The Beginning of the End of History
The story of an essay.
FRANCIS FUKUYAMA
Persuasion, September 8, 2026
Today marks the publication of Francis Fukuyama’s new memoir In the Realm of the Last Man.
I composed my essay “The End of History?” sitting in my in-laws’ house in Las Vegas in the winter of 1988–89. I was preparing for a lecture at the University of Chicago organized by Allan Bloom and Nathan Tarcov at the Committee on Social Thought. Bloom was habitually pessimistic about the ability of Western liberal democracies to defend themselves, and the overall rubric of the lecture series was “The Decline of the West.” I told Bloom I was happy to participate, but that I would have a more optimistic take on what was going on in the world. He said that was fine, and I gave my talk a year before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Owen Harries, an Australian former ambassador, was the new editor of a small magazine founded by Irving Kristol called The National Interest. He had lunch with me at the Beverly Hills Hotel that winter and asked whether I had anything to contribute. I told him about my upcoming lecture, and he promised to publish the written version, which came out in the summer of 1989. The phrase “the end of history” was not my invention; rather, it was central to the thought of the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel was the first explicitly historicist philosopher; that is, a philosopher who argued that human thought and institutions were not fixed but evolved over historical time, and that the “truth” of a particular assertion needed to be judged in relation to the historical era in which it was articulated. We may not believe in the legitimacy of monarchy or slavery today, but there were certainly times in the past when many people did support such ideas. The fact that we believe in democracy and equal rights today is testimony to the reality of “History” in Hegel’s sense.
The idea that human societies evolved over time was something that took root only in modern times. Both Plato and Aristotle argued that there was a cycle of regimes that succeeded one another, but this led to cyclical change that simply reproduced previous forms of government in succession. The idea that history was progressive, that it had a beginning point in primitive societies but moved toward more complex and advanced ones, was adumbrated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his Discourse on the Origin of Inequality under the heading of “perfectibility.” His description of “man in the state of nature” was not simply a thought exercise, as it was for Thomas Hobbes, but an actual effort to describe human behavior that drew on what Europeans at that time knew about non-Western societies. Europeans were aware of the existence of other sophisticated societies, such as those of Islam and China, but the opening up of the New World suggested societies differed in what we would today call their level of development. Hegel simply systematized the idea of History and provided an intellectual structure for understanding what drove that evolution.
The notion that societies evolve over historical time in a progressive fashion is tacitly accepted by almost everyone today, whether they self-consciously understand that fact or not. The idea of a Hegelian history is embedded in our words “development” and “modernization.” Organizations such as the former US Agency for International Development (USAID) and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (i.e., the World Bank) were both dedicated not to simply helping poor countries become rich, but to helping them create modern institutions that make life more secure and predictable.
The most important intellectual to accept and then modify Hegel’s concept of history was Karl Marx. Hegel argued that history had evolved into the modern liberal state in the wake of the French Revolution. Marx criticized Hegel’s understanding of the end of history and argued that the true end of the human development story would be a Communist utopia. This would come only after the working class rose up and displaced the bourgeoisie, establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat. At the Marxist end of history, the alienation brought on by the capitalist division of labor would be abolished and human beings would be able, as Marx said in The German Ideology, “to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.”
My particular understanding of Hegel did not come directly from Hegel but from Hegel’s twentieth-century interpreter, the Russian-French philosopher Alexandre Kojève. Kojève taught an extremely influential seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in Paris in the late 1930s that was attended by many luminaries who would go on to become major figures in the French postwar intellectual firmament: Georges Bataille, Raymond Queneau, Jacques Lacan, André Breton, Éric Weil, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Raymond Aron. He had an extended dialogue with Leo Strauss on philosophy and tyranny, and got to know Allan Bloom as well. Kojève’s lectures were later transcribed and published as Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.
Kojève of course accepted Hegel’s historicism, but he made historical progress revolve around a critical human characteristic: the desire for recognition. Human beings do not simply desire material resources such as food, clothing, and shelter; they also crave the respect or recognition of other human beings. This struggle for recognition results in bloody battles at the beginning of history as individuals seek dominance; those who achieve it become masters, while the losers become slaves. But neither the master nor the slave finds his desire for recognition fully satisfied: the slave for obvious reasons, but the master as well because he is recognized not by another master but by a slave.
In Kojève’s account, human beings are unique insofar as they seek recognition for their willingness to risk their lives in a bloody battle. Other creatures in nature are instinctively programmed to preserve their own lives or the lives of their offspring; only human beings are willing to risk their biological lives for the sake of recognition alone, as opposed to, say, the material spoils that come as a result of victory in war.
In this respect, Kojève’s human being is similar to that of his predecessor Immanuel Kant. Kant believed that what made human beings distinctive was their possession of moral will, an ability to choose right or wrong that was ultimately not subject to the laws of physics. Human beings therefore had to be treated as ends in themselves rather than as a means to other ends. But in Kojève’s interpretation of Hegel, masters cannot achieve the satisfaction of recognition until they realize that this will come only with the equal and mutual recognition by fellow citizens. My particular gloss on Kojève/Hegel was that this could only come about in a modern liberal state, where the equal and mutual recognition of all citizens was guaranteed by a rule of law that granted them basic rights. The liberal state was legitimate and stable not necessarily because it distributed material rewards equally, but because it provided equal recognition and thus satisfied the thymotic side of human striving.
