Fukuyama’s superficial handling of the Islam problem

Francis Fukuyama is a typical neoconservative intellectual in the skillful way he trots out various intelligent-seeming theories that—particularly when it comes to moral or ethnocultural issues—never quite deal with the reality that the theories purport to explain. Remaining always on the surface of things, he is almost always unsound. Yet he knows how to present an engagingly complex argument, and there is, accordingly, much to say about his Wall Street Journal piece about Europe’s Islam problem. A reader offers us a tasty serving from this banquet:

I have now read and re-read the piece in the WSJ yesterday by Frances Fukuyama, and the one comment on VFR. I find him to be unconvincing. He is attempting to paper over a big crack in his theory, a crack that arguably has been there from the start, but that now has become glaringly obvious.

Recall that in “The end of history” Fukuyama asserted that since everyone on Earth wants the fruits of liberal democracy, therefore all countries would, in time, have some version of it. There is a premise here that I don’t recall him stating outright, although he may have done so: that the fruits of liberal democracy are so beguiling and desirable that no group will be able to resist them, and thus all groups of humans will therefore be willing to pay any price to have them. This ignores the common human failing of wanting to get something for nothing; a social theory that ignores human nature is doomed to failure.

So now we see Fukuyama saying that while liberal democracy is still unstoppable, it may require some modification in order to work its magic upon immigrants to Western Europe. I quote from the WSJ article conclusion:

Two things need to happen: First, countries like Holland and Britain need to reverse the counterproductive multiculturalist policies that sheltered radicalism, and crack down on extremists. But second, they also need to reformulate their definitions of national identity to be more accepting of people from non-Western backgrounds.

But wait, this means that the mighty puissance of liberal democracy somehow fails to work its magic upon immigrants to countries that are the very epitome of liberal democracy! Yet it is supposed somehow to be able to tame the mullahs of Iran, the apparatchniks of Peking, the tribal cultures of sub-Saharan Africa. How can it be that this wondrous concept will sweep the entire globe with its historic inevitability, yet it cannot win over the children and grandchildren of immigrants living in the very heart of the European Union?

This chasm of a contradiction cannot be casually papered over, and Fukuyama’s attempt to do so fails miserably. The problem in Netherlands, in Britain, in France and elsewhere is not in the end caused by those country’s “failure to accept people from non-Western backgrounds” at all. If that were true, then Vietnamese and Chinese would be rioting as well, black Africans from south of the Sahara and Koreans as well as immigrants from the Caribbean would be burning cars. But they are not. Therefore the problem is not that all immigrants to France or Denmark are somehow slighted because of a lack of acceptance of their non-Western background. The problem is a certain group of people from non-Western backgrounds who have openly refused to accept liberal democracy, even while they literally live off of the fruits of it.

The irresistible force of liberal democracy has met the immovable object, whose name the mainstream media dare not say…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 03, 2005 01:49 PM | Send