Fukuyama's mistake: a unipolar world turned out to be a utopia

Thank you very much for inviting me to attend this up-to-date and necessary discussion on the changes taking place in our world order. The unipolar world that the U.S. has been building for a long time has turned out to be a wishful thinking.

It is back in 1989 that the American thinker Francis Fukuyama, perhaps unknowingly became the first to predict the demise of the "unipolar world”. In his essay "The End of History?" he triumphantly said that the spread of American- style liberal democracy throughout the world would bring about the common good, and would signal that the mankind has achieved the end point in its sociocultural evolution.

His model of a "unipolar world" was supposed to lead to an age with no ideological confrontations and, accordingly, no social upheavals, such as wars and revolutions.

Now, analyzing his essay, one can only smile bitterly, as we may note that it reflects not so much the author's vision of the future development of mankind, but rather the sentiments U.S. political elite, which was celebrating an upcoming disintegration of the Soviet Union and the Socialist camp. Watching how the Socialist pole, led by Moscow was about to collapse in the late 1980s, Washington assumed that it could set up a perpetual U.S.-led unipolar world, imposing its liberal values across the globe. It seemed to them then that the fall of the socialist camp may pave their way to establishing world hegemony.

This perception of developments has created a false sense of exceptionalism in the American elite, that empowered them to determine the fate of all mankind. This could be attested by a new U.S. foreign policy, proclaimed in 2006, which then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice called "transformational diplomacy”.

According to this new model, Washington assumed the right not only to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, but also to establish democracy in them according to the American template.

Rice put that a very sophisticated way: “America needs an equally bold diplomacy, a diplomacy that not only reports on the world that it is but seeks to change the world itself. We've called this mission transformational diplomacy”. That is, the U.S. has empowered itself to transform the world according to its own script-book, bringing closer the very "end of history," which in fact would establish liberal- democratic totalitarianism in world politics with a harsh suppression of dissent. Yugoslavia, Libya, and Iraq are brilliant examples of such totalitarianism, which attempted to transform the world without being invited by legitimate governments. We also know the results of such a transformation - the collapse of nation-states, the large-scale flow of refugees into Europe and the emergence of the Islamic State, which seeks to build a world caliphate by armed force.

Certainly, in its pursuit of global hegemony, the U.S. needs to follow a policy that would contain the social, political and economic development of other nations, creating hotbeds of tension both within the territories of its opponents and the neighboring countries, also imposing its culture on the people of its potential adversaries.

Francis Fukuyama intuitively guessed it right that the unipolar world is "the end of history," though he meant the positive side of it. In his world of the future, with liberal democracy being a victor, there was no need for philosophy to stay on the table. What Fukuyama did not see was that giving up philosophy as a form of social thinking would lead to the degradation of society itself. The Western world now serves as a good example of it, replacing traditional values, which underlie European cultures, with LGBT values, which could eventually dismantle the whole of human society. After all, LGBT values are aimed at destroying the institution of the family, the institution that distinguishes human beings from the animal world.

As we know, the process of building family and kinship relations in its time brought about the so-called primary norms, which later triggered ethics, morality, and law. When the traditional institution of the family is replaced with by LGBT values, it will eventually lead to giving up all social and legal regulators, turning human society into a flock of consumers. And this development would really be the end of human history.

And the fact that there were forces, such as Russia, China and Iran and other states that challenged the unipolar world has become a salvation for humanity, there's no other way to put it. Resolute in their stance, they have triggered a change in inter-state relations. Thanks to this, more and more countries are moving to the right side of history, rejecting dictates, blackmail, sanctions, military pressure and proliferation of color revolutions, as well as weaponizing the dollar. Now they are facing an important task: to form a fair and successful model of a polycentric world order, that has to rest on such basic principles as the prohibition to set up any totalitarianism in international relations; protection of the traditional values of all peoples living on planet Earth; non-interference in the affairs of other states, except at the request of a legitimate political regime.

In the new world, economic cooperation and the well-being of all nations should be an ultimate goal per se, instead of a desire to transform everyone according to one's own liberal-democratic template.