The Clash of Cultures and American Hegemony

Francis Fukuyama

This is a link to the presentation I gave to a plenary panel “The Clash of Cultures and American Hegemony” (this wasn’t my title) at the American Political Science Association annual meeting in Philadelphia on Sept. 1. Sam Huntington was supposed to be on the panel but was not able to participate; other panelists were Ben Barber (Univ. of Maryland), Steve Walt (Harvard), and Jim Kurth (Swarthmore).

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One Response to The Clash of Cultures and American Hegemony

Travis Whetsell says:

November 12, 2006 at 8:17 pm

Undoubtedly many adminstrative errors in application of theory have led to failures in such areas as the mid-east. Yet, rather than conceding that the administration had a coherent theory of international relations from which its policies eminated, i argued in my bachelors thesis that 2002 national security strategy, taken as a comperhensive representation of a theoretical base, lacked such coherence and was flawed by serious internal contradictions. As such, it employed principles from both the realist and the liberal internationalist tradition. It did not resolve the seemingly mutaully exclusive propositions from either side.

In short, the adminstration’s policy failures emerged from its contradictory theoretical base. As you stated in The End of History, while balance of power politics may have little relevance among post-historical states as a tool of statecraft, realism retained its relevance in dealing with the historical world. I think its safe to say that the adminstrations failures have stemmed from its failure to ackowledge the persistant relevance of realist theory in the 21st century, as well as its failure to comprehend possible social, economic or historical preconditions for democracy.