Big questions in history: It's not even the end of the beginning

The boast that 'history is over' is an idle one. Historical hiatus, or peace, is always the prelude to war, says Benjamin Barber

The end of history recurs with some regularity. Every time a scholarly shill for the latest would-be empire decides that his chosen people have a lock on tomorrow's hegemony stakes, he converts his wishful thinking into timeless stasis.

If the "victory" of capitalism over communism (c 1990) meant the end of the Cold War and hence in effect the end of bipolar conflict, then America was surely about to become numero uno in a world of perpetual peace - the end of history as pax Americana. This was more or less what Francis Fukuyama proposed in the 1990s (if with less enthusiasm than some of his critics realised) in the most recent proclamation of history's end.

Hegel, Fukuyama's inspiration via the Right-Hegelian Alexandre Kojève, had the same fantasy about his beloved Prussia, although it did not reciprocate his love until the end of his life, when he was finally given an academic chair at Berlin. Like Fukuyama, Hegel was seduced by power - by Prussia's emerging status as a European worthy, if not quite a world colossus. But if Prussia could contend for Europe's leadership, and Europe was already the ruler of the world in 1830, then history might be approaching its appointed end, and the Owl of Minerva (bearing Hegel aloft) could finally take flight to survey the dusk marking the end of history's long day.

In contemplating time's end, Hegel had shrewdly observed that eras of peace were empty pages in history's annals. From this perspective, history might be said to terminate every time peace settles - usually just for a moment, but occasionally for a bit longer. Yet conflict is our nature:only observers of limited vision or historians of great expectations will mistake a pause in history's endless story of war for something more permanent.

Hegel at least indulged in speculating about an end to history as Europe entered a period of relative calm. Only a few small European wars, such as the one in the Crimea and those permanent colonial campaigns overseas, marred the long Congress of Nations peace of the 19th century. And, yes, there were revolutions galore in 1830, 1848 and 1871 preparing for the big one in 1917 - but, all in all, it was a century far more tranquil than the preceding one and no match for the one yet to come. If history was not exactly over, it seemed to be taking a snooze.

Fukuyama, on the other hand, mistook a mere moment of transient victory in the war between McWorld and jihad as the triumph of one over the other.

Even as writers such as Robert Kaplan were detecting a rupturing of the nation-state along ethnic and racial fissures, even as al-Qaeda was planning its first assault on the World Trade Centre, even as the Balkans were unravelling and Hutus and Tutsis were slaughtering one another, even as Samuel Huntington was predicting a clash of civilisations, Fukuyama was concluding that the collapse of the Soviet Union marked not a momentary victory for American unipolarity - what the French came to call hyperpuissance - but the end of history. What he seemed to be saying, however, was not so much that history was over but that "we won".

Consequently, when 9/11 made it clear we had not won after all, the latest episode in the end of history ended.

More recently, with history again in fits of hyperactivity, commentators have moved away from integration and stasis (the McWorld thesis) to give jihad and its cousins terrorism, civil war and anarchy their due. John Ralston Saul, in Harper's Magazine , proclaimed the "end of globalisation", while the prophets of American empire, under siege and engaged in endless war rather than perpetual peace, are being aptly represented in Clyde Prestowitz's Rogue Nation (2003), Chalmers Johnson's The Sorrows of Empire (2004), Zbigniew Brzezinksi's The Choice (2004) and my own Fear's Empire (2003).

Even in eras of peace, however, the notion that history can end is risible.

It is not simply that apparent stillness usually covers a dialectical massing of forces along history's tectonic plates, which are likely to give at some later point in a social earthquake; it is not just that, in the absence of war, social history of the kind laboriously chronicled by the annals school, where the march of small changes in community behaviour - measured by minute entries in village registries - presages larger historical forces and keeps moving right along despite apparent stasis, thank you very much. It is, rather, that the idea of an end of history is rooted in a wholly implausible view of human nature.

