The end of history? Hardly – but a good point to assess the world’s future shape

Ten years on from 9/11, the urge naturally remains in western countries to ask: “What has been accomplished? And what has been lost?”

For a younger generation of Americans, the death of Osama bin Laden in May this year clearly constituted the type of joyous emotional release that VE or VJ-Day did for their grandparents. Yet recent events in the Middle East, most notably the Arab Spring, have drawn other comparisons too, this time with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of Communism in eastern Europe.

Given the emotional and intellectual reverberations, it is therefore natural to ask whether the world is becoming a safer place, and whether, barring some serious deviations en route caused by extremists like bin Laden, we are in fact still moving towards the type of universal liberal democratic peace prophesied by Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man.

Fukuyama’s prophesy was after all always that the longer-term trajectory of humanity was generally clear; that while totalitarian political movements or religious extremists might occasionally still emerge, globalising capitalism meant that the world as a whole was generally destined to become a much calmer – and more boring – place, in a democratic but fully “post-political” age.

His intellectual antithesis back in the early 1990s was Samuel Huntington, an American political philosopher who predicted instead a future “clash of civilizations” along the cultural fault lines of race and faith. Al-Qaeda’s rhetoric of recreating a global caliphate represented precisely the kind of cultural backlash that Huntington believed globalisation would provoke and make more common. However, with al-Qaeda in retreat, and populations across the Middle East seizing greater and greater freedom and democracy for themselves, has Fukuyama proven the more reliable longer-term prophet?

On a number of levels the current situation is deeply ironic. Western populations may feel safer from catastrophic single acts of terror with a franchise like al-Qaeda now visibly on the run, but the cost of the wars that brought this result have surpassed the bill of almost any previous human conflict, and threaten to cripple future western prosperity. The United States helped win the Second World War, for example, at a cost to itself of around $4.1 trillion in today’s money. The costs of the “war on terror” today, however, for the US alone, are rapidly approaching the $4tn mark, and the results have arguably also been far less decisive. The Taleban and Saddam Hussein may both have fallen, but Iraq and Afghanistan remain unstable zones, likely to be dependent for years on further western support.

Rather than the Second World War, the more direct comparison for the “war on terror” would be with the “war on drugs”, now generally acknowledged to be a policy failure. In the latter, academics coined the term “balloon effect” to describe the tendency of drugs production to migrate to neighbouring states whenever a state initiated a particularly fierce crackdown on cultivation. Like the drug cartels, terrorists have shown a willingness to migrate whenever western airpower renders an environment inhospitable.

The human costs of the past ten years, though far less than earlier mass conscription conflicts, nonetheless also remain significant. Between 225,000 and 258,000 people have been killed in the past ten years, and the West’s wars have also generated 7.8 million refugees. These outcomes reflect a true age of asymmetry, considering the fact that the 9/11 attacks themselves probably only cost around $500,000 to mount. In an age where the constraint of mutually assured destruction no longer applies, the West’s new-found doctrine of expeditionary warfare looks ironically more of a threat to longer-term western prosperity than Soviet Communism ever was. With an expanded Nato an increasingly ineffective dinosaur, and the crisis rocking western economies, Fukuyama’s vision of the world’s inevitable future has, in other regards, seldom looked less secure.

Ten years on from 9/11, the time has clearly come to rethink not just the future position of the West, but the future trajectory of humanity as a whole. Though bin Laden’s death may have reduced the threat from one relatively small constituency of malcontents, in other regards western populations today feel even less secure than they did during the Cold War. The western counter-balance for much of the Cold War was full domestic employment, stable communities, good quality public healthcare, decent pensions, affordable housing and a general sense of rising prosperity – what the French refer to as the Trente Glorieuses, or “30 Glorious Years” of 1945-75. The West may well never feel as stable again as it did then, without a far more serious reorientation of effort than most politicians appear prepared to contemplate.

l Dr Alex Marshall is from the Scottish Centre for War Studies, University of Glasgow.