Confucian Democracy: A Deweyan Reconstruction

Chapter 1: Confucian Democracy?

Chapter 1 Confucian Democracy? Divining the Future With the end of the Cold War, many have foreseen a new world order. Have we reached “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government ”?1 Even as Francis Fukuyama’s announcement of the end of history stirred up a fierce storm of controversy in 1989, events in China moved rapidly to shatter any belief that China would become a liberal democracy any time soon. How could we talk about the “unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism” as we watched a government turn its guns and tanks against unarmed citizens in the streets of Beijing on June 4, 1989? While not claiming the immediate end of history, Fukuyama proclaims the inevitable end of history.2 He supports Alexandre Kojève’s defense of Hegel’s claim that the inevitable end began in 1806, but the end is not so much a point as it is a long, drawn-out process, with no terminus in sight. Quite apart from being impossible to prove, any claim of historical inevitability undermines active advocacy to work for that end: if nothing we do could change the outcome, neither do we need to do anything to ensure it. At times Fukuyama doubts the inevitability of liberal democracy for some countries. His 1989 (17) article places the Soviet Union “at a fork in the road: it can start down the path that was staked out by Western Europe forty-five years ago, a path that most of Asia has followed, or it can realize its own uniqueness and remain stuck in history.” In The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama is no longer even sure that “most of Asia” will follow that 1 path staked out by Western Europe, as he acknowledges the serious challenge some recent Asian views posed to liberal democracy. Nor is it clear that the only other alternative is to “remain stuck in history.” More and more Asians are becoming convinced that economic prosperity does not require, and in some circumstances may even preclude, blindly copying Western nations, that their very different cultures are the key to economic success with political stability and protection against Western social malaise. Asian countries are looking for their own paths. Contrary to his initial claim that the end of history lies in “a universal homogeneous state,” the content of which is “liberal democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the economic,” Fukuyama acknowledges subsequently that “the existing state system will not collapse anytime soon into a literally universal homogeneous state,” and he even conceded that “in the end . . . the contours of Asian democracy may be very different from those of contemporary American democracy.”3 The “end of history” claim has two parts: what will happen and what should happen. Part of the distinctiveness and power (some critics would say the “fatal flaw”) of Hegel’s philosophy lies in synthesizing the two. Fukuyama, despite his adoption of Hegel’s teleological framework, separates them and emphasizes the latter: “at the end of history, it is not necessary that all societies become successful liberal societies, merely that they end their ideological pretensions of representing different and higher forms of human society.”4 Fukuyama’s contention that liberal democracy is the only universally valid norm because it resolves fundamentally the “contradictions” involved in the human struggle for recognition by ensuring universal and equal recognition is unpersuasive. His conception of a universal human nature underlying his claim that the struggle for recognition is the basic driving force of history is open to challenge. Even if there is a general human desire for recognition, it could take many forms, some of which (e.g., the desire to be superior instead of equal to others) may find better fulfillment in an undemocratic society. Fukuyama’s claim notwithstanding, no consensus has developed in the world concerning the legitimacy and viability of liberal democracy. Instead, voices of doubt and outright challenges are getting louder. Asians have been defending their departure from the liberal democratic model on normative grounds. They need not lay claim to “higher forms of human society” or an alternative “universal” model; all that they need to establish, and to reject Fukuyama’s thesis, is that their particular historical and cultural circumstances make Western-style liberal democracy inappropriate, even harmful, for their societies, and nonliberal alternatives offer better solutions to their...