History, after all, is but a reflection of human nature, and human nature is nothing if not contentious and quarrelsome (Locke). Life is a perpetual quest for power that ends only in death (Hobbes), with men themselves being little more than "voluble dissemblers anxious to avoid danger and covetous of gain" (Machiavelli) who are likely to live in a condition where "every man is enemy to every man" where "there is continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of men is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" (Hobbes again). We may thirst after Kant's perpetual peace and Plato's eternal justice but, as Thrasymachus observes to Socrates, justice is usually but the right of the stronger. Even peace is the product of implied violence; that balance of terror about which Winston Churchill famously remarked: "It may well be that we shall, by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage where safety shall be the sturdy child of terror and survival the twin brother of annihilation."

To make any real sense of the claim that history can end, we have then to raise the stakes. For it may be that seemingly silly aspirations to an end to history motivated by mere politics are informed by, and redolent of, a higher, more philosophical (even spiritual) quest for an end to multiplicity, tumult and the apartness that is life. From the start, thoughtful metaphysicians have imagined a yin and a yang - moments of stillness confronting moments of energy and movement - that constrain and impel the human story. The two Western philosophers who inaugurated this debate were Heraclitus, for whom life was about difference, conflict and change, and Parmenides, the champion of sameness, unity and stasis. For Parmenides, the world was one and oneness a form of motionlessness and hence timelessness (time is motion), in which neither difference nor change were real. Plato embraced Parmenides's aspirations but had finally to acknowledge that change (for him, dissolution) was ineluctable, the true way of the unhappy world.

Christianity bore witness to the same battle: man and woman given the gift of Eden, comfortable in God's timeless embrace, using (misusing) liberty to choose otherness - pushed by God to the hard world East of Eden where women would give birth in pain and suffering and men would labour by the sweat of their brows. Welcome history, human time's Big Bang beginning. In the Christian story, however, history is but an interval between timeless epochs of rest. Representing apartness from God, it is a detour, a forced journey between the oneness from which humankind came and the redemption by which it would retrieve reunion with the Godhead. History and the Fall were one and the same, while salvation was the way out.

From this Christian perspective, the end of history is a feature of teleology: the idea that life's purposiveness is aimed at an end ( telos ) whose realisation both fulfils purpose and brings time to an end. Hegel effectively rationalised the Christian teleology. In his metaphysic, profane history is driven by reason's sacred spirit towards a terminus that will be marked by timeless sublimity - although the realisation of spirit may be perpetually deferred by the intractable dialectics of real human life.

Matthew Arnold captures the paradox. Even as he gazed upon that relative century of peace that followed the Congress of Vienna, he had few doubts that as the gentle eternity that is love confronted the brute facts that are history, it would not be love that conquered. Be true to one another, he urges:

For the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

On the darkling plain of recent times, all the great utopians of the spirit have succumbed to a realism of the body. While they lend us hope that there may be ways to escape the darkling shadows via therapy (Freud), rationality (Weber) or revolution (Marx), they recognise that conflict and life are the same. Id trumps superego, irrationality dominates reason, and power corrupts revolution. It seems that as long as we live and breathe, there will be conflict enough - war, cant, hatred, death and cruelty enough - to drive history forward.

The hegemon's dream of an end to history might then be generously understood as a secular version of the dream of a return to Eden, a soft landing in God's bosom. It is the hope that telos might triumph over the teleological battles meant to produce it. As a religious and poetic reverie, it has much to recommend it. As politics, however, it is more than dangerous. It mistakes momentary hegemonies for permanent peace, though such hegemonies are generally fated to provoke war just a stop or two down the line.

In confounding God's grace with the construction of frail human empires, it invites disaster. In the end (which never comes), the boast that history is over, whether heard from the lips of Marx or Fukuyama, seems all too familiar. Like President George W. Bush's 2003 boast that the war in Iraq was over, it is more often a prelude to hell than a gateway to heaven.

Benjamin R. Barber is professor of civil society at the University of Maryland.