Francis Fukuyama: The future ain't what it used to be

In 1993, Francis Fukuyama said that history had ended. But a lot has happened since ? September 11, the Balkan wars... So where does that leave his famous theory? And what does he now think tomorrow holds for the human race?

You might expect, first of all, some kind of apology from Francis Fukuyama, the political economist who famously told us just over a decade ago that, thanks to the collapse of Soviet communism, we had reached "the end of history". The world, he said in the best-selling book The End of History and the Last Man, was becalmed as it converged on the Western model of liberal capitalism and we needed no longer to fear the clashing of great civilisations.

He might similarly find this a good moment to say sorry for putting his name to an open letter sent to President Bill Clinton a few years ago urging him to take action against Saddam Hussein and Iraq. The note was co-signed by figures such as Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld, who were out of government then, but who today – as the top guys in the Pentagon – have been primarily responsible for pushing us into the war in Iraq.

You may be disappointed, however. It is the luxury of academics, as against political leaders, that no humility is ever really needed. Now teaching at the Washington DC-based School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), part of Johns Hopkins University, Professor Fukuyama has no trouble explaining himself. It does not even seem contradictory to him that his most recent book, Our Posthuman Future, which is coming out in paperback this week, includes a section headlined "The Recommencement of History".

He would probably like, first, to set the record straight on Iraq. Talking in his book-lined office at SAIS, he baulks, although with placid politeness, at the suggestion that "that" letter was the proof of what some anti-war commentators see as a conspiracy among conservative hawks in Washington to manipulate American foreign policy towards armed aggression against Saddam. Only when President George Bush came to power, with his Republican base, could the plot start to bear fruit.

"In that case, it was one of the most public conspiracies ever hatched," he replies, before taking instant issue with the manner of the response that has taken us into conflict. Indeed, he berates the Bush administration for ignoring world opinion and ordering in the troops without international backing.

"I signed the letter, but I have not been at all happy with the way they have executed this," he begins, shrugging of any responsibility for where we find ourselves now. "The letter did not say you should go into this unilaterally, that you can do this in contempt of the views of the rest of the world. That was not what I signed up to. I don't think Iraq is the single most serious problem in the world and that therefore you can subordinate all of your alliance relationships and goodwill with the rest of the world to this. It is not a good trade-off." As for predicting where we will stand once the fighting is over, Fukuyama demurs.

Now, what about this stasis in history he was on about before? In fact, his apparent about-face in the new book – that history is resuming its march – is not meant as a contradiction of his earlier views at all. His thesis, he insists, is intact, more or less. It is just that something else has raised its head that, well, complicates matters a little. Our Posthuman Future is about biotechnology, psychochemical drugs and the genetic engineering of our bodies, and how such life-science advances threaten to run amok with what it is to be a human being. It is about Ritalin, gay genes and clones.

But that aside, how can he stand by his first book, one that did so well that it reached the best-seller lists in America and was translated into 22 languages? Let's see. Since it came out we have had years of war in the Balkans, the twin towers were knocked down in New York, and now conflagration in Iraq. There is plenty of history there, surely. To be fair, his premise was not that nothing more was going to happen on our planet and that historians – and newspaper headline-writers – were soon to be out of a job. Fukuyama was talking more about history as defined by the German philosopher Hegel as the process of evolution in human society. By the collapse of the Berlin Wall, we had all more or less reached the same conclusion, he wrote – that free-market capitalism, with private ownership, trade and entrepreneurial endeavour, was the model that worked, even if it came in slightly different varieties.

He need not disown his celebrated theory "as long as it is understood properly". He posits: "The End of History was really about the long-term process of modernisation, whether there is basically one broad path to go down, and whether that process converges into a single broadly defined set of institutions. Well, there aren't really a lot of alternative paths to modernisation, and if you look in a long enough timescale, I would say that is right."

Take China, where he has just been on a lecture tour. "That is a society for which much of this is front and centre. As China gets richer, there will be this increasing demand for democracy, regardless of the fact that it was a totalitarian government that got them to this point." Even Iran, an Islamic theocracy now, will get there, he adds.

But surely we are in the very midst of a clash of civilisations today – the collision of Christianity and Islam, or at least the radical elements of Islam? No, he says, that is not quite right either. He suggests, somewhat daringly, that the September 11 attack on New York was a "blip" in the greater scheme of things; nor should the Iraq war deflect us either. "I think that Iraq is kind of irrelevant to this. Neither Arab nationalists nor Islamic fundamentalism, or any of the other alternatives in that part of the world, present a really serious route to modernisation. If the question is, 'Is this a fundamental clash between two equally valid civilisations in the sense that both show equal promise and 50 years from now we will be out there competing with one another,' then I think the answer is pretty obvious. It is an unequal contest."

Push him, however, and you do wring out a few concessions. "I probably underestimated the strength of nationalism in Europe during the Balkan conflict," he admits, before rapidly arguing that it has ended with a Serbia that is converging with the rest of Europe and has thus taken exactly the evolutionary path he was describing. But, finally, he outlines three scenarios where the "end of history" theory becomes imperilled. The first is not about terrorism in the ordinary sense, but terrorism backed by nuclear weapons. "If you can imagine a world in which nuclear weapons didn't exist, you would say, 'Yeah, there is terrorism but this big freight train to modernisation in the rest of the world is not going to be derailed by it.' But clearly if regions decide to remain outside this and don't want to get on the train and can use weapons of mass destruction, that is a serious complication."

