End of History

A historical vision, secular heir to the (teleological and soteriological) salvation religions, according to which the age-old conflicts between peoples will progressively culminate in humanity’s regrouping within a single World State, governed by individualistic norms of peace, prosperity, and uniformity.

The end of history is a utopia, formerly professed by Marxists, today by Islam (once its jihad has conquered the world), as well as by liberals (notably Francis Fukuyama), who believe the collapse of Communism is leading all the world’s peoples to form, in the course of the Twenty-first century, a global liberal society under the auspices of an all-powerful and self-regulating market — a society whose only problems will be minor ones resolvable by the police or existing regulations.

The utopia inherent in the ‘end of history’ is implicit in all modernist and egalitarian ideologies. Its aim is to eliminate differences and conflicts between peoples for the sake of its peculiar model of humanity (the bourgeois consumer). This utopia hasn’t a chance of being realised, but it nevertheless has a detrimental effect on Europeans in challenging their independence, identity, and sovereignty. Linked to notions of ‘humanity’s global pacification’, the end of history is in essence a profoundly totalitarian utopia. For history, this river of destiny, whose course is unforeseeable, is far from having dried up.

With its impending clashes between large ethnic blocs, the Twenty-first century will, in actuality, be possibly more conflict-ridden and violent than the Twentieth century — because of, not despite, globalisation! On an overpopulated planet, prone to rising perils, it’s not the end of history leading to a liberal, democratic world state that we see coming, but an intensification of history, as the competition between peoples responding to the imperatives of selection and the struggle for life becomes ever more desperate.

(see history)