Au nom de l’humanité nous supprimerons les milliers…

This February, during the run-up to war with Iraq, George W. Bush made a landmark speech to the American Enterprise Institute; a speech that gives us perhaps the clearest insight into his vision for the future of Iraq. Cutting through the demonisations of Saddam Hussein’s regime and paying lip service to the importance of the Security Council, we are left with this: “A liberated Iraq can show the power of freedom to transform that vital region (the Middle East), by bringing hope and progress into the lives of millions.”

The administration’s policy, whether or not it’s taken at face value, is being implemented in a reckless fashion based on troubling ideological assumptions. The question is not whether democracy is desirable or whether the administration is actually concerned with promoting it in Iraq. The problem, rather, is with the seductive and almost messianic belief that democracy can be exported through foreign intervention. Historical parallels with other ideologically driven policies and movements should give us all pause when contemplating exactly what America is trying to do. What follows below is an outline for further inquiry.

A belief in the exportability of democracy makes most sense if it’s rooted in a belief in the inevitability of democracy. Where does this key article of neoconservative faith come from? Its roots may be diffuse, but the foundational text is surely Francis Fukuyama’s celebrated 1989 essay “The End of History?” In this essay, as well as in his subsequent book, (The End of History and the Last Man; note the disappearing question mark), Fukuyama argues, claiming to follow the German idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, that History is an understandable process which proceeds to a definite end point. Fukuyama is careful to distinguish history, defined as the succession of events, from History, the dialectical process which is Hegel’s lasting contribution to Western philosophical thought. He claims that while we can not hope to predict the former, we can be certain that the latter is both “coherent and directional,” and that its final outcome is liberal democracy.

The details and implications of Fukuyama’s conclusions are too many to fairly treat here. Suffice to say that the argument is presented with adequate nuance to withstand most of the casual and misinformed criticism which has been hurled its way since 1989 (and especially since Sept. 11, 2001). It is, however, Fukuyama’s deterministic framework for arriving at his conclusions - and the extent to which neocon policy elites seem to have absorbed them - that have direct and worrisome implications for U.S. foreign policy.

Those passingly familiar with the work of Karl Marx may recall that he too took Hegel’s conception of History as a point of departure. Marx was convinced that the outcome of the historical process, which, unlike Hegel, he defined in purely materialist terms, was in fact knowable. The End of History, in Marx’s view, was of course communism, which would inevitably supplant advanced capitalism due to the contradictions inherent in the system.

At the turn of the 20th century, V. I. Lenin turned Marx’s philosophy into practice. To do so, he had to overcome the uncomfortable reality that advanced capitalism, with all its fertile contradictions, was nowhere to be found in post-Imperial Russia. Undeterred, he came up with the idea of a Vanguard Party (his very own Bolsheviks), which would seize power and transform society in the direction that he knew everything was headed anyway: towards communism. Since the End of History was known, it was easy for him to justify both to himself and to his party all the actions which they undertook.

At this point, a general connection between George W. Bush’s rhetoric and that of Lenin may suggest itself: Though they draw on diametrically opposed ideologies and have very different goals for the world, both Bush and Lenin rely on an eerily similar underlying understanding of how History is supposed to work. Lenin’s (and later Stalin’s) legacy is a testament to the dangers of allowing an ideology founded on determinism to determine action. Bush ought to take note.

Of course, to draw a direct parallel between George Bush and Lenin would be obscene in its inappropriateness. In almost every conceivable way, from hairstyle to intelligence, from political inclination to personal background, they share nothing in common. More generally, the juxtaposition of the primitive and dysfunctional political systems of revolutionary Russia with the mature institutions of the United States today makes the comparison seem even less tenable. And to imply that Bush is basing his foreign policy solely on ideological hopes of exporting democracy to the world would not do justice to the capable people in his administration who are steeped in realpolitik.

Nevertheless, I believe that the comparison is valid in a certain context. Both Marx and Fukuyama take the Hegelian conception of History as a jumping off point for their particular theses. Both have particular readings of Hegel, though Fukuyama is not as forthcoming as Marx is as to how heavily he adapts Hegel’s thought to suit his own ends. And though both Marx and Fukuyama are seductive in suggesting that the future is predetermined, I would argue that neither explicitly endorses a coherent course of action to hasten its advent - although this is surely debatable in Marx’s case.

The danger for the Bush administration, then, comes from taking the next step, and mistaking what is a brilliant and provocative heuristic like Fukuyama’s for a foolproof prescription for action. This is not to say, reductio ad absurdum, that the U.S. invaded Iraq because of Fukuyama’s book. It is rather to call attention to a disquieting similarity between Marxism/Leninism and the “End of History” worldview that seems to infuse neoconservative foreign policy, and to wonder if the latter should learn from the gargantuan folly of the former.

This article initially appeared in the November 2003 La Dotta, the student-run journal of the Johns Hopkins University SAIS Bologna Center.