"Technology Prevents the End of History" - Francis Fukuyama on the Future of Democracy

This interview was originally conducted in Croatian and published by the portal Ideje.hr. The following is the full English translation.

A hot southern wind, thick with sand and heavy with moisture, has been shaping the face of Europe in recent days. While Paris simmered, Rome wilted in concrete sweat, and Berlin stopped working by noon, in Greece the weather seemed almost mild. In early July, at the Grand Resort Lagonissi – a luxury hotel complex built in the 1950s as an American gift to a strategic ally, a place where the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan still whisper through the palms and stone-and-concrete architecture – the three-day 29th annual Economist roundtable was held.

There, among diplomats, former and current prime ministers and presidents, representatives of international organisations, Nobel laureates, strategists and technologists of the new era, I met the man whose name has for decades been synonymous with one great question: has History really ended? Francis Fukuyama, political philosopher and global authority, became world-famous in 1992 when he published The End of History and the Last Man, a book that declared liberal democracy the final point of humanity’s ideological evolution. It was a bold, Hegelian claim, expressed in the triumphal tone of a world that then believed truth had at last come down on the side of the West.

Thirty-three years later, the world looks significantly different. Authoritarian regimes have not only failed to disappear but are confidently modernising. Democracies, meanwhile, are stumbling under the burden of polarisation, technological disruption and crises of identity. Instead of the promised convergence, globalisation may only have widened the gaps. And while Fukuyama has increasingly returned, through books on identity, institutional trust and democratic renewal, to these central themes, the crucial question remains: was his thesis premature, mistaken, or merely misunderstood?

We talked in a pleasantly air-conditioned room, overlooking the calm sea whose surface appeared motionless, almost eternal. Yet beneath that blue expanse, as beneath the land on which it rests, lie seismic forces, real and geological, but also geopolitical. In a region where earthquakes are part of the natural rhythm, and where continents symbolically collide as often as centres of power, to speak of the “end of history” feels both ironic and inevitable. It was a conversation about what liberal democracy is today: dream, struggle, or memory. About whether history ever truly stopped, or whether we simply held our breath for a moment. And about whether future generations, looking at the remains of democracy, will feel admiration or only detached nostalgia.

At the very beginning of the conversation, we returned to where it all started, with the question that inevitably follows him, almost like an intellectual refrain:

More than three decades after The End of History and the Last Man, do you still consider liberal democracy the political destination of humankind, or, looking back, was it only a short-lived exception rather than the final stage?

As I understood the question, it is really whether there exists a systematically different social and political order that is more durable and better for human life than liberal democracy. And I have felt, you know, for years, that the only regime that might be a real challenger is in fact the Chinese system, because they have achieved a very high level of technological progress, economic growth, stability, and so on. So I think that for me it is still an open question. The issue is how sustainable the Chinese system actually is, but, you know, at the moment even the sustainability of American democracy itself looks questionable. So, at least in my mind, I don’t see a clear answer to that question.

In a world marked by the resilience of authoritarianism, the erosion of democracy and the rise of governance driven by artificial intelligence, has History returned with a vengeance, or did it never actually disappear?

Technology is one of the factors that prevent the end of History, because it acts in a destabilising way. Every social and economic order is built around the technological capacities of the economy in a given historical moment. For example, in the 19th century the key technologies of industrialisation were coal, steel and heavy industry, which encouraged centralisation of power. We thought that the digital age would disperse technology, and in some ways it has. Information became more accessible and more democratic. But now we have the opposite problem: anyone can say anything, and there is no social consensus even on the simplest things such as empirical facts. And so everything has evolved differently from what we expected. I wrote a book published back in 2001, Our Posthuman Future, in which I argued that biotechnology in the long term could pose a great threat to democracy, because in my view certain rights are in fact rooted in biology. If you can manipulate what it means to be human, you can manipulate what rights are and what the political order looks like. Today we are witnessing the merging of artificial intelligence and biology. AI is being used to design proteins, interpret genetic information and so forth. And I don’t think that what comes out of this will necessarily support liberal democracy.

Globalisation once promised convergence of economies, values and political systems. Today it seems more to expose differences. Was that promise genuine, or merely a projection of Western liberal optimism?

It was probably a bit of both. It seems to me that societies in the course of modernisation do converge in certain respects: you need educated people, a broad middle class capable of sustaining modern institutions, you need an education system, an urban structure. These are patterns that occur regardless of culture. But you do not necessarily get convergence of cultural values and political systems. That has become much clearer in recent years. There was a version of modernisation theory I once took seriously, which argued that as societies became wealthier, they would become more democratic because they had more educated people, a middle class, and historically this supported democracy in the West. But this is not happening in China. So something in that theory clearly doesn’t fit.