In his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Kojève playfully asserted that history ended in 1806 at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt, where Napoléon defeated the Prussian monarchy. The idea that history ended that year, prior to all of the huge political upheavals that followed in the two subsequent centuries—Italian and German unification; the American Civil War; the colonization and later decolonization of much of the non-European world; two World Wars; the Holocaust; revolutions in Russia, China, Iran, and elsewhere—is on the face of it much more absurd than an assertion that it ended in 1989 or 1991 when Communism collapsed. But what Kojève meant by this was summed up in the following passage from his lectures on Hegel:
What has happened since then [i.e., the Battle of Jena] has been nothing but an extension in space of the universal revolutionary force actualized in France by Robespierre-Napoleon. From the genuinely historical perspective, the two World Wars with their train of small and large revolutions have only had the effect of bringing the backward civilizations of the outlying provinces into line with the (really or virtually) most advanced European historical stages . . . It might even be said that, from a certain point of view, the United States has already reached the final stage of Marxist “communism,” since all the members of a “classless society” can, for all practical purposes, acquire whatever they please, whenever they please, without having to work for it any more than they are inclined to do.
With the defeat of the Prussian monarchy in 1806, Napoléon brought to the core of old Europe the Code Napoléon, the modern legal framework coming out of the French Revolution. The latter established the underlying principles of a modern liberal order, namely, the two principles of liberty and equality, or the equality of liberty. Obviously, these principles were nowhere truly implemented. As Napoléon was advancing in central Europe, for example, the French colonial authorities were putting down a slave revolt led by Toussaint Louverture in Haiti; colonization of Algeria and Vietnam were still decades in the future. But Kojève’s point was that once the idea of universal freedom got out, it was only a matter of time before those principles became accepted and practiced around the world. Toussaint himself had started his uprising, for example, under the banner of the Rights of Man and Citizen that had been recently declared in Paris. So there were rearguard actions to defend the old order everywhere, but in the end they would not stop the march of the idea of liberty, or of the equality of liberty.
The implication of this understanding of Kojève/Hegel was that no amount of “stuff happening” out in the real world of global politics could by itself falsify the notion that history had ended, whether in 1789, 1806, or 1989. The actual diffusion and spread of the ideas of liberty and equality have been very uneven both temporally and geographically since the French Revolution. The real question had to be understood not just in terms of the flow of day-to-day events around the world, but on the level of ideas: Was there an alternative set of principles upon which a different society could be based that were fundamentally at odds with those of the French Revolution? And were there societies built around those ideas that looked like they were sustainable, and would satisfy the wishes of their inhabitants better than existing liberal democracies built around those principles?
These would be the grounds for a serious refutation of Kojève’s assertion that history had ended.
The original essay “The End of History” appeared in The National Interest in the summer of 1989, when I had started working as a Deputy Director of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff under my old colleague Dennis Ross. The Berlin Wall came down a few months later, on November 9, and set in motion a series of events that would lead to the dissolution of the former Soviet Union two years later. The emergence of a Europe “whole and free,” as George H. W. Bush put it, was the greatest geopolitical event of my lifetime, and vindicated the historical direction I had pointed to in the article.
Today’s ideological landscape is obviously far more fragmented than it was thirty-five years ago. There is today far more consensus on the democratic side of liberal democracy than there is on the liberal part. While there are obviously huge remaining social inequalities in many societies, few try to assert that there are reasons why a certain subgroup of people have an intrinsic right to rule over others. The PRC is a dictatorship, but the Chinese Communist Party claims a right to rule because it believes it represents the people: it is the People’s Republic of China. Ethno- and religious nationalism have been on the rise in recent decades. Most of these groups represent rearguard efforts to protect perceived privileges, rather than assertions of the inherent inequality of groups. In the United States, we’ve seen the ugly return of earlier forms of racism and misogyny. But groups taking such positions do not seem poised to systematically overturn the Declaration of Independence’s assertion that “all men are created equal.”
What has been under much more sustained attack in recent years is the liberal part of liberal democracy; that is, the idea that governments should be constrained in their powers by a rule of law and constitutional checks on state power. Much of the democratic backsliding we’ve seen over the past decade has in fact been driven by groups claiming to represent “the people,” whose democratic legitimacy gives them the right to dismantle the constraints imposed by liberal restrictions on state power. Hence Viktor Orbán’s claim to be presiding over an “illiberal democracy.”
Support for liberalism, as opposed to democracy, has always been more fragmented and episodic. The reason for this, as I explained in Liberalism and Its Discontents, is that one of its important justifications is a pragmatic one concerning the management of political diversity, rather than any deep commitment to the liberal principle. Support for liberal constraints on state power is often derived from the experience of authoritarian government and the wars and privation that the latter often entail. So seventy years of relative peace and prosperity can lead to a broad forgetting of what illiberal rule can bring.
Liberalism also raises the problem of the Last Man, which is not a contingent but an intrinsic issue buried in the heart of the doctrine. This requires further discussion.
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Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is In The Realm of the Last Man. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.
From In the Realm of the Last Man. Used with permission of the publisher, Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Copyright © 2026 by Francis Fukuyama.
terça-feira, 8 de setembro de 2026
The Beginning of the End of History: The story of an essay - Francis Fukuyama (Persuasion)
terça-feira, 7 de abril de 2026
The World Simply Does Not Trust America - Francis Fukuyama (Persuasion)
Francis Fukuyama
Persusasion, Apr 07, 2026
Back in 1995, I published my second book, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity. In it I argued that trust is among the most precious of social qualities, because it is the basis for human cooperation. In the economy, trust is like a lubricant that facilitates the workings of firms, transactions, and markets. In politics it is the basis for what is called “social capital”—the ability of citizens to cohere in groups and organizations to seek common ends and participate actively in democratic politics.
Societies differ greatly in overall levels of trust. In the 1990s, Harvard’s Robert Putnam wrote a classic study of Italy which contrasted the country’s high-trust north with its distrustful south. Northern Italy was full of civic associations, sports clubs, newspapers, and other organizations that gave texture to public life. The south, by contrast, was characterized by what an earlier social scientist, Edward Banfield, labeled “amoral familism”: a society in which you trust primarily members of your immediate family and have a wary attitude towards outsiders who are, for the most part, out to get you. The only large organizations in the south were the Catholic Church and, of course, the Mafia. The latter was a direct product of distrust: if you were a businessman, you couldn’t count on the state to protect your property rights because of a weak rule of law; if someone cheated you, you hired a mafioso to break their legs.
