The State of Francis Fukuyama

Abstract

Professor Francis Fukuyama, currently Bernard L Schwartz Professor of International Political Economy at Johns Hopkins University, was born in Chicago in 1952, and has a BA from Cornell and a doctorate in political science from Harvard. He has worked with the RAND Corporation, the Department of State specialising on the Middle East, and continues to serve on several significant boards such as the President’s Council on Bioethics and the National Endowment for Democracy. Something of the range of his interests can be gauged from the fact that he has written monographs on Russia and the Third World, the consequences of the biotechnology revolution, and social capital. He became widely known with the publication of The End of History and the Last Man in 1992. Translated into many languages, the head of bestseller lists and awarded major international prizes, The End of History and the Last Man provoked popular and academic debates; but his two most recent books, State Building: Governance and World order in the TwentyFirst Century (2004) and After the Neocons: America at the Crossroads (2006) have more immediate relevance to Australia. His shift from identifying as a neoconservative to asserting that neoconservatism was ‘something’ he ‘could no longer support’, has been reported widely in Australia. He had contributed to the neoconservatist underpinning of the war in Iraq and he had joined the initial celebration at the fall of Sadam Hussein, but he has concluded that the American theoretical justification for the war was wrong and its execution incompetent, and he has called for a new direction in American foreign policy, a ‘Realistic Wilsonianism’. While Fukuyama’s changing evaluation of the arguments of his one-time neocon colleagues has illuminated major issues about American policy and the war in Iraq, his general thinking about failed or weak states and foreign intervention has received less attention in Australia. And it is those considerations that have implications for Australian policies in East Timor, Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and the other islands where Australia has primary responsibility for any external interventions requiring personnel and cash. Where there have been debates in Australia, they have tended to be concerned with the immediate and practical, not the long-term and theoretical, but as Fukuyama and others have demonstrated, much foreign aid and intervention has been determined by theoretical assumptions that are unproven or false Show more