Silbey 1 Spenser Silbey Mr.

Tickles IR 18 November 2010 Fukuyama is the Craziest Person I Have Ever Been Assigned to Read for a Class; What is Wrong With You, Newman? 1. The clash of civilizations, a concept created by noted racist Samuel Huntington, describes the central conflict of the late 20th and emerging 21st century as what takes place when the fundamentally Western values of liberal democracy and market capitalism bump up against a resurgent fundamentalist Islam. Policies such as the never-ending War on Terror, sanctions against the Iranian pursuit of nuclear weapons, even while we allow Israel to have such weapons without disclosing their existence, and anti-Muslim domestic policies and public attitudes in both the US and Western Europe are all symptoms of this conflict. Attempts to Americanize the world, also known as globalization or, to Fukuyama, modernity, but which truly represent a new form of imperialism, are seen in attempts at expanding free trade and foreign investment in order to globally integrate the economy such that American domination of the system is inevitable and in interventionary foreign wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Institutions like the World Banks Structural Adjustment Program and USAID assist in forcibly promoting democracy through financial means. This neoliberal regime of imposing both capitalism and democracy through violent or coercive policies is the Americanization that has created blowback from movements like al-Qaeda. 2. According to Fukuyama, civil peace is impossible because certain cultures, notably Islamic ones, increasingly refuse to participate in the Western-dominated global system of capitalism and democratic structures. By clinging to the past, Fukuyama argues, these peoples are preventing the end of history, or the complete domination of neoliberal values throughout the world, and thus prevent peace from being a possibility across cultures. He lays the blame

Silbey 2 squarely on the side of the Afghans, the Pakistanis, the Iranians, and the Saudis for a conflict that is at its root a backlash to the violent and supposedly virtuous promotion of Western values. The Western arrogance in Fukuyamas paper is evident and shocking in his argument that Western neoliberal values, with roots in Enlightenment philosophers (which is itself a dubious claim), are universal positives. The very fact that there is resistance to the spread of these values disproves his argument on face, and his attempt to know the foreign other, here represented by Islam, is ham-fisted at best and shows a deep lack of understanding of any Eastern culture. 3. As I have argued above, Islam, especially its more radical elements, seek to resist the insidious spread of liberal democracy and market-oriented capitalism that has conquered much of the rest of the world. It clings to its historical cultural roots and reacts negatively to the spread of shallow and sexual permissive American popular culture. Even though Christianity continues to undergo similar conflicts in places like Northern Ireland, Fukuyama criticizes the internal warring of Islamic sects that has taken so many lives in conflicts like the Iran-Iraq War. Where Asian countries like Korea and African ones have decided to accept the spread of American neoliberal values, the Muslim world has decided to resist it. He also argues that the value of tolerance specifically is an affront to Islam, which would prefer to see states based on advocating a particular religion and its form of truth. 4. Fukuyama argues that radical Islam is a result of the change that all cultures have now undergone: from a largely rural and farming-based existence into an urban one defined by technology. Things like poverty and lack of economic growth which, ironically, tended to stem from attempts at globalization and the control of Western corporations over oil reserves, made conservative Islam an attractive option in opposition to the dominant global narrative. He argues that Saudi investment has been able to spread this form of Islamo-fascism (what the HELL does that mean?!). In fact, the return to radical Islam that Fukuyama decries so strongly was provoked entirely by American arrogance. The CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Socialist Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran in the 1950s took place solely

Silbey 3 because British Petroleum was concerned that the popular leader (TIMEs Man of the Year), would nationalize the countrys oil supplies to return its wealth to its people. The Shah that the United States installed in his place was a violent dictator who tortured and killed his own people, and when radical Islam offered an alternative to the Shahs violent secularism, the Iranian people turned towards it. This was the direct cause of the Islamic Revolution that Fukuyama identifies as the root of the current resurgence in fundamentalist Islam. In addition, the 1980s saw an unprecedented proliferation of American popular culture to the rest of the world that was not appreciated by some conservative religious elements, like Islamic conservatives, and created a fundamentalist backlash. 5. Outsiders see Americans as repugnant not only because of arrogant, idiot neoliberal writers like Fukuyama, who justify endless foreign intervention in the name of civilizing the barbarian Arabs (sounds just a little bit like what the Europeans were doing back in the 1800s, eh?), but because of the trappings of American consumerism and culture. The very assumption that our dominant values of liberal democracy and capitalism are universal goods is the kind of logic that causes the rest of the world to revile us because it is evidence of a deeper assumption that we white, thinking people know what is good for the irrational brown folks better than they themselves do. The perceived superficiality and immorality of American consumer culture, Hollywood films, sexual permissiveness, TV, and popular ignorance are all also factors in creating the resentment of the rest of the world, especially the Islamic one. 6. I think that my answers to the past five questions have done a decent job of articulating my problems with Fukuyamas thesis, but I am more than happy to continue criticizing this hack. A view of world politics based on culture and civilization is dangerous because it necessitates judgement regarding the superiority of certain cultures over others. Once a culture believes it is superior, extermination of all that is inferior is not only a possibility, but becomes a moral necessity in the name of saving the others. Nazi Germanys attempts at extermination the Jews is a perfect example of this sort of logicthey genuinely thought that they were assisting the rest

Silbey 4 of the world by eliminating the Jewish threat and forcing views of racial purity on them. Fukuyama even endorses the kill to save mentality in the assigned reading: The Islamo-fascist sea within which the terrorists swim constitutes an ideological challenge What will be the broad march of history from this point forward? certain factors will be key. The first is the successful outcome of military operations in Afghanistan and then beyond them Saddam Hussein in Iraq. German fascism died because Germany was bombed to rubble and occupied by Allied armies. [emphasis mine] (7) Violence in order to save and as a moral necessity is the most dangerous force that threatens humanity today, because when killing is good for those being killed and for those doing the killing, any kind of violence is legitimate, as shown in the disregard for civilian human life during bombing campaigns in Iraq and the widespread torture of detainees in the War on Terror. The never-ending nature of a war against a tactic, rather than a specific enemy, again justifies extraordinary measures on the part of the United States that have translated into the erosion of civil liberties, torture, and hundreds of thousands of dead, and counting, in the war against Islam that Fukuyama says is necessary. Works Cited Fukuyama, 2002 Professor of International Political Economy at Johns Hopkins (Francis, Has History Started Again? Policy vol. 18 no. 2, Winter, pp. 3-7)