END OF IDEOLOGY DEBATE: THE END OF HISTORY THEORY NOW FALSIFIED

 From the Ransford School of Political Science, Online

The defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945 and the collapse of the Soviet Empire in 1991 enticed scores of Western commentators to relegate ‘‘ideology’’ to the dustbin of history. Proclaiming a radically new era in human history, they argued that all political belief systems had converged in a single vision: liberal capitalism.

 This dream of a universal set of political ideas ruling the world came crashing down with the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Indeed, the very rationale for the ensuing ‘‘Global War on Terror’’ was built on the notion of ideological diversity and incompatibility.

Let us consider, for example, President George W. Bush’s 2007 televised address to the nation in which he unveiled his administration’s new ‘‘surge’’ strategy in Iraq by invoking the specter of an expanding ‘‘radical Islamic empire’’ ready to ‘‘launch new attacks on the United States at home and abroad.’’ The commander in chief left no doubt that the contest with militant Islamists was much more than a military conflict: ‘‘It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time. On one side are those who believe in freedom

and moderation. On the other side are extremists who kill the innocent and have declared their intention to destroy our way of life.

 In the long run, the most realistic way to protect the American people is to provide a hopeful alternative to the hateful ideology of the enemy—by advancing liberty across a troubled region.’’ These sentiments were echoed in Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s lead article on the ‘‘new American realism’’ published in the August 2008 issue of Foreign Affairs: ‘‘Ultimately, however, this [struggle] is more than just a struggle of arms; it is a contest of ideas. Al Qaeda’s theory of victory is to hijack the legitimate local and national grievances of Muslim societies and twist them into an ideological narrative of endless struggle against Western, especially U.S., oppression.’’

Indeed, the idea that the United States and its ‘‘coalition of the willing’’ were engaged in a ‘‘great ideological struggle’’ with Islamist jihadists around the globe has been at the center of official White House rhetoric since the start of Bush’s second term in January 2005.

The president’s announcement of a protracted ideological war that, in his opinion, would last well into the twenty-first century, runs counter to a prominent thesis posed by several reputable twentieth-century social thinkers that ideological politics had ended with the defeat of fascism and communism. This controversy over the fate of ideology first erupted in the United States and Europe in the 1950s when political pundits on both sides of the Atlantic found themselves embroiled in what came to be known as ‘‘The End of Ideology Debate.’’ 

The book that set the terms of this controversy bore the suggestive title The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties. Widely hailed as a landmark in American social thought, the study was authored by Daniel Bell, a rising intellectual star who would eventually establish himself as one of the most influential American sociologists of the twentieth century.

Postulating the utter exhaustion of Marxist socialism and classical liberalism—the two ‘‘grand’’ ideologies of the nineteenth century—Bell argued that old master concepts such as the ‘‘inevitability of history’’ or the ‘‘self-regulating market’’ had lost their power to rally modern constituencies who had witnessed the economic desperation of the Great Depression, the hypocrisy of the Moscow Trials, the treachery of the Hitler–Stalin Pact, the horrors of Nazi concentration camps, and the unleashing of weapons of mass destruction against defenseless civilians in a devastating war of truly global proportions.

Most westerners, Bell argued, had abandoned simplistic beliefs in nineteenth-century utopias that projected visions of perfect social harmony—be it the classless society of Marxist socialists or the commercial paradise of laissez-faire liberals. Novel ideological formations had emerged in the newly independent states of Africa and Asia, but their nationalistic messages and politically naı¨ve slogans of ‘‘liberation’’ were too parochial and limited to appeal to post–World War II audiences in Europe and the United States.

In spite of its nostalgic tone, Bell’s book showed much appreciation for the virtues of a world without ideological battles. He noted that people in the West had become less prone to pledge their allegiance to dangerous forms of political extremism and more accepting of a pragmatic middle way embodied in the class compromise of the modern welfare state of the 1950s. On one hand, this pragmatic middle way offered the political stability and economic security most people were craving after the traumatic events of the first half of the century. On the other hand, however, its technocratic framework seemed to provide hardly any outlets for political passions and heroic ideals.

Ideology—for Bell largely an emotionally laden and politically dangerous ‘‘all-or-none affair’’—had become intellectually devitalized and increasingly displaced by a pragmatic reformism built on the virtues of compromise, utility, and scientific objectivity. The preoccupation with administrative solutions for largely technical problems related to the state

and national economies had rendered ideology obsolete. Bell cautiously applauded the alleged demise of nineteenth-century ideologies, implying that a deideologized politics of the 1950s was facilitating Western progress toward a more rational and less divisive society.

However, as his detractors were quick to point out, Bell’s analysis contained a number of uncritical assumptions. For one, in implying a necessary link between the ‘‘ideological’’ and ‘‘totalitarianism,’’ he painted the pragmatic mode of empirical problem solving in overly rosy colors. He made the demise of ideology appear as an attempt to refashion a new age of rational moderation—a natural state lost in nearly a century’s worth of irrational attempts to put radically utopian ideas into practice.

