When you declare the "end of empires" you seem to forget how modernity has reduced the relative importance of the territory in favour of other geopolitical variables such as technology, economic strenght and diplomatic relations. Also, is Fukuyama really wrong? isnt the social networks allowed by modern technology really an extension of the liberalism/individualism mindset that Fukuyama pointed to?

I should preface this comment by saying that I have never read his book. However...

The meaning of the term "End of History" was the following. All nations would adopt our system of government because it was the best one. Period. Fukuyama believed there was one ultimate, super, great system of governance that all nations would eventually adopt - our system, which was based on elected officials, human rights, and capitalism.

I agree with him that there is one best system of governance. We may never discover what that system is. But I believe it exists. However, based on the events of this past year, I am convinced that we do not have it.

Nonetheless, I do agree with Fukuyama on several points. I agree that the ideal system of government values human rights. I agree that the ideal system is basically capitalistic. Now, some of the economic policies of this system may deviate somewhat from what Fukuyama – and others – think of when they use the word capitalism. However, I think most people – including myself – have more or less a similar definition of the word. And I think most people agree that capitalism is the best economic system (by the way, I believe China has a capitalistic economy and is socialist mostly in name only).

I actually think the biggest failure of his "End of History" thesis was the part about elected officials (what we call democracy). I actually think this is a bad idea. This system does not select the right people. In fact, it doesn’t even select the people who run our government. I believe that the bureaucrats actually run our government. I wrote about this idea in an article I wrote a while ago…

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B6BI_OoKPhKjYjBhNjRjYmEtZTUzNC00MWMzLTg1OWEtOTMwMjkxYWUyZWJi

Our system of government places the responsibility for the actions of our government on the elected officials. That means the people who crafted the policies – the bureaucrats – can create policies without having to worry about being punished. This is a bad system of government as it allows the people in charge to avoid accountability. It allows our government to do idiotic and reckless things (take a look at our foreign policy over the past few decades).

Actually, in that article I wrote, I singled out the bureaucrats as the people in charge. However, I believe the media and our universities also need to accept a good deal of responsibility when things go wrong (particularly our historians).

We really do need to change our system of government. We need transparency and we need accountability.

For those of us that know better, it was never going to happen. It is not ideology that needs to be opposed but raw evil. Unfortunately we will never be free of evil, consequently the battle will be with us till the judgment.

Love the Tolkien reference ... I had thought of him even before I read it!

People have grown tired of being ruled over by Big Men with their Big Ideas. The best thing about emergent networks is that they provide stability (a few basic principles are always followed) without losing dynamism (how those principles manifest themselves can change quite rapidly if necessary).

There are not going to be any specific networks the way there are specific nations, or specific empires. Individuals and small groups will merely network between themselves.

Fukuyama gets a bad rap because most folks who cite him do not take him on his own claims bt rather what they think Fukuyama was arguing.

F sees the long 20th century as one big struggle to see what would replace dynastic imperialism. The contenders were democratic capitalism, fascism, and communism. With the defeat of the major fascist powers in 1945 and the collapse of the Soviet empire in 1989-1991, he argued that while there may be rearguard actions, that democratic capitalism won and no new global alternative would arise.

So if you think F is wrong, then what is the challenger? Not China since it has no overarching ideology. Authoritarian capitalism is not an ideology or an organizing form that challenges democratic capitalism and the Chinese have no desire to export their model. Salifist Islamism? This is the type of rearguard action F warns about. Any movement that seeks to return world politics to the 7th century is not a serious competitor to democratic capitalism but rather a response from weakness trying to fend off the baleful effects of modernity for a little while longer.

And exactly how do the various movements of the "Arab Spring" even if they are hijacked temporarily by religious fascist undermine Fukuyama?

While i am not as optimistic as Fukuyama (I think a new medievalism with no systemic struggles but plenty of simply national and regional conflict is more likley) ceertainly most of the critiques and evidence that his ideas generate do not really engage these points.

It is not ideology that needs to be opposed but raw evil. Unfortunately we will never be free of evil, consequently the battle will be with us till the judgment. Good Work!
massagista
avioes venda

In the run-up to the real story, the author says Chinggis Khaan's Mongol warriors were named "Tatars" by Europeans who superstitiously believed they were warriors from Tartarus - Latin word for the netherworld.

