After the End of History

By AISHA LABI Tuesday, Jun. 11, 2002

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His academic creden-tials are impeccable and he's on the faculty of Johns Hopkins, one of the U.S.'s leading universities. But political scientist Francis Fukuyama is no cloistered don. His 1989 essay, The End of History, which predicted the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, earned him a reputation for prescient analysis that resonated far beyond the halls of higher learning. Originally written as an article for an obscure foreign policy journal, The End of History — which presented the end of the cold war as evidence of the triumph of liberal democracy over all other political ideologies — became a best-selling book that catapulted Fukuyama into the underpopulated ranks of famous public intellectuals.

The topic of his latest book, Our Posthuman Future, is as timely now as the failure of communism was in 1989. When, on the 10th anniversary of his landmark article, Fukuyama was asked to reflect on what had changed since its publication, he found himself focusing on biotechnology. Alarmed by the potentially sinister consequences of people being able to manipulate genes and control evolution, he envisions a threat to humanity itself. "Science and technology are two of the big forces driving history forward," he says. "This new technological era is clearly going to have implications for politics." He warns that without proper regulation, the worst-case scenario would be a world divided between genetic haves and have-nots. "We could get people making choices with regard to their children that will lead to quirky results," he says.

On the socioeconomic front, Fukuyama says the strain that rapidly aging populations and low birth rates place on national resources, particularly in Europe, is of serious concern. The influx of immigrants needed to fill labor shortages is already contributing to social upheaval and, he says, "unless governments get serious about addressing this in moderate form now, it's going to come back to haunt them in a much nastier form later on."

Fukuyama's view that biotechnological advances create a slippery slope that only a strict regulatory framework can control has prompted much comment — and criticism. As a member of President Bush's advisory Council on Bioethics, he's in a position to help shape policy — and he's no stranger to the corridors of power. He served two stints at the State Department under previous Republican administrations and has close ties to many in the current White House.

Fukuyama, 49, started out as a liberal and shifted rightward — to the dismay of his father, an ultra-liberal Congregational Church preacher who escaped being confined with the rest of his family to a Japanese internment camp during World War II thanks to a college scholarship. Fukuyama sometimes attends church with his wife and three children, but stresses that religion plays little role in shaping his theories. Though he's usually labeled a neo-conservative, he says that "for biotechnology the old signposts aren't much help. The right is very split on this issue, as is the left." The walls that separate the two sides of the biotechnology debate could prove more difficult to breach than the Berlin Wall whose fall Fukuyama predicted.

Q&A
TIME: Is history still over, with liberal democracy prevailing?
FUKUYAMA: The big story of global politics is modernization — a process that begins with economic development and brings in its wake democracy and a kind of cultural convergence. It's replaced the cold war as the basic structure of world politics. There are those societies that participate in it, those who would like to participate in it and can't, and others that reject it powerfully.

TIME: How does Sept. 11 affect your argument?
FUKUYAMA: It's a serious challenge in the sense that you have these radical Muslims who clearly reject some key basic aspects of Western civilization — consumerism and secular politics.

TIME: Did the extent of this rejection surprise you?
FUKUYAMA: It surprised everybody. A lot of people had thought Islamic radicalism was on the wane

TIME: You've also expressed surprise at the U.S.-Europe divide .
FUKUYAMA: Particularly on the role of international institutions. I think it's a widely held American view that there isn't this "international community" out there that's more legitimate than the elected representatives of the people. Most Europeans are at a point in their national histories where they'll accept judgements by this larger community.