn't deliberately designed it's just the result of this you know geometrical you know coincidence but then they came to be decorated and they came to be seen as architectural motifs in their own right and their argument was that in biological evolution that happens a lot of times things evolved for one purpose and are useful for another and I think in the history of human institutional development you get spandrels all the time so for example the reason that the Europeans were able to exit out of clan based kinship politics was the fact that the Roman Catholic Church saw this big opportunity by changing inheritance laws to limit the ability of typing it plans to keep property within the tribe you know and the church did this I think for purely material reasons they wanted to get their own hands on these resources but they forbade concubinage and the outlaw divorce and all of these strategies that that that these kinship groups used and the result was the emergence of a much more individualistic society in Europe at a very very early point you know compared to China or India or the Arab world and so that was not an in you know the church didn't set out to destroy extended kinship but like a spandrel it just happened as a result of other intentions that it had and this is really about actors in historical context choosing a strategy so that they can see succeed in terms of economic resources and power or whatever that's right I mean they they follow all sorts of different motives some of them are idealistic ones I mean the church really was responsible for establishing the European rule of law the tradition of the European rule of law in the 11th century because it wanted to exert you know moral authority in Europe but you know so everything is a mixture of motives but no institution you know is ever simply you know anticipated and planned and just emerges as a result of somebody's plan it's really a much more accidental and nonlinear process in your book you argue that really we have to look to China to see the the formation of the first state in the way we conceive of today talk about it what was it what were the factors in China I think in the third century they say that that leads to the first I guess in quotes modern state modern state well so it's important the word modern there are many states in in Babylonia in Egypt that preceded China but China was the first Society in my view to actually create a modern bureaucracy that was impersonal II recruited that wasn't just friends and family of the Emperor and the reason that that happened was essentially military competition the Chinese fought five centuries of almost unremitting warfare in what they call the spring and autumn and warring States period that finally reduced the number of Chinese polities down to a single Chinese state the beginning of the Qin Dynasty in 221 BC and it was the need for survival in this extremely brutal and violent period that required people to be recruited on the basis of merit rather than just who was your cousin or you know who are you related to or who were your friends with and so modern institutions emerge in China there's a very very early period as a result of that kind of social competition and what what results then is the transcending of kinship ties we we've recently had on our program Anatole Levin who has a new book on Pakistan we had ambassador John Campbell as a new book on Nigeria and in both cases when you look at Nigeria you look at Pakistan its kinship and the resulting patrimonial ISM that that creates a many of the problems we're dealing with them what helped us help our audience understand why is that transcending of those ties so important well I think that you know kinship all societies go through this period where social organization is based on kinship but kinship is very limiting if you want to win a war if you want you know the best organized you know bureaucracy a lot of times it's not your relatives that can provide that also kinship just leads to small-scale societies and so the modern state was created in a way to establish a universal criteria for citizenship everybody in the territories is a member of this larger community it doesn't matter what your tribe or your ethnic group is and I think in many developing countries the problem you know Pakistan is a great example of this there has these modern state institutions are basically imposed on top of societies that are still basically organized according to kinship and patronage and you know what the social scientists call clientelism where some powerful landlord you know can mobilize thousands of peasants that work on his lands and vote whatever way that landlord wants and that's not you know that's not modern democracy and that's not a modern state after the chapter on China comes a comparison with India view and and you get I think you say around 600 you get a detour you call it in India that means that the consequences are that India does not go the route of a powerful state what were the difference is there well I think this is a testimony to the power of ideas it's really the rise of this brahmanic religion in India in the millennium before the birth of Christ you get a hierarchy established in India in which the the brahmanas the the top class are priests and they're distinctly superior to the next class down which is the class of Kershaw trios were warriors were the actual holders of political power it's interesting you know prior to that point India and China actually looked fairly similar their tribally organized the Indians raised cattle they were itinerant you know tribal groups of that that had that ate beef and then all of a sudden with the rise of this religion you get a very very different form of social organization the caste system which basically sacral eise's the division of labor in in the economy creates a very powerful set of social constraints on political powers so to this day the ability of any Indian state to penetrate down into a village level is is limited and no Indian ruler has been able to do this so I think that the fact that India is a democracy a rule a law governed democracy in China is an authoritarian state is not the product of anything that happened in the last hundred or 200 years it's not the product of colonialism these are patterns ago much further back no government in India has ever other than for a very brief period of time being able to exercise a sort of dictatorial centralized authority that Chinese governments have routinely been able to exercise over that same 2000 year period and this is the important point isn't it about why all this history matters because it really informs our understanding of the trajectory of China and India today as they are in the the company of the other BRICS and are changing the International economy no that's right I think that you know I don't want to sound like a historical determinist because in fact you know countries change these deeply rooted patterns of behavior they create new institutions and then they veer off in different directions but I do think that without an understanding of some of the deeper historical patterns that exists you just not going to understand the present in China for example you know what they invented really was a high-quality centralized bureaucratic form of administration that's the thing that they're good at they've been good at this for the last two thousand years they're still good at it they're much better at it than the average you know African or Middle Eastern or you know Latin American country and if you don't appreciate you know how much history stands behind that I don't think you're going