The Russian Rebuke to “End-of-History” Triumphalism Is Complex and Potentially Dangerous
Russian disenchantment with Western liberalism has produced a worldview hostile to end-of-history triumphalism. The rise of this ideology may be another sign of liberalism’s decline, but its tenets set it at odds with liberalism’s socialist critics.
Conservative nineteenth-century Russian philosopher Konstantin Leontiev, who developed a theory of civilizational life cycles. (Wikimedia Commons)
Humanity, we may imagine, in the absence of climate collapse, is likely to exist for many thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions of years to come. What societies of the distant future might resemble is something that we can only guess. But the idea that they will be much the same as today seems a bit far-fetched. One doesn’t have to be a full-fledged Marxist to recognize that as economic systems change, social structures, values, and institutions will change too. And since we can’t possibly know what sort of economy lies one thousand, ten thousand, or one hundred thousand years from now, we also can’t possibly know what sort of social and political values and institutions lie ahead either.
In light of this, the idea that Western-style liberal democracy represents the “End of History,” as Francis Fukuyama infamously put it, is more than a little arrogant. It is absurd to think that we in the West, at this point in time, have solved for all eternity the question of the optimal form of social organization.
Nevertheless, one might argue that liberal democracy is still better than the alternative. In the wake of the turmoil resulting from the Great Recession, however, and the ball-fumbling of government responses to the pandemic, cold water has been thrown on liberal triumphalism. Consequently, liberals now find themselves facing unexpected ideological challenges, especially from the populist right. The result is something of a panic, with intellectuals lining up to proclaim that democracy is under threat and fascism is just around the corner.
Whether the populist right is truly fascist is debatable. Much of the critique of liberalism is not a rejection of liberal ideals, but rather a rejection of the manner in which societies that call themselves liberal fail to live up to those ideals. For instance, efforts by populists to undermine judicial independence are often couched in democratic terms, based on claims that judicial activism has resulted in a small elite using its control of the courts to impose its own norms contrary to the will of the majority, and that reining in the courts amounts to “balancing out democratic powers by promoting the popular will.”
A similar dynamic occurs on the international scene, with the West’s international rivals — particularly Russia — arguing that they are not the ones undermining the liberal international order. Rather it is the West that is doing so, and that by resisting it, they are doing no more than protecting the order that originally prevailed. Thus in a 2019 article, Russian foreign minister Sergei Lavrov complained that Western economic sanctions were contrary to liberal principles, and that the West “has developed the concept of a ‘rules-based order’ . . . [whose] aim is to undermine the internationally agreed legal instruments.” In this way, he portrayed Russia as defending the international order against efforts by the West to revise it.
Beyond that, the Russians have introduced a different form of ideological challenge to Western liberalism, in the name of what one might call “civilizational” theory. In contrast to the Fukuyama-ite concept of the End of History, which envisions the entire world converging on a single future, civilizational theory maintains that different human societies develop according to their own particular logic, each progressing along its own path to its own unique future.
“Civilizational” Theory versus Liberalism
The West’s assertion of its moral and institutional superiority, combined with demands that others adjust their own systems to comply, has become harder and harder to sustain in light of galloping inequality and falling living standards and life expectancy in the United States and UK. What’s more, the “values” claimed by the West’s most ardent promoters keep changing and certainly aren’t what they were twenty or thirty, let alone one hundred years ago. If the “End of History” is Western liberalism, it’s a perpetually moving target.
Unsurprisingly, all this has led to an anti-liberal backlash, with the result that in recent years History has begun to reassert itself. Critics complain that what we call “democracy” is not really democratic at all — that long-standing social systems are being rapidly overturned by new technologies, immigration, and other changes, oftentimes at a high cost to many individuals, and that societies are becoming more and more unequal. In short, democracy and capitalism are not all they’re cracked up to be.
Other than China, the largest source of opposition to Western liberal norms is Russia. The originator of civilizational theory was Russian biologist Nikolay Danilevsky, whose two-hundredth birthday fell at the end of November. Once largely ignored, Danilevsky has enjoyed an enormous boost in popularity since the late 1990s. Scarred by the experiences of that decade, when Russia went through a decade of economic failure, plummeting life expectancy, rising crime, political instability, and the like, many Russians determined that “real existing liberalism” was not at all what liberal theory said it ought to be. Disenchantment with Western foreign policy cemented the desire for an alternative worldview. Danilevsky neatly filled the void, providing a philosophical justification for why Russia should be permitted to abandon the Western route and go its own way.
