Links to Fukuyama's writing/speaking

Here are a few of the resources I will be referencing on Thursday.

Francis Fukuyama Interview
From "The First measured Century" on PBS

QUESTION: And he used public data as the basis of his argument. How important in a modern society is measurement?

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: I think that measurement really is extremely important as the basis for any kind of social or public policy in a modern society. And politicians frequently don't recognize this. Politics is always argued on the basis of anecdote: "I know somebody that had a broken family and the son went wrong, and therefore broken families cause crime." You cannot get beyond that kind of anecdote slinging unless you turn to statistics that apply to broad populations.

And one of the problems, I think, in understanding our own social history is that, for most categories of things that we now regard as important, a lot of those statistics simply weren't kept reliably up until some point in the early twentieth century. So that now if you want to go back and look at things like rates of alcoholism, or rates of illegitimacy, or other sorts of anything beyond plain vanilla - births, deaths and marriages - for most of the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century, they simply don't exist.

QUESTION: The other great measuring tool that we have is, of course, public opinion data - specifically in the realm of trust. Could you sort of march me through how that came about?

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: Well, public opinion polling really got its start in the 1950s. It is possible to get public opinion data that goes back [to] earlier decades. But I think it becomes institutionalized really in the 1950s with the rise of the Roper Organization and other organizations that are dedicated to creating what's called "time series" data. Where you ask the same question year after year or at regular intervals, and so you can trace the evolution of popular attitudes over time. And I think that that became an extremely useful thing to politicians simply to track opinions of voters, and to try to develop marketing data.

For social scientists, I think [the public opinion poll] was very important [in] getting at this whole layer of values. Because, you know, the conventional sorts of statistics can [only] measure behavior: how many marriages are recorded, how many people are killed in a particular city or a particular neighborhood. What is much harder to get at is motives, why people were behaving the way they were, why they were disaffected or poor or ended up without a job. And for that, survey data was really the only source by which you could get behind the behavior to intentions and beliefs.

Of course, survey data has got its own weaknesses, because most surveys ask very simple-minded questions. They don't probe in depth. They often require just a yes or no. But it's better than nothing.

QUESTION: When you look at the survey research data for the 1960s in the realm of trust, what do you pick up?

FRANCIS FUKUYAMA: Well, first of all, there's been a massive shift towards distrust. The Roper [Organization] and organizations like the General Social Survey [have data that very consistently shows] that in the 1950s [there] are really high levels of trust for all sorts of things: for the federal government, for Congress, for scientists, for all the major institutions in society - corporations, the military and the like. And all of those see a very dramatic decline over the next 30 years. So that in the late 1950s people were asked, "Do you generally trust the [federal] government to do the right thing?" And perhaps 70 percent of the respondents would answer yes. By 1991 that number was down to something like 15 percent, which is a just astonishing change.

It wasn't just government. The General Social Survey asks a question, "Do you trust your fellow citizens, or can you never be too careful in dealing with other people?" And in the 1950s about 60, 65 percent said that they could trust their fellow citizens. By the 1990s that [number] had fallen to about 30 percent.

So all across the board there was a growth of cynicism and [a] distinct rise of distrust on the part of Americans.

[note: This is actually a fantastic interview in terms of seeing what a broad brush Fukuyama uses, and the distinctly ideological purpose that drives his own work. - A purpose that is presented so objectively as to appear detached scholarship.]

Q&A with author and former neo-con Francis Fukuyama
MacLeans Magazine March 2006

Has the United States reacted -- or overreacted -- to threats because it is by far the strongest military power? You know, when you have a hammer you see all problems as nails?

"I actually used that metaphor in my book. America, in its domestic institutions, very deeply believes that concentrated power is a danger. Even when that power is legitimated by democratic majorities and represents the will of the sovereign people, we divide and limit and balance power in all sorts of ways. Yet somehow when we go into international politics we say, "Well, just trust us. Concentrated power in our hands is fine because we're benevolent and we will use this responsibly." That just seems like one of those contradictions. If you can't trust the sovereign with power in domestic politics why should you trust the sovereign with power internationally? In many respects, if we weren't in such a hegemonic position we wouldn't be tempted to do dumb things."