to understand that you know the contemporary Chinese system and and looking at the the revolution in quote in the Middle East today you're not going to be able to understand their trajectory which without understanding the breakthrough that did not occur in in the Arab countries the breakthrough of moving me on kinship and separating the church in the state yeah well I think even as we speak you have these uprisings in Yemen in Libya in Jordan you know in Syria and in all of those countries the social the actual social organization is still based on tribe or clan or you know ethnic group or sect and so in a sense there hasn't been this process of modern nation building and state building that's you know that's taken place there's some exceptions so Egypt clearly has a very strong you know national identity and sense of separate statehood but that also suggests that Egypt's path towards actually creating a real democracy is probably going to be easier than Libya which wasn't even a country until the Italian has brought these you know disparate provinces of the Ottoman Empire together and said okay your your one country huntington introduced also the idea of political decay and you address that concept today what what what are the the two factors that lead to political decay that is the the unraveling of these the sectoral components of liberal democracy well I think they're the sources you know one important source is is just the stickiness of institutions so we human beings create rules institutions but we invest them with a kind of intrinsic worth either through religion or through you know deep historical tradition and when external circumstances change we we don't modify them and so we're kind of stuck with dysfunctional institutions and in the book there are many historical examples of this I actually think that we may have in the United States today you know a little bit of a case of this because our system of checks and balances is so effective that it's actually preventing you know important decisions from being being made the other source of political decay I think is anytime a society comes under stress on the modern institutions you know don't function as well what gets reasserted friends and family you know this this biological urge to you know as a kind of default and a form of social organization that leads to political corruption and the you know the recapture of the state by you know especially by wealthy elites this book your new book is one of a projected two volumes it takes us up to the French Revolution in and one to two of the factors that you touch upon in the latter part of the book which really change the equation you know in in the episodes to come are the whole international relations phenomena but also economic development talk about that a little because now what we're seeing is into this mix we have to add you know the power of international intervention processes like the the international institutions the World Trade Organization and so on well globalization is not a new phenomenon it's been going on for several hundred years this is basically the knitting together of the world through trade investment you know the movement of people ideas so no country today evolves in isolation we have foreign models we have foreign resources we have advisors we have the World Bank we have you know USAID I mean there's a lot of ways in which the development of an individual society is shaped by the ones surrounding it the other really important difference between the modern world and the historical world that I described is economic growth after the Industrial Revolution basically if you look at the curve for growth it kind of bumps along for the first 50 thousand years of human history and all of a sudden around the Year 1800 it just it goes like this and we've been on that trajectory you know hopefully we'll stay on it but it's made the you know the experience of the last few generations different because all of a sudden people are mobilized by economic growth so you think about China today hundreds of millions of workers coming off of the countryside you know lived as peasants now they're living in big cities access to TV internet a lot of different sources of information and their lives are just completely different and so that really has an important shaping it's an important shaping factor for for politics what are the issues in in our times and with the the after the fall of the Soviet Union the emergence of the US as the most powerful country in the world is the whole question of how one can intervene in the internal affairs of countries to to help them achieve the end result of liberal democracy and I think as a result of this recent period you you've changed your thinking an idea that he appears several times in the book is you know it really dependent depends on the circumstances on the ground there are limits to what intervention can achieve now in the United States the notion that the US could intervene was really the neoconservative agenda what what have we learned from that experiment what did you learn from that experiment because you you saw yourself as a neoconservative but but you you broken with that tradition yeah well I think that if you just look at the history of American nation building efforts first of all we don't actually don't learn very much from our own you know mistake so there's a kind of historical amnesia but I think that you know the main lesson that emerges is that Americans are too impatient you know we go into Haiti or Nicaragua or you know Vietnam or more recently Iraq and Afghanistan and we've got about a four or five year attention span and we want to fix these countries and give them strong governments rule of law in length of time and if they don't measure up you know at the end of this period we got frustrated and then we you know we we leave and I think that this you know simply doesn't appreciate the difficulty of helping countries to implant-- strong institutions it is something that other outside powers can do but it takes you know maybe a generation long commitment and I think that that's something that you know Americans are too impatient to release it around for so so a secondary purpose in a way of this book is to say hey this is really complex stuff if you're going to try to do this and it would be if one were to give the book to policy makers and they should read it you know I think what you're left with is the notion you do need patience you need to have a big picture that it's not not only in the sense of what's going on now but in kind of the history of these places and actually our own history that's right Americans tend to project their own experience on other societies and they tend not to really absorb you know the real context in which these things are happening so in fact that's what you know it's one of the reasons I wrote the book I've been interested in this whole question of failed States and nation-building and what do we know actually about building institutions and I think part of the reason that the history is important is to make people understand that this is a it's a difficult process but it's also one that you know is guided by the you know the specific trajectory of particular societies unless you understand that background you're really not going to be able to help them very much is we in a situation in the United States both domestically and in foreign policy where what would you call cognitive dissonance in the book drawing on the whole literature on that that that we're in danger of not adapting to the change circumstances both domestically and in terms of not learn for example