This is wrong in two ways.
1) The Tatars were, and are still to this day a Mongolic tribe. They were not named by the Europeans. The Tatars were incorporated into the expanding Mongol Empire as it moved into Central Asia and absorbed at most or all the various Turkic tribes in that region. As some of the fastest and toughest riders the Grand Khaan encountered in his expanding empire, he often took pride in the skill of the Tatars, and gave them a vanguard role to play in new conquests. This name has nothing to do with backward, uninformed, medieval European superstition.

2) The Europeans referred to Mongolian warriors as "Tartars", with an "R" before the second "T". This was the reference to Tartarus and all that nonsense.

Please don't confuse the name of a real and still-extent Turko-Mongol tribe with some ill-informed medieval slur from 13th century European ignorance.

I think this analysis misses or willfully distorts Fukuyama's main argument, a very common problem. Most of the critics of "The End of History" - at least those I have read-seem not to have read the book.

The main argument of "The End of History" is that the intellectual and institutional alternatives to liberal, democratic capitalism as social-political concepts have been discredited, are no longer viable. Thus liberal-democratic capitalism - which Fukuyama defines very broadly to include both the U.S. political economy and social democratic states like Sweden, may be the preferred form of modern human organization.

I think that is a pretty powerful argument which has little or nothing to do with the rise and fall of empires, nation states or "networks" like the Tea Party Movement. Is Arquilla really saying that ad hoc networks will become viable alternatives to liberal democratic capitalism? I find this very hard to believe.. thankfully!!!!

Agree or not, I see little connection between what Fukuyama is saying and the content of this article.

John Arquilla fell into the same trap many accuse Fukuyama of falling in to: seeing one small characteristic of adaptation (I wouldn't really call anything I have seen this year "change") and extrapolating that characteristic into a world-wide revolutionary storm of sweeping paradigm shifts.

Taking network analysis (a tactic which has its own faults) and trying to apply it to the Arab Spring or any other such occurrence this century is inherently faulty unless we can establish how the network is constructed and for what purpose. Then, of course, we will find that each are unique anyway.

I think Arquilla's logic leap that Occupy Wall Street is the same as Al-Quaeda is akin to reading the title of Fukuyama's book and understanding its thesis.

Much more academic work and observance needs to be done before Arquilla convinces anyone that leaderless "people power" is the government of the future. Especially in that part of the world, leaders will rise, provide direction to the masses, then give the direction either the movement needs, or is willing to accept (two entirely different things, but both prevalent in history).

I think I will relegate this article into the dustbin of history.

Why after over two decades since the fall of the Berlin wall have the western intelligencia not arrived at new critical view of our economic system? Is it really within the realm of possibilities that the regulated free market is the best of all possible worlds? We have come to expect that cell phones, computers, power grids, medical access, … will all improve with in a year or two and be totally transformed on the timescale of decades. Why do we not expect a transformation the way in which we provide for ourselves with our various needs?

That this critique does not yet exist is not an expression of satisfaction with the status quo. The Occupy and to a lesser extent its predecessor the Tea Party movement come from opposite sides of the political spectrum, but both arose from insurgencies within their political cultures. Dissatisfaction is what unites both movements.

Link

All very nice, this slosh of empires, nations, networks, neo-liberal corporate economics, and electoral "democracies." Dated.

What we are seeing is the emergence of global banks and corporations as the real centers of power and determiners of government policy. Despite all the popular protests and networks, what is emerging is a world of corporate feudalism whose "bread and circuses" consist of "democratic" elections and entertainment-focused media (including the news), Who gets elected means very little relative to the control of governments by corporations and their allies in the military. Elections, media and recreational drugs are the opiate of the people.

The use of the internet is being brought under corporate and government control. Within 20 years it will not be possible for revolutionaries to use media networks in their efforts. The Chinese model of media control is coming to America. Corporations and the military want it. There may be hold-outs in a few countries (like Sweden) where there is no possibility of revolution anyway. Not significant.

China and the USA and the UK and now Europe are different models of corporate control (the Chinese Communist Party and the Red Army being huge corporate conglomerates). Governments serve the corporate lords, and no election changes that reality.

As in feudal times armies (including the police) are becoming professionalized, that is, mercenary, with the troops working in a "career," voluntarily limiting their perspective to that of their officers, and living divorced from the civilian life of the nation state they allegedly serve. In fact their governments will use them to serve corporate interests. Of course patriotic propaganda will effectively obscure what is really happening. To keep patriotism buzzing some wars will probably be necessary, especially if they serve to consolidate corporate interests in some way. Plus the military, armed to the teeth, will want to use those arms in battle. So let them have some wars that do not involve the general population at all.