In Trust, I characterized the United States as a “high-trust” society. This view has a long history. When the French observer Alexis de Tocqueville visited the United States in the 1830s and traveled across much of the settled part of the country, he noted that America had a high density of civic associations, from bible studies to clubs to mutual aid societies, and that Americans found it relatively easy to work together with strangers in the face of challenges. This, he felt, stood in sharp contrast to his native France, where, he said, you couldn’t find ten Frenchmen who were ready to work together in a common endeavor. In France, there was little of the spontaneous sociability or social capital that he found in the United States. This view of high-trust America was supported, in the mid-20th century, by survey data that showed Americans trusting other Americans to a higher degree than people in France and many other countries.
If I were to re-write Trust today, I would not characterize the United States as a high-trust society. Even as that book was being published in the 1990s, political polarization had started to spread, and Americans began to sort themselves according to their political preferences. That polarization has only increased in the interval between then and now. It has turned into what political scientists label “affective polarization,” in which partisans don’t just disagree on issues, but also come to believe that their opponents are deeply malevolent and dishonest. Social capital still exists between members of the different political tribes, but distrust is rampant across the society as a whole. We don’t accept a common set of facts on issues like vaccine safety or election integrity, and we live by a series of conspiracy theories that inform us that things are not what they seem.
Trust and social capital are built on a foundation of moral virtue. We come to trust people who are honest and reliable, who keep commitments and are willing to offer support even when it isn’t of immediate benefit to themselves. Trust takes time to build through a process of repeated interaction: if we see another person fulfilling their promises and reciprocating favors, we tend to do the same for them, creating a virtuous circle. But a trust relationship that has built up over time can be broken in an instant, if one of the parties betrays that trust and takes advantage of the other player. Just as trust builds on itself, distrust can become self-reinforcing: if we are betrayed, we are tempted to seek revenge against the betrayer.
Trust is also critical in international relations. We come to trust other countries based on their observed behavior, just as we do with individuals. There is no global enforcer of rules or a sovereign to make countries behave. The use of force is constrained only by the expectation that it will be met with a counter-force, in an environment where credibility is the coin of the realm.
That is what makes me extremely worried about the present global situation, and fearful of where our world order is heading.
It is hard to imagine that the current war with Iran and the crisis over the Strait of Hormuz does not represent a fundamental rupture in the North Atlantic security structure. NATO is an alliance built on trust: its deterrent value rests on the belief that NATO members will come to one another’s aid if a member is attacked. This is what happened after 9/11, when a number of alliance members did come to America’s defense in Afghanistan and Iraq. NATO is not an all-purpose commitment to support a treaty partner who has undertaken an offensive war against a third party. Trump is accusing alliance members of betraying the United States by not collaborating with it to re-open the Strait—but no one ever signed up to wage offensive war.
The truth of the matter is that the United States has never been as isolated as it is today. Mark Rutte, the Secretary General of NATO, has made some supportive noises in the current crisis, but that was done out of cynical calculation. No sane European leader can think that support for the United States today will be reciprocated by a Trumpist United States down the road. And while American actions have greatly benefited rivals like Russia and China, they can hardly delude themselves that the United States will reliably serve their interests in the future.
Donald Trump has claimed that the United States has never been as respected as it has been under his presidency. Of the very many untrue things he has said in his career, this is among the most absurd. There has never been a time when the United States was more distrusted, by both traditional friends and by rivals, as at the present. A successful dealmaker needs to generate a minimal amount of trust that he will uphold his end of the bargain. But reciprocity is a virtue that Trump has never understood or practiced.
Francis Fukuyama is the Olivier Nomellini Senior Fellow at Stanford University. His latest book is Liberalism and Its Discontents. He is also the author of the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.
O mundo simplesmente não confia nos Estados Unidos - Francis Fukuyama (Persuasion)
O mundo simplesmente não confia nos Estados Unidos
Da mesma forma que os americanos já não confiam em si mesmosFrancis Fukuyama, Persuasion (07/04/2026)
INTELIGÊNCIA DEMOCRÁTICA, ABR 7
Em 1995, publiquei meu segundo livro, Confiança: As Virtudes Sociais e a Criação da Prosperidade. Nele, argumentei que a confiança está entre as qualidades sociais mais preciosas, pois é a base da cooperação humana. Na economia, a confiança é como um lubrificante que facilita o funcionamento das empresas, das transações e dos mercados. Na política, é a base do que se chama de “capital social” — a capacidade dos cidadãos de se unirem em grupos e organizações para buscar objetivos comuns e participar ativamente da política democrática.
As sociedades diferem muito em seus níveis gerais de confiança. Na década de 1990, Robert Putnam, de Harvard, escreveu um estudo clássico sobre a Itália que contrastava o norte do país, marcado pela alta confiança, com o sul, onde a desconfiança era predominante. O norte da Itália era repleto de associações cívicas, clubes esportivos, jornais e outras organizações que davam estrutura à vida pública. O sul, por outro lado, era caracterizado pelo que um cientista social anterior, Edward Banfield, denominou “familismo amoral”: uma sociedade na qual se confia principalmente nos membros da família imediata e se tem uma atitude cautelosa em relação a pessoas de fora que, em sua maioria, estão tentando prejudicar os outros. As únicas grandes organizações no sul eram a Igreja Católica e, claro, a Máfia. Esta última era um produto direto da desconfiança: se você fosse um empresário, não podia contar com o Estado para proteger seus direitos de propriedade devido à fragilidade do sistema jurídico; se alguém lhe enganasse, você contratava um mafioso para quebrar as pernas da vítima.
