2.3 How events in China and the Arab world support cultural-conflict based reading of the future
Both of these cases add to the cause of many critics of Fukuyama’s thesis. Principally, Fukuyama’s former professor Samuel Huntington published an essay entitled ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ in Foreign Affairs, 1993 [ 12 ]. Huntington argues that what the new ‘source of conflict’ will be due to cultural divisions rather than Fukuyama’s proposed economic based conflicts. In both the rise of the Islamic state and the Chinese development there is evidence to contradict ‘The End of History?’. The Islamic state forms an obvious point of support of Huntington, with Huntington himself stating Islam to be one of the ‘blocks’ between which altercations will arise. Whilst it remains hypothetical for now, such an existence would demonstrate that our entrenched cultural groups are modus operandi for self-identification, rather than political ideology. The situation in Gaza also helps to stoke the proverbial fire against Fukuyama, as there is a clearly defined conflict, which is escalating [ 13 ], not based on political ideology, which has brought the western ‘block’ into indirect conflict with the Islamic through Israel. China is another point of contention in this respect, as the nation forms the largest part of the ‘Sinic’ block mentioned by Huntington. Thus it raises the concern that perhaps China’s choice of government is not purely the political one that Fukuyama suggests, but rather a choice that is made to fall in line with the Chinese cultural properties [ 14 ]. China has always had a undeniably massive working class, combined with the individual ethnic and cultural sects within the country then China and the fact that swathes of China had been ruled (at different times) by foreign authoritarian powers then, in theory, China makes itself the perfect country to adopt the political ideology that promotes , superficially, the clearest equality, communism. Thus, seeing that China has clung to its way of government without major lapses twenty-five years after ‘The End of History?’ it is possible to consider that this is a cultural facet of the country, rather than a delay in the forming of a western liberal democracy. To a great degree Fukuyama’s argument hinges upon the market as a generator of change, that it is not only a chief advertisement for the benefit of western liberalism, but also is a key facet to the entire political construct, that the market is a natural evolution in this form of government and intrinsic to ultimate homogeneity. The 2007 global economic crisis came to show that this free market was not only capable of spectacular failures, but that a key cause of its collapse was the political handling, as Paul Krugman argues the western governments’ deregulation was to blame [ 15 ] , and that even more worryingly, the latest collapse is evidence of a repetition of history, that this form of economy is prone to ups and downs [ 16 ], and that despite the possibility of garnering an astronomic wealth, there is the possibility of a rapid decline into poverty. The free market of the west was in the fall-out of the crash no longer an exponent of this political ideology, but the opposite. Depending upon interpretation, Fukuyama’s thesis can be viewed as stating that the economy is what causes the homogenous political state because western liberalism is what facilitates the free market. The 2007- 2008 financial crisis showed that this form of economy has the possibility of complete failure. And in reaction to this financial crisis, with mass protests such as ‘Occupy Wall Street’ [ 17 ], it became apparent that there was a public resentment to the government handling of ‘big business’. If there were to be a financial crisis even more devastating than that of 2007, the pressure from the public to change the nature of the economy and alter an inherent part of the western liberal democracy. 2.4 The 2007-2008 Financial Crisis
12 Huntington, Samuel P. The Clash of Civilization? Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993 13 http://edition.cnn.com/2014/07/25/world/meast/mideast-crisis/ 14 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_social_structure 15 http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/30/moral-decay-or-deregulation/ 16 http://www.nationwide.com/ups-and-downs.jsp 17 http://occupywallst.org/about/
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