JM Book Blog
10/20/2006
  Fukuyama: Realistic Wilsonianism
Francis Fukuyama: America at the Crossroads - Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy

Hardcover: 240 pages
Publisher: Yale University Press 2006
ISBN: 0300 11 3994

Foreign policy wisdom fluctuates between two poles: universalism and realism. The universalism of this unipolar world is global democratization.
"There is simply no other legitimating set of ideas besides liberal democracy that is broadly accepted in the world today." 130
Fukuyama, disillusioned by the war in Iraq and obviously distraught by the Bush administration spoiling the neocon ideology is jumping the ship and calling for a "more realistic" foreign policy for the U.S.

Fukuyama details the neocon legacy - not from the past five but fifty years - and shows how the missteps of excessive unilateralism and stress on military power (reaching its prime in the Iraq War) has done this legacy no good.

"The existence of the United Nations is in a way a huge distraction that prevents people on both right and left from thinking clearly about global governance and international institutions." 157
Fukuyama succeeds in showing the naivity and arrogance of the Bush administration. Maybe it was hubris, or "having a hammer making everything look like a nail" or maybe it was just pure ignorance and not understanding how the world works. Balancing, rather than bandwagoning seems to be the underlying logic of international politics.

Well, Fukuyama offers an alternative: realistic Wilsonianism.
"…What is needed is not a return to a narrow realism but rather a realistic Wilsonianism that recoqnizes the importance to world order of what goes inside states and that better matches the available tools to the achievement of democratic ends.” 184

"What I have labeled realistic Wilsonianism could be alternatively described as hard-headed liberal internationalism. This is distinguished from the soft-headed version by several characteristics: first, the United States should work toward a multi-multilateral world, not give special emphasis to the United Nations, second, the goal of foreign policy is not the transcendence of sovereignty and power politics but its regulation through intstitutional constraints; and finally, democratic legitimacy embedded in real institutions ought to guide the design of the system overall." 215
Fukyama also asserts the (enormous!) possibility of CD - Community of Democracies.
"A broader organization of democracies actually exists, in the form of a group called the Community of Democracies, founded in Warsaw in 2000 with backing from the Clinton administration."
This would be a really welcomed initiative. To trust the UN is unefficient and dangerous, to let someone do it alone raises concerns about ultimate motives and is viewed by many as illegitimate. To do it with democracies might be both efficient and legitimate.

Second Opinion: Michoko Kakutani /The New York Times
  10/20/2006 01:44:00 ap.




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