Em Trust, caracterizei os Estados Unidos como uma sociedade de “alta confiança”. Essa visão tem uma longa história. Quando o observador francês Alexis de Tocqueville visitou os Estados Unidos na década de 1830 e viajou por grande parte da área povoada do país, notou que a América tinha uma alta densidade de associações cívicas, desde estudos bíblicos a clubes e sociedades de ajuda mútua, e que os americanos achavam relativamente fácil trabalhar em conjunto com estranhos diante de desafios. Isso, segundo ele, contrastava fortemente com sua França natal, onde, de fato, não se encontravam dez franceses dispostos a trabalhar juntos em um empreendimento comum. Na França, havia pouca da sociabilidade espontânea ou do capital social que ele encontrou nos Estados Unidos. Essa visão da América de alta confiança foi corroborada, em meados do século XX, por dados de pesquisas que mostravam que os americanos confiavam em outros americanos em um grau maior do que as pessoas na França e em muitos outros países.
Se eu fosse reescrever “Trust” hoje, não caracterizaria os Estados Unidos como uma sociedade de alta confiança. Mesmo quando o livro estava sendo publicado na década de 1990, a polarização política já havia começado a se espalhar, e os americanos começaram a se organizar de acordo com suas preferências políticas. Essa polarização só aumentou no período entre então e agora. Ela se transformou no que os cientistas políticos chamam de “polarização afetiva”, na qual os partidários não apenas discordam sobre questões, mas também passam a acreditar que seus oponentes são profundamente malévolos e desonestos. O capital social ainda existe entre os membros das diferentes tribos políticas, mas a desconfiança é generalizada em toda a sociedade. Não aceitamos um conjunto comum de fatos sobre questões como a segurança das vacinas ou a integridade das eleições, e vivemos sob uma série de teorias da conspiração que nos dizem que as coisas não são o que parecem.
A confiança e o capital social são construídos sobre uma base de virtude moral. Passamos a confiar em pessoas honestas e confiáveis, que cumprem seus compromissos e estão dispostas a oferecer apoio mesmo quando isso não lhes traz benefício imediato. A confiança leva tempo para ser construída por meio de um processo de interação repetida: se vemos outra pessoa cumprindo suas promessas e retribuindo favores, tendemos a fazer o mesmo por ela, criando um círculo virtuoso. Mas uma relação de confiança construída ao longo do tempo pode ser quebrada num instante, se uma das partes trair essa confiança e se aproveitar da outra. Assim como a confiança se constrói sobre si mesma, a desconfiança pode se tornar auto-reforçadora: se formos traídos, somos tentados a buscar vingança contra o traidor.
A confiança também é crucial nas relações internacionais. Passamos a confiar em outros países com base em seu comportamento observado, assim como fazemos com indivíduos. Não existe um órgão global que imponha regras ou um soberano que obrigue os países a se comportarem. O uso da força é limitado apenas pela expectativa de que será respondido com uma força contrária, em um ambiente onde a credibilidade é a moeda corrente.
É isso que me deixa extremamente preocupado com a situação global atual e com medo de para onde nossa ordem mundial está caminhando.
É difícil imaginar que a atual guerra com o Irã e a crise no Estreito de Ormuz não representem uma ruptura fundamental na estrutura de segurança do Atlântico Norte. A OTAN é uma aliança construída sobre a confiança: seu poder de dissuasão reside na crença de que os membros da OTAN se ajudarão mutuamente caso um membro seja atacado. Foi o que aconteceu após o 11 de setembro, quando vários membros da aliança defenderam os Estados Unidos no Afeganistão e no Iraque. A OTAN não é um compromisso universal de apoiar um parceiro que tenha empreendido uma guerra ofensiva contra um terceiro. Trump acusa os membros da aliança de traírem os Estados Unidos por não colaborarem para reabrir o Estreito — mas ninguém jamais se alistou para travar uma guerra ofensiva.
A verdade é que os Estados Unidos nunca estiveram tão isolados como hoje. Mark Rutte, o Secretário-Geral da OTAN, fez algumas declarações de apoio na crise atual, mas isso foi fruto de um cálculo cínico. Nenhum líder europeu sensato pode acreditar que o apoio aos Estados Unidos hoje será retribuído por um Estados Unidos sob o comando de Trump no futuro. E embora as ações americanas tenham beneficiado enormemente rivais como a Rússia e a China, eles dificilmente podem se iludir achando que os Estados Unidos servirão aos seus interesses de forma confiável no futuro.
Donald Trump afirmou que os Estados Unidos nunca foram tão respeitados como durante sua presidência. Dentre as inúmeras inverdades que ele proferiu ao longo de sua carreira, essa é uma das mais absurdas. Nunca houve um momento em que os Estados Unidos fossem tão vistos com desconfiança, tanto por aliados tradicionais quanto por rivais, como atualmente. Um negociador bem-sucedido precisa gerar um mínimo de confiança de que cumprirá sua parte do acordo. Mas a reciprocidade é uma virtude que Trump jamais compreendeu ou praticou.
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sexta-feira, 21 de fevereiro de 2025
Os Estados Unidos acabaram de mudar de lado na guerra da Ucrânia Francis Fukuyama, Persuasion
Os Estados Unidos acabaram de mudar de lado na guerra da Ucrânia
Francis Fukuyama
Persuasion (20/02/2025)
Mesmo que qualquer pessoa com olhos pudesse ver isso chegando, os movimentos recentes de Donald Trump em relação à Ucrânia e à Rússia representam um golpe devastador. Estamos no meio de uma luta global entre a democracia liberal ocidental e governos autoritários, e, nessa batalha, os Estados Unidos acabam de mudar de lado e se aliar ao campo autoritário.