Although many commentators like to confuse them, the civilizational challenge to liberalism is rather different from the populist one. The latter seeks to overturn existing systems on the grounds that they are not fit for purpose. The former is in principle indifferent to individual systems — its basic concept is “to each his own.” Western populists and Russian civilizationists might be seen as allies against a common enemy — the elites said to be running Western societies — but they are about different things. Populists are concerned with internal enemies, civilizationists primarily with external ones.
In this sense, civilizational thinking is less of a threat to Western liberalism than is populism, in that it is unconcerned with how we govern ourselves. It merely objects to the exporting or imposing of our systems onto others.
The Thorniness of “Flowering Complexity”
It is true that civilizational thinking has its dangers. Democratic peace theory would suggest that international peace will come through the spread of liberal democracy. A world of different civilizations each marching in their own direction is incompatible with this idea.
That said, civilizational theory is not necessarily confrontational. Many of its supporters argue for a “dialogue of civilizations,” and claim that it is only through mutual recognition of civilizational differences that a peaceful world order is possible. Alternatively, some adopt an isolationist position, claiming that what is needed is what Russian philosopher Boris Mezhuev calls “civilizational indifference.” If we can just agree to disagree, and stop worrying about what each other is doing, then at last we will have a chance to live together.
Beyond that, civilizational theory offers some hope to those who might otherwise fear the decline of the West, albeit in a somewhat perverse way. Following Danilevsky, his near-contemporary Konstantin Leontiev developed a theory of civilizational life cycles, according to which civilizations went through three stages — primary simplicity, flowering complexity, and, finally, secondary simplicity. Leontiev was an aesthete who placed great value on diversity of all sorts, thus the stress on “flowering complexity.” Homogeneity in his eyes was aesthetically displeasing. Consequently, he was a determined anti-liberal, seeing liberalism’s commitment to equality as being likely to eradicate all social, economic, and cultural divisions, producing a uniform society that would correspond to the stage of secondary simplicity and thus mark the end of the civilizational progress.
Leontiev would likely find much to despise in modern Western society. But the postmodern turn in Western culture, with its ever-growing emphasis on diversity, would probably have won his favor. The replacement of ethnically and religiously homogenous societies with multiethnic, religiously diverse ones; growing economic inequality; the weakening of democracy in favor of managerial rule by a technocratic elite — all of this in Leontievian terms are indications of a return to a complex, stratified, and divided society. These qualities are markers of flowering complexity, and as such are a positive sign, indicative of a young and prosperous civilization.
This civilization is, of course, not the Western civilization of the twentieth century, and while it continues to call itself liberal, its liberalism certainly isn’t the liberalism of the past either. Rather, this is a new civilization, built on the ruins of the old. It is precisely for that reason that its arrival is generating such fierce resistance.
The Return of History
Leontiev’s notion of civilizational health, with the short shrift paid to democratic principles, is unlikely to be attractive to left-wing critics of liberalism. Civilizational theorists tend toward social conservatism, nowadays couching many of their complaints against the West in terms of the defense of “traditional” values and institutions. Although the uptake of civilizational thinking could help tear down the hegemony of liberal internationalism, the result could be something that social democrats and socialists find even worse.
This applies to the international as much as to the domestic order. Many proponents of civilizational theory seek to replace globalization with regionalization. This does not mean, however, that civilizational theory is any threat to capitalism. It simply has the potential to threaten the liberal model of globalized, open markets.
In economic terms, the model is somewhat similar to early nineteenth century German economist Friedrich List’s concept of the “autarky of large spaces.” Such “large spaces” are likely in many cases to be dominated by a single power. In this way, the global hegemony of one region (the West) will be supplanted by the regional hegemony of certain individual nations. Why this would be an improvement for anyone other than those individual nations is not immediately obvious.
Since at least the early 1800s, critics have been predicting the impending “decline of the West.” It’s been a long time coming, but perhaps it has finally arrived. But as Leontiev pointed out, when one civilization dies, it never entirely disappears, but leaves some roots from which a new civilization can grow. Viewing the Russia of his time as an old civilization, near the stage of secondary simplicity, he urged his fellow countrymen to accelerate the process of starting a new one. And perhaps this is now what is happening in the Global North. Western civilization is dying, but a new West is rising. Where it will go, nobody can know, but one thing seems sure — History is back with a bang.