Francis Fukuyama

In the summer of 1989, I argued that we had in effect reached the "end of history." Ever since then, every development in world politics, from the crisis in Somalia to the Balkan wars to genocide in Rwanda has led commentators to charge that I was wrong and that history was still ongoing.

This has been no more so than after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon. It is obvious that the attacks constituted "history" in a conventional sense. But the way in which I used the word history, or rather, History, was different and meant in the Marxist-Hegelian sense: it referred to the evolutionary progress of mankind over the centuries toward what we recognize as modernity, characterized by institutions like liberal democracy and technologically driven capitalism.

My observation, made back in 1989 as communism was collapsing, was that this evolutionary process did seem to be bringing ever larger parts of the world toward modernity. And if we looked beyond liberal democracy and markets, there was nothing else there toward which we could expect to evolve; hence we had reached the end of history. While there were retrograde areas that resisted or rejected that process, it was hard to find a viable alternative type of civilization that people actually wanted to live in after the discrediting of socialism, monarchy, fascism and other types of authoritarian rule.

This view has been challenged over time by many people, and perhaps most articulately by my former teacher, Samuel Huntington. He argued in a 1993 article that rather than progressing toward a single global system, the world remained mired in a "clash of civilizations" where the world's six or seven major cultural groups would coexist without converging and constitute the new fracture lines of future global conflict. Since the stunningly successful attack on the center of global capitalism was evidently perpetrated by Islamic extremists unhappy with the very existence of Western civilization, Huntington's view would seem on the surface to be correct.

I believe that in the end I am right and that Huntington is wrong: Modernity is a very powerful freight train that will not be derailed by recent events, however painful and unprecedented. Democracy and free markets will continue to expand over time as the dominant organizing principles for much of the world. But it is worthwhile thinking about what the true scope of the present challenge is in the wake of recent events.

It is clear that modernity has a cultural basis. That is, liberal democracy and free markets do not work at all times and everywhere simply because they are rational and universally appealing. Rather, they work best in societies with certain prior values and commitments whose origins may not be entirely rational. It is not an accident that modern liberal democracy emerged first in the Christian West, since the universalism of democratic rights can be seen in many ways as a secularized form of Christian universalism. This was, at any rate, the view of philosophers from Tocqueville and Hegel to the antidemocrat Nietzsche.

The central question raised by Huntington is whether institutions of modernity such as liberal democracy and free markets will work only in the West, or whether there is something much broader in their appeal that is making headway in other non-Western societies with different cultural starting points. I believe there is: The empirical proof lies in the progress that democracy and free markets have made in regions like East Asia, Latin America, Orthodox Europe, South Asia and even Africa.

Japan has adopted the major political and economic institutions of the West, and yet succeeded in retaining its own cultural identity and values. Proof of the integrating power of modernity lies also in the millions of Third World immigrants who vote with their feet every year to live in Western societies and eventually assimilate Western values. The flow of people moving in the opposite direction, and the numbers of people who want to blow up what they can of the West, is by contrast negligible.

But there does seem to be something about Islam, or at least the fundamentalist versions of Islam that have been dominant in recent years, that makes Muslim societies particularly resistant to both the political and economic forms of modernity. Of all contemporary cultural systems, the Islamic world has the fewest democracies (Turkey alone qualifies), and contains no countries that have successfully made the transition from Third to First World status in the manner of South Korea or Singapore.

There are plenty of non-Western people who prefer the economic and technological part of modernity and hope to have it without having to accept democratic politics or Western cultural values as well (e.g., China or Singapore).

There are others who like both the economic and political versions of modernity, but just cannot figure out how to make it happen (Russia and some eastern European countries are examples). For them, transition to Western-style modernity may be long and painful, taking place in stages.

China's economic modernization, for example, has already generated pressure for a more open political system, as was the case in both Taiwan and South Korea. There are no insuperable cultural buffers that are likely to prevent such societies from eventually getting to the end of history, and they constitute about four-fifths of the world's people.

Islam, by contrast, is the only cultural system that seems to regularly produce people like Osama bin Laden. the Taliban in Afghanistan, or Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran who reject modernity lock, stock and barrel. This raises the question of how representative such people are of the larger Muslim community, and whether this rejection is somehow inherent in Islam. For if the rejectionists are more than a lunatic fringe, then Huntington is right that we are in for a protracted conflict made dangerous by virtue of their technological empowerment.

