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Believing that the main event may be over, Fukuyama depicts whatever troubles lie ahead as little more than nuisances, devoid of ideological content and context, therefore lacking historical standing. That notion adds insult to the injuries of the masses starving in Africa and Asia, the basement dwellers of Beirut and the victims of narco-terror in Latin America. While the prospects for capitalism and democracy may look pretty good from Japan, Italy, Holland and France, where translations of Fukuyama's article will soon appear, they are less bright in places like Peru and Bangladesh -- and even Mexico and Israel.
Never mind, Fukuyama seems to say: "For our purposes, it matters very little what strange thoughts occur to people in Albania or Burkina Faso, for we are interested in . . . the common ideological heritage of mankind." This passage, almost a throwaway line amid the references to Hegel and the main strands of Fukuyama's argument, stands out nonetheless. It will be particularly embarrassing when "post-history" produces its first ugly spectacular, whether it is a nuclear war between two backward and strange- thinking countries that never cared much for Karl Marx or Adam Smith, or an ecological disaster that is beyond the micromanagement of the technocrats who Fukuyama predicts will inherit the earth.
In one melancholy respect, there is nothing new in Fukuyama's pernicious nonsense. In the bad old days of Stalin and Brezhnev, too many Americans were preoccupied with the threat of Communism to attend adequately to Third World problems (overpopulation, underdevelopment, sectarian strife), as well as First World blights such as drugs and homelessness. Now, in the heady era of Gorbachev, some Western strategists may have redefined the challenge as coping with the decline of Communism, but their world view remains afflicted by a peculiar combination of arrogance and shortsightedness.