In particular, some commentators interpreted Bell’s assertion of a deideologized climate in the United States as a deeply ideological attempt to reclaim objectivity, compromise, and pragmatism as the essential attributes of a superior Anglo-American culture. They considered The End of Ideology a sophisticated defense of the ‘‘freeWest’’ that was itself thoroughly pervaded by the ideological imperatives of the Cold War.

Second, several reviewers argued that Bell was unconsciously trying to substitute technocratic guidance by experts for genuine political debate in society. They charged him with evoking a myth of a popular consensus around basic norms and values in order to forestall a potentially divisive discussion on the remaining inequalities in America.

Third, the international tensions produced by the Cold War, together with the sudden upsurge of ideological politics in the 1960s and 1970s, seemed to disprove Bell’s thesis entirely.

The civil rights movement, the numerous protest movements against the Vietnam War, the feminist movement, and the meteoric rise of environmentalism all pointed to the distinct possibility that at least some of the central norms and values contained in radical, Western nineteenth-century ideologies were still alive and well a century later.

Nearly three decades later, the sudden collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union unexpectedly resurrected the end-of- ideology debate. In a seminal 1989 article he later expanded into a book-length study, Francis Fukuyama, then a deputy director of the U.S. State Department’s policy-planning staff, argued that the passing of Marxism- Leninism as a viable political ideology marked nothing less than the ‘‘end point of mankind’s ideological evolution.’’

This end state was ‘‘evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.’’ Fukuyama also postulated the emergence of a ‘‘deideologized world,’’ but he insisted that this new era would not be characterized by the convergence between liberalism and socialism as predicted earlier by Bell.

 Rather, Fukuyama asserted that it represented the ‘‘unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.’’ Downplaying the significance of rising religious fundamentalism and ethnic nationalism in the ‘‘New World Order’’ of the 1990s, Fukuyama predicted that the global triumph of the ‘‘Western idea’’ and the spread of its consumerist culture to all corners of the earth would prove to be unstoppable. Driven by the logical development of market forces and the unleashing of powerful new technologies, Western capitalist democracy had emerged as the ‘‘final form of human government.’’

Hence, Fukuyama’s vision of a deideologized world only partially overlapped with Bell’s similar analysis. While Fukuyama agreed with his colleague on the irrevocable demise of socialism, he disagreed with Bell’s bleak assessment of free-market liberalism. Indeed, Fukuyama expected a high-tech realization of the old nineteenth-century free-market utopia.

Expressing some discomfort at the coming ideological vacuum at the ‘‘end of history,’’ he predicted the rapid marketization of most social relations in a globalized world dedicated to self-interested economic calculation, the endless solving of technological problems, and the satisfaction of ceaseless consumer demands In more recent articles on the subject, Fukuyama defended and expanded his central idea that the end of ideology would be connected to free-market globalization. He not only reiterated that these developments constitute an ‘‘irreversible process’’ but also added that Anglo-American norms and values would largely underwrite the cultural makeup of the new deideologized world. Indeed, Fukuyama concluded that the current position of the United States as the sole remaining superpower has made it ‘‘inevitable that Americanization will accompany globalization.’’

Looking back from the vantage point of our own post-9/11 world, it appears that any pronouncement of an end of ideology ought to be considered from a more sober historical perspective. Bell’s thesis makes sense insofar as it coincided with a major postwar shift away from unregulated capitalism toward the welfare state. Fukuyama’s triumphalism constituted a sensible response in the late 1980s because it echoed the central ideas of rising free-market forces. As Fred Dallmayr notes, ‘‘Western liberalism and liberalization have emerged as the triumphant ideological panacea, spreading its effects around the globe.’’

 Hence, twentieth-century end-of-ideology visions should be seen as historically contingent attempts to universalize the dominant ideological imperatives of their time by presenting them as a natural finality to which history no longer poses an alternative. But in so doing, they reiterate the absolute truth claims of nineteen-thcentury ideologies.

It should come as no surprise that this study rejects the thesis of a deideologized world. Instead, we will advance the opposite argument: ideology not only is very much with us today but also represents just as powerful a force as it did a century ago. As we see it, far from condemning people to ideological boredom in a world without history, the opening decade of the twenty-first century has become a teeming battlefield of clashing ideologies.

The chief protagonist—the dominant ideology some analysts call ‘‘market globalism’’—has encountered serious resistance from two ideological challengers—justice globalism and jihadist globalism. Seeking to control the conceptual meaning of globalization and, as a result, determine the form and direction of actual social processes of globalization, market-globalist forces will continue to clash with their opponents as each side tries to impress its own ideological agenda on the public mind.  As most spectacularly shown by the events of 9/11 and the ensuing Global War on Terror, the ideological contest over the meaning and shape of globalization has deeply impacted the political landscape of the new century.

However, before elaborating on these arguments in more detail, we will turn to a brief discussion of the main elements and functions of ideology and clarify their relationship to market globalism.  Join us at Ransford School of Political Science Online so we discuss this further.

Further discussion on this topic is expanded at the Ransford School of International Relations and Diplomacy online. Alternatively, you can enroll for other programs at Ransford.

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