You have written extensively on identity politics. Are today’s democracies in crisis because they lack shared civic values, or because identities have been hardened to such an extent that a common foundation has become impossible?

That may be putting it a little too harshly. Liberal societies are based on the assumption of universal human dignity, equal dignity for everyone, but that runs into strong resistance, because certain groups defined by race, ethnicity, religion and so forth do not want simply to be equal to everyone else, they want their special status recognised. That was a major transformation on the left at the end of the 20th century. Progressive politics used to be based on the working class, but has now fragmented into a series of small identity groups: women, LGBT people, ethnic minorities – each seeking partial recognition of their identity. That threatens the basic premise of liberalism, which begins from equality for all. And this provoked a fierce reaction on the right, where people believe identity politics has marginalised, say, white people or the dominant ethnic group in a given society. And that is not good for the health of liberal democracy.

It seems that liberal democracies today are struggling with polarisation and self-doubt, while authoritarian regimes project agility and confidence…

Well, I’d be careful there. Some authoritarian regimes certainly do that, but if you look at the whole world of authoritarianism, many of those regimes are fragile, unstable and unhappy. Too many people look at Singapore and say: look how successful they are. But for every Singapore there is also a Democratic Republic of Congo or a Sudan.

Still, the convincing narrative of liberal democracy seems lost. How could it be renewed and made persuasive again?

First of all, I don’t think there is a single answer that would work everywhere, because circumstances really are different. In the United States, we have the phenomenon of the “abundance movement”, which strikes me as a brilliant idea of how progressives might reimagine their role. For the last fifty years people have regarded government as the greatest threat to individual freedom and have tried to limit it. In that way, both the left and the right strangely converged in an anti-government stance. But we might rediscover that earlier sense of government as a force for positive change. The area I find particularly interesting is infrastructure – because the Chinese are very good at that. They can build quickly, relatively cheaply, while many liberal democracies struggle.

If we could remove some of the procedural obstacles that hobble democracies, we would solve some big problems.

If we could remove some of the procedural obstacles that hobble democracies – for example, if we want an energy transition, we must build large systems to reduce emissions quickly and move to alternatives – then we would solve some major problems. In the United States, for instance in California, New York, Illinois, cities under progressive administrations have a huge problem with affordable housing. Theoretically we could build, but we have too many rules and self-imposed constraints. I think a new progressivism could be imagined in the US that would build green infrastructure, respond to climate challenges, and say: we will survive what is coming. And if that were achieved, I believe people could be inspired by it… hopefully.

We are sitting, figuratively speaking, in the shadow of the Acropolis, so we cannot help but wonder whether future generations will study democracy as Tocqueville once did; not as a living experiment, but as a noble ruin, worthy of admiration but uninhabited?

I understand the question and its background, because today it is not without grounds, but that image strikes me as too pessimistic. One measure of where people want to live is where people flee to. There are many poor, chaotic, corrupt, failed states around the world. And each year they produce thousands of migrants seeking better living conditions. But those people do not go to China, Russia, or North Korea. They go, or try to go, to the United States or to Europe, to the countries of liberal democracy. That, in my view, is clear proof that people still prefer to live in liberal democracies rather than in any alternative political system. That should be kept in mind when we compare these systems.

What happened to trust (as you wrote about in Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity)?

That is a complicated story. I think in some ways we have become victims of our own success. People became more educated, wealthier, had more free time, and learnt to think critically – and that is exactly what they did. They turned that critical mind against their own societies. Here’s a concrete example: I believe corruption and paedophilia in the Catholic Church had existed for centuries. But we didn’t know about it, because the Church concealed it, and there was a system that suppressed bad news. Today we have an enormous amount of information. We know more about corruption, so it seems to us that it is increasing, but in fact it is only our knowledge of it that is increasing. And that, I think, is part of what is happening over time.

Are you saying the world has not changed, only the amount of information available about it?

I wouldn’t say the world is the same, but I claim that our perception of the world is often shaped by social mechanisms that sometimes provide us with a clearer view of reality, and sometimes obscure it. One of the greatest challenges today is that we can no longer agree even on basic empirical facts, because we no longer trust science, we no longer trust the entire system of knowledge we built in order to provide reliable information. And that is going to be a huge problem for democracies in the future.

What do you expect in the next five, ten years? What do you fear?

I have many fears. Nevertheless, I believe that liberal democracy, despite everything, will show a certain resilience, simply because I do not see any obvious alternative that could function better. Yes, it is possible that I am wrong, but at present that is how I think.