Does Libya Show Fukuyama Was Right?

by Zack Beauchamp

Matt Yglesias makes a provocative point:

Reading about the serious problems facing Libya’s sundry rebel groups as they try to put a unified political structure together I’m struck by the extent to which the past couple of years have vindicated Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History thesis. Historical events, of course, continue to occur. But each and every one of them re-enforces his 1989 point about the “the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.”

Amitav Acharya, in an interview we featured recently, disagrees:

I speak here as an IR scholar, not as a specialist in those regions. What has been happening in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere in North Africa and the Middle East does attest to the universality of the desire for freedom as you suggest. Though the question I ask is what kind of universalism or whose universalism is it? In the United States, some George W. Bush era neo-cons are celebrating that this is a vindication of their democracy promotion agenda of the kind that gave us the war in Iraq. Others see the uprisings confirming Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis. Both claims are ridiculous and if this is the kind of universalism we are talking about we are really doomed. One of the things about the Arab Spring was that it was a bottom up process; it was sought by the people of those states and societies. Its origins were local. They were not the outcome of the end of the Cold War or any other major global shock. This is what I mean by subaltern universalism.

A. McE looks at how far Fukuyama has moved from his own ideas.