O que Trump disse nos últimos dias sobre a Ucrânia e a Rússia desafia a crença. Ele acusou a Ucrânia de ter iniciado a guerra por não ter se rendido preventivamente às exigências territoriais russas; afirmou que a Ucrânia não é uma democracia; e disse que os ucranianos estavam errados em resistir à agressão russa. Essas ideias provavelmente não foram concebidas por ele, mas vêm diretamente da boca de Vladimir Putin, um homem por quem Trump já demonstrou grande admiração. Reunidos na Arábia Saudita na terça-feira, os Estados Unidos iniciaram uma negociação direta com Moscou, excluindo tanto a Ucrânia quanto os europeus, e cederam antecipadamente dois trunfos cruciais: a aceitação das conquistas territoriais russas até o momento e um compromisso de não permitir que a Ucrânia entre na OTAN. Em troca, Putin não fez uma única concessão.
Levo isso particularmente para o lado pessoal, pois meus colegas da Universidade de Stanford e eu temos trabalhado arduamente desde 2013 para apoiar a democracia na Ucrânia. Realizamos diversos programas para treinar profissionais ucranianos de meia carreira em habilidades de liderança e valores democráticos. Visitei o país muitas vezes e desenvolvi muitas amizades com um grande grupo de ucranianos inspiradores.
Só para deixar claro, há aqui uma enorme questão moral em jogo. A Ucrânia é uma jovem, frágil e imperfeita democracia liberal, mas ainda assim é uma democracia liberal. A Rússia, por outro lado, é a mais recente encarnação da antiga União Soviética, uma entidade cuja dissolução em 1991 Putin lamenta e vem tentando reverter desde então. Trata-se de uma ditadura na qual uma única palavra errada nas redes sociais pode levar alguém à prisão por anos. Lembro-me de caminhar pela Praça Maidan, em Kyiv, alguns anos atrás, maravilhado com o fato de que a Ucrânia era uma sociedade genuinamente livre, onde se podia criticar o governo, circular livremente e votar em um candidato da oposição (como os ucranianos fizeram ao eleger Zelensky e seu partido, Servo do Povo, em 2019). Nada disso acontece na Rússia, que regrediu a uma ditadura totalitária.
Qualquer acordo de paz “negociado” agora pelo governo Trump e pela Rússia não trará paz. Pode haver um cessar-fogo temporário, mas os russos irão se rearmar e reabrir a guerra assim que se reabastecerem. Eles não têm razão para respeitar as atuais linhas de cessar-fogo e buscarão reabsorver toda a Ucrânia no momento oportuno.
Menos notado em meio à atual comoção está o anúncio do Secretário de Defesa, Pete Hegseth, de reduzir o orçamento de defesa dos EUA em 8% ao ano pelos próximos cinco anos. Isso é exatamente o oposto do que os Estados Unidos deveriam estar fazendo. No futuro, haverá novas ameaças russas a todos os países de sua periferia—Geórgia, Moldávia, os Estados Bálticos e Polônia. Os EUA não precisam se retirar formalmente da aliança da OTAN; Trump já sinalizou claramente que não cumprirá o compromisso do Artigo 5 de defesa mútua. A América será enfraquecida tanto em sua intenção quanto em sua capacidade de enfrentar futuras ameaças de grandes potências.
E não deixe que ninguém diga que isso está sendo feito para focar nas ameaças de segurança no Extremo Oriente. Neste momento, é inconcebível que Donald Trump use o exército dos EUA para defender Taiwan contra a China. Se a China impor um bloqueio ou se preparar para uma invasão, Trump iniciará uma negociação com Xi Jinping, assim como está fazendo com Putin, que na prática entregará o controle da ilha. Ele então se vangloriará de ter evitado uma guerra.
Desde 1945, os Estados Unidos têm apoiado uma ordem mundial liberal baseada em normas como a proibição do uso da força militar para mudar fronteiras e em acordos formais de defesa mútua, como a OTAN e os tratados de segurança com Japão e Coreia do Sul. Esse sistema foi espetacularmente bem-sucedido em promover paz, prosperidade e democracia. Os EUA usaram seu soft power por meio de instrumentos como a National Endowment for Democracy para apoiar defensores da democracia contra o poder autoritário de países como China, Rússia, Irã e Coreia do Norte.
Os Estados Unidos sob Donald Trump não estão recuando para o isolacionismo. Eles estão ativamente aderindo ao campo autoritário, apoiando autocratas de direita em todo o mundo, de Vladimir Putin a Viktor Orbán, Nayib Bukele e Narendra Modi. A National Endowment for Democracy pode muito bem renascer como a National Endowment for Dictatorship (Fundação Nacional para a Ditadura). Como podemos dizer à Rússia e à China para não continuarem suas conquistas quando nós mesmos estamos ocupados tentando absorver o Panamá e a Groenlândia? Esses movimentos de política externa são completamente coerentes com o ataque do governo Trump ao Estado de Direito no plano interno, seu fortalecimento do poder executivo e o enfraquecimento dos freios e contrapesos em todos os níveis.
Não me digam que o povo americano votou por um mundo ou um país como este no último novembro. Eles não estavam prestando atenção—e deveriam se preparar para ver seu próprio país e o mundo transformados além do reconhecimento.
quinta-feira, 14 de novembro de 2024
What Trump unleashed means for America - Francis Fukuyama Financial Times
Meu comentário ao final. (PRA)
What Trump unleashed means for America
Republican is inaugurating a new era in US politics and perhaps for the world as a whole
Francis Fukuyama
Financial Times, November 8, 2024
The blowout victory of Donald Trump and the Republican party on Tuesday night will lead to major changes in important policy areas, from immigration to Ukraine. But the significance of the election extends way beyond these specific issues, and represents a decisive rejection by American voters of liberalism and the particular way that the understanding of a “free society” has evolved since the 1980s.