the lessons of the intervention in Iraq well I think that the Iraq case was so negative that we're probably are going to learn you know that lesson I think the bigger lesson that we may not learn you know we're just used to being a hegemonic power we've gone through this too decade long period since 1989 of being the world's superpower the world is changing we're going into a much more multipolar world in which we're going to have to figure out how to share power with other countries and our ideas are not necessarily going to be as popular as dominant as they were in the past generation and that's an adjustment that I think is going to be difficult for Americans to make the big question at the heart of the end of history is very relevant today because when we look at the success of China it appears that we have a competing idea about how you bring economic benefit to the most people it's not clear that that Chinese experiment will work what what are your your thoughts about looking at China and the limits of the trajectory that it's on and how that compares with your ideas about the triumph of liberal democracy well China has got a lot of short-term advantages over a Democratic Society because they can make decisions you know being an authoritarian country and they're pretty good at macroeconomic policy so you go to China today and you see all this wonderful infrastructure they've been able to invest in high-speed rail and dams and hydro and all of this stuff and we in the United States you know by contrast with our checks and balances political system are pretty much stuck in a highly polarized you know atmosphere in Washington we can't make big decisions about dealing with long-term you know fiscal issues health care whole raft of issues I think however that the you can't answer the question which is the better system looking at the short-run you have to ask how sustainable are either these systems over the long run and there I still think that our system has got a lot of advantages because in the end it is going to be more flexible the one problem the Chinese have really not been able to solve is what they call the bad emperor problem where they've got a good group of leaders at the top they're roling or wrong along and you know they're very efficient but what guarantees that they're always going to have a good ruler and and I think that's historically been their their downfall they periodically get these terrible emperors the last one was Mao who can do so much damage to a society without checks and balances that you know I think democracies in the long run their average performance is going to be better because they may not get the top level performance but they avoid the you know the worst excesses what about the the problem of global governance you you talk about that in the newest edition of the end of history this book is obviously focused on the national level what happens to States and so on but do any of these insights apply to the problems of global governments clearly we're not going to get global government but but we're attempting to navigate the international institutions that that pick up some of the slack that that can't be handled by the hegemon and and actually some of what you're saying about national States apply to global governments the question of accountability the question of rules and so on you know well we have a long way to go in global governance I mean basically we're at a kind of tribal level of development with regard to global governance where there's no sovereign that can actually enforce rules there's no third-party enforcement that's basically everybody's you know got self-help and I think that we're not going to get too global government what we're going to have to have is some in-between solution that will create some degree of accountability on you know particular issues I think we're headed towards a world in which we're going to have multiple overlapping international organizations and forms of cooperation because I do think that a kind of single centralized global government is going to be awfully elusive goal you identify in the concluding conclusion to the end of history newish a new edition of book to the problem of of terrorism of non-governmental actors of proliferation what what will be the the best way to deal with that in the future in this world where we don't have absolute governmental international institutions and in America it seems to be losing its resolve you know in addressing these issues well you know it's it's messy and I think each problem is going to be addressed in a different way you take the problem of the international drug trade you know that's something that is partly a matter of national policy you know Latin America wouldn't have this problem if Americans didn't consume so many drugs so part of it is a domestic you know issue with demand part of it is a matter of international cooperation between police departments between you know intelligence agencies and the like and you know part of it is a is a kind of moral question about you know mobilizing publics to you know to fight this and money laundering and the like but that's different in turn from literation or from dealing with you know global diseases each of these I think needs a solution that's you know that's fitted to the to the nature of the problem and in a sense that's the story of institutions on a national level too there isn't a global template that that fits every society these things really to evolve based on the actual interests and histories of the actors involved given your intellectual Odyssey and the problems you've grappled with it what would be your advice to students about preparing for the future if if if they wanted to see a continuation of the field of study that that this book represents well I think they got to pay attention to you know the world as it is I've got to travel they got to open their minds I think that one of the most important you know lessons for me is the one that Seymour Martin Lipset the great sociologies used to like to quote you know to his classes that person is knows only one country knows no countries basically unless you get out of that parochial context you're really not going to be able to understand your own society because if you can't see it from the perspective of someone outside the society you're not going to see it correctly and so I think that's one you know very important thing that students ought to keep in mind when you know they think about how to study and where they're going to travel and this sort of thing and then one final question what would be the takeaway from this book that you would have for policy makers in Washington I think that it should be a greater appreciation of the difficulty first of all the need for institutions and then the difficulty of implanting them and the need for a certain amount of patience and an historical perspective when they approach questions of intervention and nation-building state building and the like let me show you a book again to our audience and and recommend it highly both for its coverage it's inside and the clearness and lucidity of the writing so thank you very much frankfurt coming on our program so Thank You Harry it was a great pleasure to have you it and thank you very much for joining us for this conversation with history [Music]

Channel: UC Berkeley Events

Views: 49,123

Keywords: uc, berkeley, ucberkeley, webcast.berkeley, cal, Conversations, with, History, Harry, Kreisler, Francis, Fukuyama, The, End, of, Origins, Political, Order

Id: X5Qy_4249JA

Length: 56min 1sec (3361 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 03 2011