The answer that politicians East and West have been putting out since Sept. 11 is that those sympathetic with the terrorists are indeed a "tiny minority" of Muslims, and that the vast majority are appalled by what happened. It is important for them to say this to prevent Muslims as a group from becoming targets of prejudice.

The problem is that there are many gradations of sympathy, and that dislike and hatred of the United States and what it stands for are probably much more widespread than the politicians would like to admit. Certainly the group of people willing to go on suicide missions and actively conspire against the United States is tiny. But sympathy may be manifest in nothing more than initial feelings of Schadenfreude at the sight of the collapsing towers, an immediate sense of satisfaction that the United States was getting what it deserved, to be followed only later by pro forma expressions of disapproval. By this standard, sympathy for the terrorists is characteristic of much more than a "tiny minority" of Muslims in the Muslim world, extending from the middle classes in countries like Egypt and Jordan to members of immigrant communities in the West.

This broader dislike and hatred would seem to represent something much deeper than mere opposition to U.S. policies like support for Israel or the Iraq embargo, encompassing a hatred of the underlying society. After all, many people around the world, including many Americans, disagree with U.S. policies, but this disagreement does not send them into paroxysms of anger and self-destructive violence. Nor is it necessarily a matter of ignorance about the quality of life in the West.

The conspirator Mohamed Atta was a well-educated man from a well-to-do middle class Egyptian family who lived and studied in Germany and the United States for several years. Perhaps, as many commentators have speculated, the hatred is born out of a resentment of Western success and Muslim failure, particularly among Arabs who have historical memories of past greatness.

But rather than psychoanalyze the Muslim world, perhaps it makes more sense to ask whether radical Islam constitutes a serious alternative to Western liberal democracy for Muslims themselves. (It goes without saying that, unlike communism, radical Islam has virtually no appeal in the contemporary world apart from those who are culturally Islamic to begin with.) For Muslims themselves, political Islam has proven much more appealing in the abstract than in reality.

After 23 years of rule by fundamentalist clerics, most Iranians, and in particular nearly everyone under the age of 30, would like to live in a far more liberal society. The Afghans who have experienced Taliban rule have much the same feelings. All of the anti-American hatred that has been and will be drummed up as events unfold over the coming weeks and months does not translate into a viable political program for Muslim societies to follow in the years ahead.

A bigger problem for the West than even the foreign policy crisis it faces is the issue of Muslim minority communities. Europeans have argued for many years that it is harder to assimilate Muslims than people from other cultures. It is not clear whether this is true--much of the problem lies with the Europeans themselves, who have not been terribly welcoming to immigrants and have encouraged them not to assimilate by not granting them full citizenship and rights. But the question remains: What would happen to a liberal democracy if it had to deal with a minority community that feels fundamentally alienated from and hostile to its surrounding society?

The United States has always prided itself on its ability to take people from different cultures and backgrounds and turn them into Americans within a generation or two. The experience of Japanese-Americans who were sent to internment camps during the Pacific War has sensitized people to the ways in which external threat can harm the rights of U.S. citizens. (My own family was sent to a camp and my grandfather lost his hardware business in Los Angeles as a result.)

But there were virtually no instances of disloyalty on the part of the Japanese-American community during the war, and members of this community have completely assimilated into U.S. society in subsequent years. Whether this will be the case with other immigrant groups remains to be seen.

We remain at the end of history because there is only one system that has and will continue to dominate world politics--the liberal democratic West. This does not imply a world free from conflict, nor the disappearance of culture as a distinguishing characteristic of societies.

But the conflict we face is not the clash of several distinct and equal cultures struggling among one another like the great powers of 19th-century Europe, as Huntington suggests. The clash consists of a series of rearguard actions in the various provinces of world politics, from societies whose traditional existence is indeed threatened by modernization. The strength of the backlash reflects the severity of this threat. But time and resources are on the side of modernity, and I see no lack of a will to prevail in the United States today.

Fukuyama is professor of international political economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and author of 'The End of History and the Last Man.' Han är också med i gänget, Bolton, Kristol, Perle, Wolfowitz o.a., de som förespråkade angreppen på Afghanistan och Irak.