When Trump was first elected in 2016, it was easy to believe that this event was an aberration. He was running against a weak opponent who didn’t take him seriously, and in any case Trump didn’t win the popular vote. When Biden won the White House four years later, it seemed as if things had snapped back to normal after a disastrous one-term presidency.
Following Tuesday’s vote, it now seems that it was the Biden presidency that was the anomaly, and that Trump is inaugurating a new era in US politics and perhaps for the world as a whole. Americans were voting with full knowledge of who Trump was and what he represented. Not only did he win a majority of votes and is projected to take every single swing state, but the Republicans retook the Senate and look like holding on to the House of Representatives. Given their existing dominance of the Supreme Court, they are now set to hold all the major branches of government.
But what is the underlying nature of this new phase of American history?
Classical liberalism is a doctrine built around respect for the equal dignity of individuals through a rule of law that protects their rights, and through constitutional checks on the state’s ability to interfere with those rights. But over the past half century that basic impulse underwent two great distortions. The first was the rise of “neoliberalism”, an economic doctrine that sanctified markets and reduced the ability of governments to protect those hurt by economic change. The world got a lot richer in the aggregate, while the working class lost jobs and opportunity. Power shifted away from the places that hosted the original industrial revolution to Asia and other parts of the developing world.
The second distortion was the rise of identity politics or what one might call “woke liberalism”, in which progressive concern for the working class was replaced by targeted protections for a narrower set of marginalised groups: racial minorities, immigrants, sexual minorities and the like. State power was increasingly used not in the service of impartial justice, but rather to promote specific social outcomes for these groups.
The real question at this point is not the malignity of his intentions, but rather his ability to actually carry out what he threatens In the meantime, labour markets were shifting into an information economy. In a world in which most workers sat in front of a computer screen rather than lifted heavy objects off factory floors, women experienced a more equal footing. This transformed power within households and led to the perception of a seemingly constant celebration of female achievement.
The rise of these distorted understandings of liberalism drove a major shift in the social basis of political power. The working class felt that left wing political parties were no longer defending their interests, and began voting for parties of the right. Thus the Democrats lost touch with their working-class base and became a party dominated by educated urban professionals. The former chose to vote Republican. In Europe, Communist party voters in France and Italy defected to Marine Le Pen and Giorgia Meloni. All of these groups were unhappy with a free-trade system that eliminated their livelihoods even as it created a new class of super-rich, and were unhappy as well with progressive parties that seemingly cared more for foreigners and the environment than their own condition.
These big sociological changes were reflected in voting patterns on Tuesday. The Republican victory was built around white working-class voters, but Trump succeeded in peeling off significantly more Black and Hispanic working-class voters compared with the 2020 election. This was especially true of the male voters within these groups. For them, class mattered more than race or ethnicity. There is no particular reason why a working-class Latino, for example, should be particularly attracted to a woke liberalism that favours recent undocumented immigrants and focuses on advancing the interests of women. It is also clear that the vast majority of working-class voters simply did not care about the threat to the liberal order, both domestic and international, posed specifically by Trump.
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Comentário PRA:
domingo, 8 de setembro de 2024
The Year of Elections Has Been Good for Democracy - Francis Fukuyama (Foreign Affairs)
The Year of Elections Has Been Good for Democracy
But the Biggest Test Will Come in America
Foreign Affairs, September 4, 2024
Liberals have engaged in a lot of catastrophic thinking during this “year of elections.” Many feared that authoritarian and populist politicians, from Hungary’s Viktor Orban to India’s Narendra Modi, would consolidate their gains by increasing their shares of the vote. According to Freedom House’s February 2024 Freedom in the World analysis, the world has been in a phase of democratic backsliding for nearly two decades, exacerbated by the rise of authoritarian great powers such as China and Russia, hot wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and the ascendance or advancement of populist nationalists in countries that seemed to be securely democratic—Germany, Hungary, India, and Italy.
For liberals who want to preserve a world safe for democracies, perhaps the most alarming point came in mid-July, when Republicans confirmed former President Donald Trump as their party’s presidential nominee and ultra-MAGA JD Vance as his running mate. Although Trump tried to overturn the 2020 U.S. election, he was nonetheless the enthusiastic choice of his party. He had just survived an assassination attempt; his raised fists and call to “fight, fight, fight” drew a sharp contrast with the elderly sitting president, Joe Biden, whose debate performance the previous month made him a clear underdog.
But liberals’ fears that this year would reflect the global triumph of illiberal populism have so far been proved wrong. Although authoritarian ideologies have made clear gains in several countries, democracy in many parts of the world has shown surprising resilience and may yet prevail in the United States. Their belief in the trend of democratic decline has led many liberals to wring their hands and ask despairingly whether they can do anything to reverse it. The answers to this question are simple and boring: go out with your fellow citizens and vote or, if you are more actively inclined, work hard to mobilize like-minded people to help democratic politicians win elections. Liberal democracy is all about personal agency, and there is little evidence that traditional political engagement no longer works.
THE YEAR OF ELECTIONS
The year of elections is so named because an all-time-high number of citizens worldwide went to the polls; nearly 30 countries are holding elections that are both defining and competitive. This pivotal year really began in late 2023, most critically with the Polish election on October 15 that dethroned the populist Law and Justice party (PiS) and replaced it with a coalition of liberal parties. Law and Justice had been following a path blazed by Hungary’s right-wing Fidesz party, but the strong cooperation between Poland’s Civic Platform and other left-of-center parties—whose members worked hard to overcome their past differences and held massive rallies to get out the vote—drove a 41-seat loss for PiS, which also lost its majority in Poland’s lower house of parliament, the Sejm. This represented a major setback for populism in Europe, depriving Hungary of a major ally within the EU. The only other country in eastern Europe to move in a populist direction was Slovakia, as Robert Fico returned as prime minister in October and vowed to end his country’s strong support for Ukraine. Slovakia’s pro-Western president, Zuzana Caputova, declined to run for a second term and was succeeded this June by Fico’s ally Peter Pellegrini, who, like Fico, is more sympathetic to Russia. Although populists made gains, Slovakia remains a deeply polarized nation; in May, a would-be assassin shot Fico because of the prime minister’s opposition to military aid for Ukraine.
