In the Footsteps of Tocqueville (Part IV)
W ashington, still. A visit with Francis Fukuyama. We met in Paris, a little over ten years ago, when everyone was talking about his book The End of History and the Last Man. I had at the time taken a strong stand against his argument. But I remember thinking—and saying—that whether one agreed with it or not, it was one of the boldest statements of the time. He himself is the prototype of an American intellectual. More precisely, he, unlike Kristol, seems to come close to the idea we in Europe have of an intellectual.
And I must admit that I'm happy to see him again, here in his little office full of books and stacked-up files, at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. He is lucid and sardonic, as much at ease with complex conceptual gymnastics as with geostrategic considerations, as obviously fascinated by world-historical panoramas as by more down-to-earth political analysis. (One feature that strikes me about these major American intellectuals who are close to power and its think tanks: their ability to occupy not exactly two careers but two different intellectual cultures at the same time. Wohlstetter is an outstanding mathematician; Harvey Mansfield is a translator of Machiavelli and Tocqueville; Donald Kagan and Victor Davis Hanson are well versed in ancient Greece; not to speak of Wolfowitz, steeped in Hebrew, an eminent neo-Straussian.)
So we were talking, Fukuyama and I, about his famous first book, about the end of history.
I tell him—and this makes him laugh—that like Byron, he became famous in one night thanks to a conversation.
He tells me that he has read some of my writing on Islamic fundamentalism, but—and of course I'm not convinced by this—he doesn't think Islamism is weighty enough to become the third totalitarianism that will set the great machinery of history back in motion.
Then we start talking about the war in Iraq, which, contrary to my expectations, he, unlike most other neo-conservatives, in fact condemned. We talk about one of his articles, "The Neoconservative Moment," which he wrote in reaction to a speech given by Charles Krauthammer at the annual dinner of the American Enterprise Institute, and which was published in the summer 2004 issue of the neo-conservative journal The National Interest. This article unleashed one of those vigorous debates Fukuyama seems so good at provoking; barely a dozen pages long, it has his typically provocative, cold tone, and his typically Zen-like way of breaking everything in sight without seeming to touch it.
What's the reason behind his condemnation of the war? What objection does he really have?
No moral objection; for a Hegelian, such an argument would be nonsensical.
No objection from a strategic point of view; the apostle of the end of history, this man who keeps telling us how the provinces of the empire will be brought into line with the victorious world order, could scarcely disagree with the plan to democratize Iraq.
Certainly not the traditional conservative idea that some cultures are better adapted to freedom than others; I sense that Fukuyama isn't the least bit torn between two great poles, Irving Kristol and Samuel Huntington—between the ex-leftist who has on the whole remained faithful to the universalism of his youth and the postulator of a clash of civilizations who has great difficulty ridding himself of the stumbling block of relativism—and that it's the former who remains closer to his heart.
No, his great subject, his chief and indeed only disagreement, has to do with the relationship to time that he thinks he can sense in most of his friends who are unconditional supporters of this war—their misunderstanding of the time it actually takes to build democracy, and hence of opportunity and political tactics. (There is also the argument that the pro-war stance is too close to the policies of Israel. But if that issue is raised in the National Interest article—if he may have been reproached for his way of "Likudizing" the opponent during his polemics with Krauthammer—it doesn't come up in our conversation.)
These people are strange, is the gist of what he says to me.
They've spent their whole lives preaching against giving too much power to the government. They told us to beware of the naiveté of the social-engineering specialists who purported to be able to eradicate American poverty with one wave of their political wand. And then they lost all perspective as soon as it was a question of eradicating such poverty, along with the roots of despotism, 6,000 miles away. And they have complete faith in a political decision when it's an issue—as a nation and a government are being constructed—of winning not just the war but also the peace. And they adopt the same "messianic" tone for which they've so often reproached their progressive adversaries as soon as it's a matter of building a Western-style democracy, ex nihilo, in a country that's never harbored such a concept!
Odd, this Hegelian who condemns the messianism of others.
Odd, this historicist who used to tell us that the absolute Spirit was about to arrive, and who starts praising the delays and difficulties of post-history.
Paradoxical, the spectacle of this disciple of Kojève, fed on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and on the prosopopeia of the Idea, reproaching others for their excessive idealism.
But captivating, nonetheless.
First of all because it's another sign, this time inside a single ideological family, of the intensity, the vigor, the quality, of debate that so struck me during the Democratic and Republican conventions: Hegel plus Leo Strauss … Hegelian providentialism chilled, almost reduced, by the "Greek" skepticism of the author of The City and Man … That is the Fukuyama equation. Those are the metaphysical—thus political—coordinates of this agnostic-universalist, this pessimistic progressive. And it's more than a variation—it's actually a new position on the American political chessboard.
But above all I get the impression of finding here the first serious—I mean theoretically articulated—objection to the war. Before that operation was launched, I had written that because it mistook the target, because it was aiming at Iraq instead of worrying, for instance, about Pakistan, it was morally right but politically wrong. Quietly, almost whispering, with that special smile whose very reserve oddly reveals a certain intensity, Fukuyama tells me that these people are to him—theoretician that he is of the inevitable triumph of democratic order—what Lenin was to Marx: by trying to act like angels, behaving as if time were not an issue, they condemn themselves to acting like idiots.
The problem with neo-conservatives is not, as Europeans think, their lack of a moral center or their cynicism. On the contrary, it's an excess of morals. It's the victory of mysticism over politics. They're noble spirits who don't do enough actual politics.
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Bernard-Henri Lévy is a writer and philosopher who lives in Paris. He is the author of many books, including Barbarism With a Human Face, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, and War, Evil, and the End of History. This is the fourth of several articles.
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