The authors for this session's reading, Fukuyama, Zakaria, and Kaplan, raise questions about the future for democracy, ideals, ethics, etc., in a globalizing world. They tackle their problems from different approaches.

Fukuyama:

The title, "The end of history," is taken from a notion by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), a German philosopher whose ideas of historical dialecticism influenced Karl Marx. Hegel takes human history as progress toward a certain preordained goal where humans will develop a complete self-awareness, at which point history, which consists of specific human practices, different from man to man, region to region, would disappear because all humans now had converged on the same consciousness, or mode of thought. While Fukuyama does not think all humans would think alike in the near future, and while he believes the third world would continue to exist, in a considerable part of the world, a convergence of thinking, to him, would be possible. Throughout the essay, he tried to convince the reader that ideas determined social change, therefore a convergence of ideas would mean a convergence of behavior.

Zakaria:

Zakaria points out that democracy and constitutional liberalism may be two separate things. While democracy refers to the institutional procedure of popular elections and multiparty systems, constitutional liberalism refers to the goal of the government to protect an individual's autonomy and dignity against coercion (O'Meara, p.183). While liberalism may bring about democracy, the opposite is not true. (p.184)

The problem with world politics, therefore, is not insufficient number of countries become democratic (of course, more can be), but how these democratic countries are illiberal. Zakaria quotes John Stuart Mill to argue that democracies, preciously they give people the right to vote and a sense of participation, does not mean they really represent the people. On the contrary, leaders with authoritarian backgrounds use the democratic forum to fan up nationalism and aggression. (p.191)

Kaplan:

As if to respond to Zakaria's questions on democratic governments, Kaplan questions the ready and rapid establishment of democratic governments all over the world. The democratic structure, to him, is unsustainable in many parts of the world, quickly turning "illiberal," to borrow Zakaria's term and meaning. Democracy as developed in Western Europe was the "capstone" to social and economic developments, including the scientific revolution, Enlightenment, The French Revolution and revolutions in the 19th century, and the Industrial Revolution that led to mass political mobilization in Europe. These series of events led to negotiation and compromise between the entrenched aristocracy in power and the people in sharing in political participation. These social and economic developments have not sufficiently unraveled in places in the world where democracies are being built, and entrenched oppositional interests in these countries, ethnic, economic, religious, cultural, continue to exercise divisive influences and refuse to compromise, making democracies hard to sustain.

Kaplan's other argument, more troubling to some extent, is a questioning of our own democracy (O'Meara, pp.207-214): the dominance of the U.S. by corporate America and the gradual emptyness of the Americans, which allows them to let anything to pass and to accept anything. This lack of judgment and moral conviction is very damaging to democracy.