from the IWM NEWSLETTER 77
Summer 2002/No.3
The End of the End of
History
by John Gray
POLITICAL COMMENTARY
THROUGHOUT
MODERN TIMES liberal states have always co-existed alongside
many
kinds of tyranny. Similarly, the modern world has always contained numerous
economic
systems – many varieties of capitalism, planned and guided economies,
and
a host of hybrid economic systems not easily classified.
Diplomacy
and international law developed to cope with the fact of diverse
regimes.
Yet throughout the 20th century global politics
was shaped by the project
of unifying the world within a single regime. Insofar as it remained committed to
Marxist
ideology, the long-term goal of the Soviet regime was world communism.
The
whole world was to be a single socialist economy, administered by forms of
governance
that were to be everywhere the same.
This
Marxist project is now widely and rightly viewed as utopian. Even so, its
disappearance
as a force in world politics has not been accompanied by an acceptance
of
a diversity of political systems. With communism’s fall we were, in Francis
Fukuyama’s
famous phrase, at the ‘end of history,’ a time when western governments
could
dedicate themselves to unifying the international system into a
single
regime based on free markets and democratic government. But this project
is
as utopian as Marxism once was, and promises to be considerably more shortlived
than
the Soviet Union.
Many
reasons exist for why the Soviet bloc collapsed, but – contrary to conventional
opinion
– economic inefficiencies were not central among them. The Soviet
bloc
disintegrated because it could not cope with nationalist dissent in Poland
and
the Baltic states and more generally because a single economic and political
system
could not meet the needs of vastly different societies and peoples.
Marxism
is a version of economic determinism. It predicts that differences between
societies
and peoples narrow as they achieve similar levels of economic development.
Nationalism
and religion have no enduring political importance, Marxists
believed.
In the short run, they can be used to fuel anti-imperialist movements.
Ultimately,
they are obstacles to the construction of socialism. Guided by these
beliefs,
the Soviet state waged an incessant war on the national and religious
traditions
of
the peoples they governed.
In
practice, Soviet rulers were compelled to compromise in order to remain in
power.
Few could be described as wholehearted ideologues. Even so, the Soviet
system’s
rigidity was largely the result of the fact that it was established on a false
premise.
The
basis of the Soviet system was the Marxian interpretation of history in
which
every society is destined to adopt the same economic system and the same
form
of government. The USSR fell apart because its monolithic institutions could
not
accommodate nations – Czechs and Uzbeks, Hungarians and Siberians, Poles
and
Mongols – whose histories, circumstances and aspirations were radically
divergent.
Today,
the global free market constructed in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse
is
also falling apart – and for similar reasons. Like Marxists, neo-liberals are
economic
determinists.
They believe that countries everywhere are destined to
adopt
the same economic system and therefore the same political institutions.
Nothing
can prevent the world from becoming one vast free market; but the inevitable
process
of convergence can be accelerated. Western governments and transnational
institutions
can act as midwives for the new world.
Implausible
as it sounds, this ideology underlies institutions such as the International
Monetary
Fund (IMF). Argentina and Indonesia have very different
problems,
but for the IMF the solution is the same: they must both become free-market
economies.
Russia at the time of communism’s fall was a militarized rustbelt,
but
the IMF was convinced that it could be transformed into a western-style
market
economy. An idealized model of Anglo-Saxon capitalism was promoted everywhere.
Unsurprisingly,
this highly ideological approach to economic policy has not
succeeded.
Indonesia is in ruins, while Argentina is rapidly ceasing to be a first-world
country.
Russia has put the neo-liberal period behind it and is now developing
on
a path better suited to its history and circumstances.
Countries
that have best weathered the economic storms of the past few years
are
those – like India, China and Japan which took the IMF model with a large
grain
of salt. To be sure, like the few remaining Marxists who defend central
economic
planning,
the ideologues of the IMF claim that their policies did not fail;
they
were not fully implemented. But this response is disingenuous. In both cases,
the
policies were tried – and failed at great human cost.
If
the global free market is unraveling, it is not because of the human costs of
its
policies
in countries such as Argentina, Indonesia and Russia. It is because it no
longer
suits the countries that most actively promote it. Under the pressure of a
stock
market downturn, the US is abandoning policies of global free trade in favor
of
more traditional policies of protectionism. This turn of events is not
surprising.
Throughout
its history, America has always tried to insulate its markets from foreign
competition.
So history has once more triumphed over ideology.
With
America’s loss of interest the chief prop of neo-liberal policies has been
pulled
away. Mainstream politicians may still nod reverently when the global free
market
is invoked, but in practice the world is reverting to an older and more
durable
model. It is being tacitly accepted that in the future, as in the past, the
world
will
contain a variety of economic systems and regimes. The global free market is
about
to join communism in history’s museum of discarded utopias.
John Gray is Professor of
European Thought
at the London School of
Economics. His
latest book, Straw
Dogs: Thoughts on
Humans and Other
Animals, is to be
published by Granta Books
(London) this
September.