Morbid Symptoms at the End of History
“The end of history will be a very sad time” lamented Francis Fukuyama in his 1989 essay ‘The End of History?,’ published in The National Interest. “I can feel in myself, and see in others around me, a powerful nostalgia for the time when history existed.” Opinion mongers have, in the wake of the outbreak of war in Ukraine this past February, been anxious to point to Fukuyama’s piece, written as the Soviet Union was in its death throes, as the example par excellence of western naivety and an unwarranted belief in the ultimate triumph of liberal democracy. But another, less noticed theme of the essay and the book that followed it proved to be prescient.
Present in Fukuyama’s essay and reflected in the society he spoke for was, in the aftermath of the Cold War, a deeply melancholic sentiment, even more surprising given that the values they championed were at their zenith. Victory in the Cold War should have been a moment for elation, yet what came instead was ennui. John Le Carre’s dutiful cold warrior George Smiley muses in The Secret Pilgrim (1990) that the passing of an epoch leaves people “frightened of losing everything they thought they had, and perhaps everything they thought they were as well.” Those for whom the Cold War had provided a sense of purpose, of meaning, and grand ideological struggle looked with apprehension at the new world that beckoned, one of, in Fukuyama’s words, “liberal democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access to VCR’s and stereos.
Coming from the likes of Michael McFaul, the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, declarations of the return of history and the onset of a new Cold War – “there's also this ideological dimension of autocrats versus democrats that does remind me of the Cold War […] we got lazy. We thought everybody was becoming democratic and thought it was just a matter of time until everybody joined the liberal democratic world” - that accompanied the invasion of Ukraine were not lamentations, nor were they dispassionate analyses of the situation. No, they were rather the peculiarly hopeful musings of those pining for an escape from the post-historical boredom and listlessness that Fukuyama identified, and a return to the neat ordering that the Cold War provided. But this has proven a false promise, with Russia an imperfect foil for the west and its defenders.
Contemporary Russia, far from being a meaningful ideological alternative to the west, is merely the endpoint of the market forces that define it taken to their most vulgar extreme, where private interests brazenly loot the state, a legacy of the laissez-faire shock doctrine prescribed in the ‘90s. Even the sham referenda in the annexed territories only show the lack of an alternative to the western model with any purchase, as Moscow is unable to imagine a way other than pantomiming the democratic process. What’s more, the incoherence of the myths meant to create a new and invigorated Russian national consciousness hints at their ultimate futility. The totemic symbols used by the likes of Alexander Dugin are mixed and matched with clumsiness and stupidity: Soviet revolutionary radicalism and anti-modern traditionalism, anarchism, and reactionary Christianity. That these eclectic efforts strain credulity reveals the difficulty of their project – putting a veneer of intellectual respectability on a bankrupt system, one that reflects the worst elements of its adversaries rather than offering an alternative to them. In a 1997 essay, Dugin wrote that “the Russians are longing for freshness, for modernity, for unfeigned romanticism, for living participation in some great cause […] the sweet process of creating history.” What’s more, seemingly few people in Russia would have, in the bleak years of the ‘90s, been more anxious for such a cause than the current head of state, a man whose background in the intelligence services meant that the end of the Cold War left him not just without purpose but with his livelihood in doubt.
With this in mind, the attempts from both Russian and western intellectuals and policy-makers to cast the war in Ukraine as a civilizational struggle akin to the Cold War, the language of which they frequently deploy – both Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov and The New Statesman have declared the onset of a “new Iron Curtain”, appear less as a convincing explanation and instead as desperate attempts to shake off the listlessness haunting them for 30 years. Fukuyama concluded his essay with an eye toward the future, musing that “perhaps this very prospect of centuries of boredom at the end of history will serve to get history started once again.” For his ilk, the Ukraine war appears to offer such an opportunity, a return to the certainty and vigor of the age of ideologies. They will be disappointed.
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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the wider St. Andrews Foreign Affairs Review team.