After Neoconservatism
New York Times Magazine February 2006

Now that the neoconservative moment appears to have passed, the United States needs to reconceptualize its foreign policy in several fundamental ways. In the first instance, we need to demilitarize what we have been calling the global war on terrorism and shift to other types of policy instruments. We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world. As recent events in France and Denmark suggest, Europe will be a central battleground in this fight.

The United States needs to come up with something better than "coalitions of the willing" to legitimate its dealings with other countries. The world today lacks effective international institutions that can confer legitimacy on collective action; creating new organizations that will better balance the dual requirements of legitimacy and effectiveness will be the primary task for the coming generation. As a result of more than 200 years of political evolution, we have a relatively good understanding of how to create institutions that are rulebound, accountable and reasonably effective in the vertical silos we call states. What we do not have are adequate mechanisms of horizontal accountability among states.

Identity and migration
Prospect Magazine feburary 2007

Taylor points out that modern identity is inherently political, because it demands recognition. The idea that modern politics is based on the principle of universal recognition comes from Hegel. Increasingly, however, it appears that universal recognition based on a shared individual humanity is not enough, particularly on the part of groups that have been discriminated against in the past. Hence modern identity politics revolves around demands for recognition of group identities—that is, public affirmations of the equal dignity of formerly marginalised groups, from the Québécois to African-Americans to women to indigenous peoples to homosexuals.

It is no accident that Charles Taylor is Canadian, since contemporary multiculturalism and identity politics were in many ways born in Canada, with the demands of the francophone community for recognition of its rights. Law 101 of 1977 violates the liberal principle of equal individual rights: French speakers enjoy linguistic rights not shared by English speakers. Quebec was recognised as a "distinct society" in 1995, and as a "nation" in 2006.

Multiculturalism—under- stood not just as tolerance of cultural diversity but as the demand for legal recognition of the rights of racial, religious or cultural groups—has now become established in virtually all modern liberal democracies. US politics over the past generation has been consumed with controversies over affirmative action for African-Americans, bilingualism and gay marriage, driven by formerly marginalised groups that demand recognition not just of their rights as individuals but of their rights as members of groups. And the US's Lockean tradition of individual rights has meant that these efforts to assert group rights have been tremendously controversial—more so than in modern Europe.

The radical Islamist ideology that has motivated terror attacks over the past decade must be seen in large measure as a manifestation of modern identity politics rather than of traditional Muslim culture. As such, it is familiar to us from earlier political movements. The fact that it is modern does not make it less dangerous, but it helps to clarify the problem and its possible solutions.

Excerpt from "The Great Disruption"
Republished from Atlantic Monthly

The circle that people can trust is necessarily narrower. The essence of the shift in values at the center of the Great Disruption, then, is the rise of moral individualism and the consequent miniaturization of community. These explanations go partway toward explaining why cultural values changed after the 1960s. But at the Great Disruption's core was a shift in values concerning sex and the family - a shift that deserves special emphasis.

Civil Society and Improved Governance in Developing Countries
March 20, 2007
Keynote Address by Francis Fukuyama

The second really has to do with problems of ownership and transmission mechanisms. I think actually more people agreed with this point than perhaps was evident, but ultimately institutional reform does not take place unless there is strong domestic demand for it either from the bottom up in terms of civil society or sometimes as in East Asia you get elite-driven demand for reform, you get the right minister in Uganda or somewhere else that has an agenda and wants to push it forward and has the power and opportunity to do it, and that is how this institutional reform happens. So in countries where you do not have this domestic demand, donors are always scratching their heads trying to say to themselves how do we generate demand for reform where it does not exist? So this is what gets you into conditionality in lending so maybe you can strong-arm them into wanting things that they otherwise would not want. I think the subject of the conference is another version of that where you are trying to promote bottom-up demand for good governance for all of the reasons that I think are quite evident in that Argentine example, that if you have media attention and public pressure on state officials, that will create opportunities for reform from the inside.

The second point is that in terms of institutional reform, not only does the impetus not come primarily from Washington, knowledge about how to do them ultimately cannot come from Washington, it really has to come from people who understand both the formal and informal rules by which their societies work and are governed. Therefore, the locus of research and work on this area has to be done by social scientists, journalists, and other people in developing countries themselves. There have been a number of efforts to promote this sort of thing like the Global Development Network that has been supported by the World Bank, but we need much, much more of that.