Islamic State’s rise: Francis Fukuyama’s theory put to the sword

Fukuyama argued that western liberal democracy triumphed over communism and fascism and constituted the “final form of human government”.

One consequence of this view was that large-scale conflict between the great powers was “passing from the scene”. Western grand strategy has followed this basic prescription for 25 years, mainly because most policy makers agreed with the thrust of Fukuyama’s diagnosis.

Thus, Blairite Third Wayers, Clinton Democrats and Bush era neo-Cons all assumed the global order would eventually be fashioned anew along democratic lines in accord with international law.

For more idealistic European policy elites the end of history intimated the progressive transformation of capitalist democracies into peaceful, post-national and regional “constellations”. The European Union exemplified this brave new world where an internally borderless region pursued policies of fiscal redistribution, development aid and human rights.

History’s end provided the stage, then, for the shift from realism to internationalism, or from power to worldly paradise. Yet after 9/11, events have increasingly challenged these smug, postmodern assumptions. The forces of transnational jihadism, aided and abetted by long, inconclusive and costly interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq questioned its validity. Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin’s reassertion of Russian irredentism in the Caucasus, China’s emergence as a major power in East Asia, and the rise of Islamic State across the Middle East rendered it increasingly implausible.

Nevertheless governed by their abstract commitment to international law, and preoccupied with their soft-power, Putin and Xi Jinping consistently out manoeuvred the Obama led West on the international stage whether in Crimea and the Ukraine, or the South China Sea.

Meanwhile the fallout from the Syrian civil war and the refugee crisis it generated plunged Europe’s open border policy into crisis, making Angela Merkel’s EU look not unlike a 21st century version of Maximilian II’s Holy Roman Empire before it fell apart under the strain of religious and economic crisis from 1600 to 1648.

War and instability across the Middle East, parts of Asia, Africa and Europe have, in other words, rendered peaceful regional and global transformation, following universal norms regulated by transnational institutions such as the UN and the EU, redundant.

Instead states or state-like entities, unaware that history ended, pursue classic power politics, advancing self-interest through force if necessary in the vacuum left by a Europe sans frontieres et sans armes and a US leading from behind or, more precisely, not at all.

Recent events in Paris, Istanbul, Moscow and Damascus thus announce not the end of IS but a new era of realpolitik in Europe and the Mediterranean. Russia’s intervention on the side of the Assad regime in Syria, and the French reaction to the Paris massacre in mid-November, reveal its lineaments.

President Francois Hollande and Putin’s joint announcement in Moscow in late November that France and Russia would make common cause militarily against IS, after the Paris attack and the downing of a Russian airliner over Egypt, intimates the renaissance of the double entente between the two countries, in the era of great power blocs that struggled for mastery in Europe in the decades prior to World War I.

The Russia-France entente spells the beginning of the end to France’s commitment to ever closer European union. Russia and France are historically Mediterranean powers, and maintain sizeable conventional forces including (unlike Britain or Australia) aircraft carriers.

Meanwhile, the other major European power, Merkel’s Germany, remains economically powerful but militarily weak, vainly pursuing the increasingly unobtainable goal of closer union and open borders between the 28 member states of the European (dis) Union. German led EU foreign policy seems only to honour in the breech Frederick the Great’s dictum that a state without an army is like an orchestra without instruments. As a result the EU seeks to buy off Turkey to sustain its European vision and contain burgeoning refugee flows.

In this, however, Germany not only undermines the Eastern European former Soviet bloc states’ commitment to ever closer union, but also affords Turkish President Erdogan the licence to follow his assertive neo-Ottoman foreign policy against Syrian President Assad, Russia’s proxy, and Kurdish and other minorities.

The conflict again evokes the struggle for mastery in 19th century Europe reprising events that led to the brutal 1875-8 Russo-Turkish war that established the independence of the formerly Ottoman controlled lands of the Balkans and Bulgaria.

In other words, as US foreign policy calculation in the Mediterranean is notable only by its absence, in its wake long suppressed national interests and the forgotten charms of European realpolitik inexorably reassert themselves.

It is in this realist idiom that Britain and Australia must assess whether and how to intervene in Syria. Ethical foreign policies are out, prudent assessments of the doctrine of the lesser evil are in.

The decision to join in military strikes on Syria is thus as much diplomatic as military. Few analysts believe air strikes, let alone greater British or Australian involvement, will destroy IS in Syria.

However, Cameron’s recent assertion of the right to deploy force on international legal grounds is less about law and ethics and more about Britain’s regional power status, and its resolve play a role in the resolution of the middle east. In that respect, joining France and Russia raises the interesting prospect of the formation of a new triple entente.

History of course does not repeat itself, but it may as Mark Twain observed, “rhyme”. Thus although it is unlikely that any informal Franco-Russo-British co-operation will herald another world confrontation on the scale of World War I, it does suggest the prospect of an emerging European balance where the entente powers curtail the assertive idealism of Germany, which under Merkel pursues a Mittel European fantasy with an Ottoman connection, a fantasy that first emerged in the years prior to 1914.

Whatever else, the play of interest in the Mediterranean that IS provoked illustrates a constituting fact of international diplomacy, that, contra Fukuyama, there will always be a world of enemies, where nation states have no permanent friends and no permanent enemies, only permanent interests that reassert themselves when utopian ideals and grand transformative schemes such as the EU or the UN end in moral humbug and political chaos.

David Martin Jones is an associate professor at the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland and a visiting professor at the War Studies Department, King’s College, London.