The end of ‘the end of history’

However, with the convenience provided by the concept of historical relativism, developed by Edward Halett Carr in his book "What is History," we can also construe history in a general sense as "the history of struggles or conflicts." I think this was how Francis Fukuyama had seen history, first in his article published in The National Interest, an international affairs journal, in 1989, and then in his book "The End of History and the Last Man" in 1992. Seized by an enthusiastic joy at the end of the Cold War, Fukuyama had argued that the advent of Western liberal democracy may signal the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the final form of human government.

In this book Fukuyama also said: "What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government."

This egocentric thesis that completely ignored the existence of alternatives to Western civilization has been in circulation for a long time. Fukuyama's thesis conflicts strongly with Marx's version of the "end of prehistory." Fukuyama's thesis, coming at the end of the Cold War, is an obvious reference to Marx's phrase. What Fukuyama intended to stress with this thesis was this: If the Cold War that took the bipolar world captive for many years has finally ended, and if the liberal democracy of the West has defeated the Communist bloc, then liberal democracy should be regarded as the most perfect political and economic order ever. If this universal truth will be accepted by everyone because the opposing ideology has been defeated and destroyed, then there will be no room for conflicts in a world that has lost all reason for confrontation. If history is nothing but the history of conflict, then there will be no history, since there will be no conflict. In other words, the end of history has come.

In spite of his ruling out of all alternative forms of civilization and his consecration of Western civilization, we can wish everything had been as simple and easy as Fukuyama had argued. But this was not the case. We saw no end to conflict and cruelty in the world. Nor did the end of history did come. Moreover, the US war machine started to act with the flush of victory pumped by Fukuyama and other scholars and addressed itself to the task of turning the entire world into "a sanctified basin of Western civilization." It openly made Iraq, Iran, Syria and finally the entire Muslim world a target for itself, which disturbed all Muslims. In a uni-polar world that it designed by relying on the assumption that it was the only superpower left, the US tried to formulate a world shaped according its own interest, instead of sharing power and resources. Multilateral considerations were left in the dustbin of history because of the greed of the US administrations, while unilateralism saw its heyday.

Unfortunately, in this process, the unilateralism of the US has done great damage to the prestige of international organizations such as the United Nations, which is not a fair organization tailored according to international sensitivities, but a tool for promoting the interests of big countries like the US, and turned them into meaningless constructs lacking respect. In this process, the dignity and interests of Russia, the loser in the Cold War, have been completely ignored. With the expectation that the period of poverty and misery that came in the wake of the end of the Cold War in Russia will continue forever, Russia has always been treated like a potential enemy, rather than a potential part of the West's liberal basin of democracy. The countries that were historically part of the Russian historical hinterland have been admitted one by one to NATO and the EU and these countries have been equipped with missile shields and US bases under the policy of containing Russia.

Finally, what was feared has become a reality. Russia, which has long been ignored in the international power balance and which can be challenged even by Georgia taking courage from its Western allies, has said, "enough is enough" and made a comeback to the "big chess table."

By entering, against NATO's threats, into Georgia, recognizing the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia and opting for a tough military style instead of a diplomatic one, Russia has resumed its conflict with the West. We can now safely argue for the end of "the end of history."

However, despite the end of "the end of history", we find a new conventional Cold War impossible in this era of globalization in which interests are intricately entwined with each other. So we will continue to discuss how this new process that has put an end to the US-made uni-polarity should be defined. The leaders of the members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which met yesterday in Tajikistan for an extraordinary meeting, will not be able to come up with a joint strategy that can radically affect our efforts for describing the new process. So we should wait and see how this "new world order under construction" takes its course before deciding whether to congratulate ourselves on the restarting of the history that never ended.