Internal Predictor of the USSR

«The End of History», «The Clash of Civilizations» and actual prospects of mankind

In 1989 an American political scientist Francis Fukuyama (born in 1952) published an article «The End of History?» and in 1992 a book «The End of History and the Last Man». Another American political scientist Samuel Huntington (1927-2008) objected F.Fukuyama in the article «The Clash of Civilizations?» published in Foreign Affairs magazine in 1993. Later on that article was expanded to book length and published in 1996 as «The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order». Despite the fact that the majority of those who think on a tide of both strategies did not even happen to read the works of those authors the terms «end of history» and «clash of civilizations» have been ever since included into the international political vocabulary.

However if we look through the texts, we will easily find out that there are no essential differences between both strategies, simply each of the authors tries to draw attention to one of two different aspects of the same global historical process. In the real politics both terms turned into slogans affecting the state of mind of politicians from different countries and merging their activities into an autonomous psychic entity termed egregore. The latter works both for promoting "the end of history” (in the sense of triumph of Western liberalism) and “the clash of civilizations” which could result in a quite real end of history of the contemporary global civilization. This makes us wonder what tendency is likely to outweigh:

· whether "the end of history”, in the sense of global triumph of Western liberalism will occur, or

· Western stupid persistence on gaining this ground will result in a clash of civilizations and in an eventual end of history of the contemporary global civilization, or

· any other third tendency would emerge to put the previous ones out.

However both authors could not detect a third eventuality and consequently left it unexplored.

According to Fukuyama and Huntington, the highest organizational form of human society can be implemented solely on the basis of liberal ideals. So Huntington quotes Fukuyama: "We may be witnessing," Fukuyama argued, "…the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." To be sure, he said, some conflicts may happen in places in the Third World, but the global conflict is over, and not just in Europe. "It is precisely in the non-European world" that the big changes have occurred, particularly in China and the Soviet Union. The war of ideas is at an end. Believers in Marxist-Leninism may still exist "in places like Managua, Pyongyang, and Cambridge, Massachusetts," but overall liberal democracy has triumphed. The future will be devoted not to great exhilarating struggles over ideas but rather to resolving mundane economic and technical problems. And, he concluded rather sadly, it will all be rather boring.”

This is worthy of being noted that Fukuyama is not talking here about something that actually happened but is claiming that Western liberalism had already won the field of ideas since "fascism" and "Marxism" have proven their inconsistency expressed in the defeat of Nazi Germany, Italy and imperialistic Japan in 1945, and 40 years later - in the social reforms initiated in the USSR and in China, in the course of which principles of Western liberalism have reached both life and economy organization of those countries.

Consequently, according to Fukuyama, as long as, due to the lack of other competing ideas, the mass of the people of illiberal states remains directed to the consumption in a Western manner, it will be only a matter of time before all the states become universally liberal in a Western manner with no more reasons to come into international conflicts. However, Fukuyama has not considered any scenario of further global liberalization.

Huntington does not anywhere contest the statement of Fukuyama about the predominance of Western liberal democracy over other ways of life in historically known societies, but specifies that:

«The essence of the western civilization is the Magna Carta [1], but not the Magna MacDonald's. That fact that inhabitants can't bite a hamburger doesn't mean that they will accept the first».

On account of accepting the "hamburger" (Western symbol of consumer abundance) and rejecting Western liberalism (which according to Fukuyama and Huntington produces consumer abundance in developed countries) by other regions of the planet, further expansion of the latter can lead not to a global scales triumph but to a true world war, which according to Huntington, could provoke even in its non-nuclear version a many decades recession of economic and cultural development of humanity.

At that, Huntington points out that starting from the XXth-century power of the West has been progressively decreasing with respect to power of other regional civilizations and this contributes only to fuel the potential for such a conflict of civilizations. He believes therefore that the immediate period of history should not be devoted to further liberalization of regional societies in a Western manner but to an attempt to avoid the conflict of civilizations in order to preserve the West and in the meanwhile make it aware of the internal crisis to overcome it. Huntington does not go further into the essence of the crisis, though, he implies it and puts forward recommendations concerning the immediate future:

“To preserve Western civilization in the face of declining Western power, it is in the interest of the United States and European countries:

· to achieve greater political, economic, and military integration and to coordinate their policies so as to preclude states from other civilizations exploiting differences among them;

· to incorporate into the European Union and NATO the Western states of Central Europe that is, the Visegrad countries, the Baltic republics, Slovenia, and Croatia;

· to encourage the "Westernization" of Latin America and, as far as possible, the close alignment of Latin American countries with the West;

· to restrain the development of the conventional and unconventional military power of Islamic and Sinic [2] countries;

· to slow the drift of Japan away from the West and toward accommodation with China;

· to accept Russia as the core state of Orthodoxy and a major regional power, with legitimate interests in the security of its southern borders;

· to maintain Western technological and military superiority over other civilizations and, most important, to recognize that Western intervention in the affairs of other civilizations is probably the single most dangerous source of instability and potential global conflict in a multicivilizational world.”

The fact that differences in ideals and traditions of regional civilizations is an objective historic reality, and that the majority of those who think in terms of "the end of history» and «the clash of civilizations» have not read Huntington’s recommendations, the way of thinking with such categories and the political practice resulting from it, contribute to self-implementation of the global politic scenario which makes subject of Huntington attempt of warning, first, western politicians and other readers as well.