The corporate lords have the power, and they exercise it, to take away jobs, hire slave labor, and throw previously prosperous people into economic marginality. They can drive down wages anywhere, and they do. They can eliminate government social benefits through "austerity," and they are doing so. The world is their playground, every government their servant or partner.

This corporate feudalism does require a large number of prosperous servants with degrees from elite schools, or with valuable technical skills. And fairly prosperous lower levels servants with degrees from lesser schools. The rest of the population can be kept on a subsistence level, or left to fend for themselves.

The corporate feudal world can operate quite well with 30-45% of the population in any country excluded from prosperity. In many countries the excluded percentage can be much higher.

Even social democratic Europe now operates solely to get cash into its big, insolvent banks by siphoning that cash through the fiction of "government bailouts" and a relentless propaganda narrative that "governments have been naughty and need to be disciplined." But the big banks, outrageously bad in their behavior, are coddled and rewarded. The bailed out governments are merely conduits to push huge amounts of cash ("paying off debts") into the big, insolvent banks in order to keep them liquid, that is, with enough ready cash to continue operating.

Corporations have no problem accepting, even celebrating, the one thing that history really teaches us: wealth is always narrowly concentrated, most people can be left poor with no consequences for the ruling elite, and that those in power require a strong mercenary military/police function to maintain control. Reformers can be blocked through political processes, revolutionaries need to be kept in line with physical force or the threat of physical force. All property, such as the internet, must eventually be brought under corporate/military control. That's the human history that operates even in the present and will do so in the future.

“So the end that Fukuyama perceived may have really been instead a great "bend of history," with the fighting between empires and nations finally, decisively resolved in the latter's favor. There are no more empires, lest one is willing to see the United States in this role -- just a few Americans on the far left and right characterize the country as such, though some others around the world are more inclined to view America this way... Yet, if this notion of a "bend" rather than an end to history is right, something must fill the void created by the fallen empires. It seems to me that networks -- the aforementioned loosely knit social aggregations of both civil and "uncivil" society actors -- are striving to do just this.” -- JOHN ARQUILLA

So the Occupy Wall Street protesters, the self-proclaimed 99%, see America as a ‘nation’ and not as an ‘empire’ ruled by corporations rather than by the anachronistic aristocracy of your forced dichotomy? In the end all grand schemes which lecture us about ‘world orders’ and ‘world views’ trip and fall on their own semiotic swords. The reality consists of the dynamics of nested hierarchies of supranational social and economic groups whose members are all vying for personal enrichment by any and all means available to their respective groups regardless of whatever names that those groups are known by. A supranational group can be as simple as the remittance workers in America, Europe and Dubai or as sophisticated as the international bankers in Liechtenstein or the Cayman Islands. The ‘networks’ as Arquilla calls them are only the traceable artifacts of those social and economic groups which can be exploited by the media and forensic investigators. Only naive fools with nothing to lose and apologists for powerful people use their own true names while blogging etc. while the rich and powerful are too intelligent and have far too much to lose to be so honest. By Arquilla's accounting these groups are labeled the “uncivil” and the “civil” respectively.

I wish it was so simple to get rid of the evil in this world. Unfortunately, evil is not like water, they don't make a Harmsco filter for evil where we can separate the bad eggs in ideology from the good ones. As long as people exist we will always have hatred, and ideology will always be a part of that.

There are many great comments in this post, I really enjoyed reading over all of these. It is amazing to see all of the insight that people have put into understanding the information that has been given to them and formulating their own opinions on Harmsco the mater.

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I agree with him that there is one best system of governance. We may never discover what that system is. But I believe it exists. However, based on the events of this past year, I am convinced that we do not have it. Nonetheless, I do agree with Fukuyama on several points. I agree that the ideal system of government values human rights. seslichat I agree that the ideal system is basically capitalistic. Now, some of the economic policies of this system may deviate somewhat from what Fukuyama – and others – think of when they use the word capitalism. However, I think most people – including myself – have more or less a similar definition of the word. And I think most people agree that capitalism is the best economic system (by the way, I believe China has a capitalistic economy and is socialist mostly in name only).