In November 2023, Javier Milei defeated Sergio Massa in the second-round presidential vote in Argentina. Many in the United States understood Milei to be an Argentine Trump, given his antiestablishment personal style and embrace of the former U.S. president. But Milei was riding a wave of popular disgust with the ruling Peronists, who had led the country into deep economic stagnation. Although many populists embrace a strong state bent on enforcing conservative cultural values, Milei is a genuine libertarian. The early success of his economic stabilization program allowed him to retain his popularity despite having a weak base in the Argentine National Congress. The chief danger Milei poses is not that he will move in an authoritarian direction but that he will go too far in weakening the Argentine state.
Liberals’ fears that this year would reflect the global triumph of illiberal populism have so far been proved wrong.
Early 2024 saw mixed results for democracy. In January, Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party defeated the pro-Chinese Kuomintang, and Finland remained in a solidly democratic camp. In both cases, the winning parties had worked quietly but vigorously to build their legislative majorities. On the other hand, the following month, El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele was reelected president with a remarkable 85 percent of the vote—a reward for having dramatically decreased crime by using extrajudicial means to incarcerate a large part of the country’s gang leadership. In running for a second term, Bukele flouted the Salvadoran constitutional prohibition against consecutive reelection; he may well remain in power for years to come. The trend toward rewarding strongmen continued with the election of Prabowo Subianto to the Indonesian presidency. Human rights groups have accused Prabowo, a former special forces commander, of committing war crimes during Indonesia’s occupation of Timor-Leste in the 1980s and 1990s; he had been banned from traveling to the United States from 2000 until 2020, when Trump’s State Department granted him a visa. But his victory may not have reflected anything more than the enormous popularity of his predecessor, Joko Widodo, whose legacy Prabowo has claimed he will perpetuate.
In Bangladesh, the corrupt Awami League party led by Sheikh Hasina held on to power in January amid countrywide protests against her rule. Her success, however, would prove to be transitory, as renewed protests after the election led Hasina to flee the country in early August. Whether Bangladesh can reclaim a democratic mantle is not certain, but it is clear that a huge number of citizens were fed up with a ruler who had been in power for 20 of the last 28 years.
POPULIST REMEDIES REJECTED
The middle of the year brought two important elections, in South Africa and Mexico, that did not fit easily into the populist-versus-liberal framework. In South Africa, the African National Congress, which had dominated the country’s politics since it transitioned to democracy in 1994, lost 71 seats and its majority in the National Assembly. The rise of a new party, uMkhonto weSizwe (MK), associated with the country’s corrupt former president Jacob Zuma, was troubling, but in the aftermath of the election, the ANC went into a coalition not with MK but with the Democratic Alliance, a party that tends to represent white and so-called colored, or mixed race, voters. The DA gained three parliamentary seats, and the radical left-wing Economic Freedom Fighters party lost five. For all the corruption scandals and economic decline that South Africa has experienced in the past decade, the 2024 election was in some ways reassuring. Voters held the ANC accountable for its corrupt stewardship of the country and did not turn wholeheartedly to populist remedies.
Mexico similarly demonstrated the strength of its democratic culture. Liberal analysts have characterized the country’s sitting president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, as a Latin American populist, but he was popular against the backdrop of a corrupt and ineffective establishment. In daily speeches, he railed against the corrupt oligarchy that had ruled Mexico for decades. He dialed back the war against narcotraffickers, which brought a momentary reduction of violence while failing to solve an underlying problem that will plague Mexico for years to come. And he initiated a number of pro-poor policies while largely maintaining fiscal discipline. As the country’s first decidedly left-wing president since the 1920 Mexican Revolution, he became extremely popular, and his successor, Claudia Sheinbaum, won the presidency in June by more than 30 points over her conservative rival. Sheinbaum’s party, Morena, also won a supermajority in the Mexican Congress, giving it the option of changing the constitution after she takes office. López Obrador displayed many illiberal tendencies during his presidency, and his parting gift to the country will be a so-called reform of Mexico’s judiciary that, in fact, will severely weaken the institution’s independence. But it is not clear how Sheinbaum will use her substantial power once she comes into office. She does not seem to have inherited any of López Obrador’s zealotry. Barring any surprises, she is better thought of as a left-of-center Latin American politician than a left-wing populist.
Another pivotal election was in India, where the vote occurred in stages between mid-April and early June. Prime Minister Modi—a charter member of the populist-nationalist club who had weakened his country’s media, courts, and civil liberties—was expected to increase the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party’s majority in India’s lower house, the Lok Sabha. Instead, the BJP lost its majority and was forced to enter into a coalition with other parties. Its losses were particularly great in its former northern Indian heartland, where it shed 49 seats, including 29 in the poor state of Uttar Pradesh.
Less globally influential but still significant was the election in Mongolia at the end of June. Wedged between Russia and China, the country has been the only state in central Eurasia to realize and maintain a democracy after exiting Moscow’s orbit following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. But the ruling Mongolian People’s Party, the successor to the Soviet-era Communist Party, turned in an increasingly authoritarian and pro-Russian direction between 2022 and 2024. The election, however, saw the opposition Democratic Party more than double its seat count as voters rejected a system pervaded by corruption. This outcome did not make headlines in the West, but it demonstrated the power ordinary voters can wield to defend democracy.
