In the vein of recent graduations everywhere and the exams students had to take to get there, and thinking there is now ample evidence out there to get closer to winding up a debate that has raged in both policy and academic circles, let’s keep in succinct: “Fukuyama was right. Huntington was wrong. Discuss”I said it was succinct!
The Duck of Minerva
Time to Wind Up a Long-Standing Debate?
7 June 2013, 1052 EDT
Dr. Jeffrey A. Stacey is currently Managing Partner of Geopolicity USA, an overseas development firm. Formerly he was Senior Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at SAIS, before which he served in the Obama Administration as a State Department official specializing in NATO and EU relations at the Bureau for Conflict Stabilization Operations. At State he founded and managed the International Stabilization and Peacebuilding Initiative (ISPI), which has over 20 government and international organization partners.
Dr. Stacey is the author of "Integrating Europe" by Oxford University Press and is currently working on a follow-up book entitled "End of the West, Rise of the East?" He has been a guest blogger at The Washington Note and Democracy Arsenal, a professor of U.S. foreign policy at Tulane University and Fordham University, a consultant at the Open Society Institute and the U.S. Institute of Peace, and a visiting scholar at George Washington, Georgetown, and the University of California. He received his PhD from Columbia University.
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24 September 2016
This is an empirical debate? I thought that an empirical debate was a controversy about propositions that could be resolved through the appeal to evidence. This is a pair of absurdly general (and ethically troubling, but that’s another issue) claims about world politics which can’t possible have (in)validity because they’re just ideological or theological posturing. “History is at an end because there are no longer any thinkable alternatives to liberal democracy”? “People are compelled by deep, fundamental values which are incommensurate with values held by other people”? I don’t even know how to evaluate either claim, because I don’t know how to define the relevant terms (like “value,” “civilization,” “(the end of) history,” etc.).
This is a category mistake like “Warhol was wrong; Mahler was right.” I’d prefer to save the resolution of debates for, you know, actual debates. Not all seemingly-empirical propositions are actually candidates for true/false or valid/invalid. No amount of evidence or argumentation will ever suffice to move a True Believer in either faith, so I’m not sure that it’s worth it to engage in the conversation.
Do people actually “debate” this in policy circles?
Ah Professor J, do you remember when the great man himself (er, which great man? I’m referring to Dr. H) came to our Department touting his Clash argument? This was after the article but before the book; I never saw more people piled into the 7th floor lounge. The knives were out. After all gathered had eviscerated his argument–viz. that states will fight wars with one another due to their different civilzations i.e. religions/sects–with such counter arguments as pointing out the large number of contiguous states that had not fought wars despite such differences. He then proceeded to defend himself in the most shocking manner: he raised his hand above the table at which he sat and said, “I have a stack of articles about other countires THIS HIGH back at my office in Cambridge!”
Oh yes, I remember. (I’d had that experience earlier: he came to Michigan State in 1992 and basically presented the article version of his position.) That was one of the moments when it occurred to me that some things that sound like arguments actually aren’t arguments, they’re professions of faith.