And what are the other complications? One, he says, is chronic bad governance in some parts of the world, most particularly sub-Saharan Africa and, to a lesser extent, Latin America. The modernisation he speaks of can only be motivated by economic progress, which in turn rests on a minimally effective government. He also, slightly surprisingly, worries somewhat about conflicting ideas of sovereignty between the United States and Europe. The US is much less interested in subordinating sovereignty to broader international institutions than are most European states, he argues, while noting that Britain, when it comes to the Eurozone at least, may be an exception. "And this has been exacerbated by the whole Iraq thing, and I don't really see it subsiding in the future," he says, referring to the debacle of the UN's role.

But he reserves discussion of the biggest kink of all for Our Posthuman Future. Dismissed by some reviewers as "scare-mongering" and hysterical, the book outlines the possible consequences of pharmacists and scientists manipulating our emotions, our minds and, eventually, even our genetic compositions. Attempts at social engineering by economists and political leaders during the 20th century finally failed, he says, because they simply did not fit with basic human nature. "If you try to abolish private property or subordinate private property to the state, people just aren't wired to respond to that kind of system. It just doesn't work, and the collapse of those kinds of systems reflects that," he says, pointing to the old Soviet Union, China and Cuba. But the manipulations that are becoming possible through the life sciences threaten to alter basic human nature itself. "What is going on now is a major revolution in the underlying science, and it's worth wondering where it's going to lead to."

Some of the effects are already being felt, he says. He worries, for instance, about the success we already see in increasing life-spans. The danger is that some countries will become national nursing homes, with the resulting fall-off in productivity and growing financial burdens on the state. The median ages of countries, notably Italy, Spain and Germany, are already soaring, as are the rates of Alzheimer's disease, as more and more people live beyond 85.

The process may become even more acute if scientists figure out how to tamper with the molecular basis for aging. "A fairly basic genetic intervention might not add just a few years to life, but may really dramatically increase lifespans. And that will be a very different kind of society." Will it not therefore be a wiser society? "Or else very sclerotic ones," he responds grimly.

Fukuyama readily acknowledges that rationing access to new drugs as they are developed would not be politically practical, or necessarily even moral. He would like to see at least some restraint, however, when it comes to certain mind-altering drugs that are already in the public domain. Ritalin, he notes, which is meant to slow hyperactivity and facilitate concentration, is already prescribed to about 12 per cent of children between two and four in the United States. Us grown-ups, meanwhile, are finding artificial peace of mind with Prozac.

This is where the notion of shared human experience is being dangerously tampered with, he suggests. It is impairing what he calls our "shared humanity", the ingredients that "have to do with every set of human faculties and emotions that allow us to identify with one another, to share experiences and to communicate. And already with drugs and other kinds of interventions, we are beginning to change that, especially in the emotional sphere." For example, little pills offer us self-esteem. "We should not think of self-esteem as an entitlement. It should be the result of having done something estimable. Now you have this pill that allows you to get the same subjective feeling without actually having to earn it. That's morally very difficult."

Bravely, Fukuyama says that suffering – and even death at the right time – are things we should not forgo. "It is hard to be the representative of the party of pain and death and suffering. But I think that is one of the big issues; whether a fully human life is one that is lived without knowing what it is like to suffer."

It is in the sphere of genetic engineering that Fukuyama gets scary. Certainly, he abhors a future that includes human cloning. By the way, he dismisses entirely the assertions of the company Clonaid, which two weeks ago published pictures of one of the babies it claims to have cloned. "I think they are frauds from beginning to end," he says. Well, that is a relief. In his most extreme passages of the book, he evokes a future where an über-class of humans in the northern hemisphere has access to genetic advances to screen out offspring that may be weak, diseased or even unattractive. Thus they build a superior race of humans. The eventual consequence could be resentment in the classes that lack such genetic privilege, followed by armed uprising and – yes – the resumption of history and clashes between civilisations. The engineered versus the non-engineered.

In our talk, he admits that this is a nightmare that is a long way off, which in fact may never arrive. But he offers a slightly less incredible scenario, one in which scientists identify what they consider to be the "gay" gene. In rich countries, mothers will be given the chance, in the privacy of their doctor's office, to have a test to screen for the gene. If it is present, they will choose not to deliver the child. "You can imagine that gays would become very rare in a single generation. Do we want to leave something like that simply up to individual choice? My feeling is that we should not."

All of which brings Fukuyama to conclude that when it comes to genetic manipulation, at least, regulation by the state is the only answer, if only to guard against the blurring of the use of biomedicine for therapeutic purposes into one of human enhancement. He notes another difference here between Europe and the US. Regulation is far more in the blood of Europeans – in Britain we already have one agency, the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority – than it is in the US. So he is pessimistic about America ever agreeing on the regulations that will be necessary.

But wait. Doesn't that bring us to yet another contradiction in the works of Fukuyama? His career was spawned in the conservative era of Reagan and Bush Sr – and wasn't The End of History a hymn to liberalism, capitalism and unrestricted trade? What is all this talk of state regulation? Is he baling out on the American conservative movement? No, he replies. "I just think that a lot of those ideological labels don't work very well, because I have always had a more complicated vision than that."

Some of us may conclude, all the same, that consistency is not one of Fukuyama's greatest strengths. Provocative thought and writing most certainly are, however.

'Our Posthuman Future' is published in paperback on Thursday (Profile, £8.99)