UNSETTLING SHIFTS
Elections to the European Parliament took place in early June. Populist parties such as the Freedom Party in Austria, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) in France, the Alternative for Germany, the Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, and Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy all made gains. Across the 27-member bloc, the biggest losers were the Socialists and the Greens. This shift was unsettling but did not amount to the earthquake that some had predicted. Center and center-right parties such as Germany’s Christian Democratic Union and Poland’s Civic Platform hung onto or even increased their vote shares. Poland’s Law and Justice party lost seats, as did Fidesz in Hungary, where a dissident party member, Peter Magyar, split the vote by forming his own party following a corruption scandal in Fidesz.
The European Parliament election’s two most disturbing results came in France and Italy. Le Pen’s RN party swamped French President Emmanuel Macron’s centrist coalition, winning more than twice the vote share. This caused Macron to declare a snap national election at the end of June. The RN gained 37 seats, and the leftist alliance, the New Popular Front, added 32; for a moment, it looked as if the RN’s young standard-bearer, Jordan Bardella, was headed toward the prime minister’s office. But in the second round of voting in early July, the center and left parties withdrew their weaker candidates, and the RN was once again locked out of power. This happened only because the left-wing parties’ cooperated to streamline their candidates—the boring but necessary work of politics that previous coalitions had failed to do.
In Italy, the situation is less promising. In the European Parliament elections, Meloni’s populist Brothers of Italy increased its vote share substantially, and her right-wing coalition holds a comfortable majority in the Italian parliament. Meloni, who became prime minister in late 2022, initially portrayed herself as a centrist. Early in her tenure, she broke with pro-Russian populists such as Orban and Fico by expressing strong support for Ukraine, and many commentators speculated that she would back European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen’s bid for a second term. But after the EU parliament vote, she shifted to the right, and her party voted for only conditional support for Ukraine and opposed von der Leyen’s reelection.
The one large European country to hold an election without the threat that a rising populist party would gain power was the United Kingdom, where in early July, the Labour Party achieved a decisive victory over the Conservatives. The Tories had been in power for 14 years under five prime ministers and had led the country into prolonged economic stagnation by, among other things, supporting Brexit. When the Labour Party replaced its far-left leader, Jeremy Corbyn, with the more moderate Keir Starmer, voters responded favorably. Populist firebrands such as Nigel Farage were still around; his right-wing Reform UK party won 14 percent of the vote, more than the Liberal Democrats, who secured 12 percent. But Britain’s first-past-the-post electoral system kept him far from power.
DEMOCRATIC RESISTANCE
There are still a number of important elections to come: in Moldova, where the liberal President Maia Sandu is likely to win reelection, and in Georgia, where the pro-Russian Georgian Dream party has a good chance of retaining power. But the most important election by far is the one occurring on November 5 in the United States between Trump and the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris. At the time of the Republican National Convention in mid-July, a Trump victory against an aging Biden looked likely, but with Biden’s decision to step aside, the Democrats have been suddenly energized. Numerous polls, both nationally and in many of the critical swing states, now show Harris ahead of her opponent.
The outcome of the American election will have huge implications both for American institutions and for the world. Trump has expressed strong admiration for authoritarian leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and China’s Xi Jinping, and at home, he has promised to weaken checks on executive power. He will almost certainly end U.S. support for Ukraine and has expressed great skepticism about the value of alliances such as NATO. He has vowed to end trade relations with China and to impose a ten percent across-the-board tariff on all foreign-produced goods. The Republican Party has decidedly abandoned the libertarian policies of the Ronald Reagan years and pledges to wield state power in the service of conservative ends.
But thus far, the year of elections has not been a terrible one for democracy worldwide. Populist and authoritarian parties and leaders have made gains in some countries, but they have lost in others. Citizens have expressed their opposition to authoritarian governance in other ways, as well. In July, Venezuelans voted overwhelmingly in favor of the opposition candidate Edmundo González, leading the regime of Nicolás Maduro to commit massive fraud in declaring him the winner. Maduro’s regime can survive only by turning openly authoritarian and abandoning any shred of democratic legitimacy. And in Myanmar, where a military junta abolished elections following a coup in 2021, an armed insurgency that allies the junta’s democratic opposition to a number of ethnic militias is making substantial territorial gains.
The outcome of the American election will have huge implications both for American institutions and for the world.
Elections by themselves do not guarantee good policies or outcomes. What they provide is the opportunity to hold leaders accountable for policy failures and to reward them for perceived successes. Elections become dangerous when they elevate leaders who do not just seek to impose questionable policies but also hope to weaken or undermine basic liberal and democratic institutions. In this respect, the United States has become something of an outlier. In no European or Asian democracy has a leader recently arisen who has blatantly refused to accept the outcome of an election or provoked popular violence to avoid stepping down from power. The willingness of many Republican voters to normalize the events of January 6, 2021, is a symptom of weakening democratic norms in the world’s leading democracy—a signal that will be picked up by like-minded populists (such as the supporters of former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, who imitated the January 6 rioters when they stormed their Congress in 2023) if Trump returns to the White House in November.
The lesson to be drawn from the year of elections so far is that the rise of populist and authoritarian politicians is not inevitable. Democratic backsliding can and has been resisted in many countries that hold elections. But democratic norms cannot be secured with violence, judicial remedies (for example, the use of the 14th Amendment to disqualify Trump), the rise of a new charismatic leader, or any other quick fix.
What remains effective is the steady, often boring work of democratic politics: making arguments, convincing and mobilizing voters, adjusting policies, building coalitions, and, if necessary, making compromises where the best gives way to the possible. Even in a dispiriting time for global democracy, citizens still have agency to move toward better futures.
- FRANCIS FUKUYAMA is a Senior Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law and is Director of Stanford’s Ford Dorsey Master’s in International Policy.
quinta-feira, 1 de junho de 2023
Démocratie : la fin d'un modèle ? - Grand entretien avec Francis Fukuyama - Dominique Moisi (Institut Montaigne)
Institut Montaigne é um think tank liberal francês:
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