The US are Acting on the Wrong Philosophical Assumptions about History

 When foreigners or Americans themselves are complaining about the US, they usually take aim at its political and economic elite, institutions, its foreign policy, the military or America's cultural or global ambitions.

Few, however, are aware of the fact that powerful nations are run according to an agenda that incorporates a specific interpretation of history:  a historical algorithm, so to speak. By and large, this philosophical interpretation of world history goes a long way towards explaining why nations like the United States behave the way they do.

From the Age of Enlightenment we have inherited a conception about the historical evolution of humanity which in most cases is depicted as both irreversible and unidirectional, or as some specialists call it, linear. In the 19th century Hegel, a German philosopher of history, refined this approach by adding a final destination to this linear historical evolution, which he called "the end of history" (in his view, German history ended with the formation of the Prussian state). Karl Marx was one of his students and he devised his own end-of-history , which was supposed to happen when the proletariat would get on top of the capitalist class for good. The type of society he imagined was called communism, in which exploitation of any kind would completely disappear and  perfect equality would reign among all members of society.

One of the legacies that Marxist philosophy of history left behind was a partition of history according to different types of societies, defined by their specific modes of production. Thus, humanity advanced from prehistorical hunter/gatherers to the classical, slave-owning ancient societies, on to feudal societies, which gave birth to what Marx called capitalist societies, in their turn the harbinger of future communist societies. And herein lies one of his biggest errors. According to a number of social scientists like Eugene Buret, or renowned economists such as J.A. Schumpeter,  capitalist society is not a new and entirely different type of society if compared to the feudal one, but just the decaying phase of medieval Western society. 

In other words, what we were conditioned by Marx to believe about the existence of capitalist and communist societies is basically wrong. If, on the other hand, we look at capitalism (in the west) and communism (in the east) as simply the decomposing phases of feudal societies, many aspects about the organisation and functioning of capitalist or communist societies become more comprehensible from a sociological point of view. What is important to note at this point is that whereas decaying medieval Western societies turned capitalist, decaying feudal Eurasian or Asian societies turned communist. 

It is useful to remember that both capitalism and communism have facilitated the transition of entire nations from agricultural countries to industrialised and urbanised ones in a relatively short period of time, albeit using vastly different methods in achieving these goals. Both types of transition, however, have been marred by extremely painful dislocation, misery and in some cases millions of casualties.

The most problematic part of the historical algorithm used to elaborate political, geostrategic and military agendas is that which refers to the evolution of humanity as a whole. Thus, if Hegel and Marx were right, then under certain conditions historical evolution will stop after reaching a peak, after which the history pages in the book of life will remain blank. A version of this misguided interpretation of historical evolution was given to the American public by Francis Fukuyama, who in 1992 published his essay "The End of History and the Last Man".

Like Hegel before him, Fukuyama believed that after the 1991 implosion of the USSR the end of history was in sight. In his view this consists of the universal adoption of market economics principles and of liberal democracy as a political system. His interpretation of world history and especially his end-of-history thesis has informed  the political action of the US and that of American neoconservatives since 2000. To this day, neocons wrongly believe that because the US is the only superpower left, it should retain the status of world hegemon for at least another century.

What actually happened after the implosion of the bipolar world was - after a brief unipolar moment - the advent of the multipolar world, which the US alone adamantly opposes.

In fact, a much more fruitful approach to understanding the historical evolution of humanity could be found in the writings of Italian philosopher of history Giambattista Vico. In his "Scienza Nuova", he postulated that human societies have a cyclical - instead of linear - evolution. Vico's definition of progress differs from that of Kant or Hegel, for example, who were firm believers in the infallibility of human reason. For Vico too, reason was the catalyst for human progress. However, Vico believed in the possible collapse of reason at some point, which in turn could cause civilisational collapse. In other words, he was convinced that a breakdown in reason can cause man to revert to an earlier, barbarous state.( His approach could for example better explain how the excesses of nazism and even communism were ever possible.)

In this cyclical paradigm of evolution, a fallen empire like Rome, for example, partially re-emerged in a different form in 800 under the name of The Holy Roman Empire (considered by Popes as the secular arm of the Church), and it was arguably the most powerful European feudal state during the Middle Ages. The Holy Roman Empire lasted for a thousand years until 1806, when it was replaced by the Confederation of the Rhine by Francis II, the Austrian emperor. After the reunification of German states around Prussia in the 19th century, the rise and the fall of the German empire in the 20th century, the partition of Germany after 1945 and its reunification in 1991, the German federal state is still the most powerful country in the EU.

Yet another example is the recent re-emergence of China as an economic powerhouse, after what the Chinese call "the century of humiliation", with the Chinese share of global GDP  approaching again 25 percent, as it did around the year 1800. 

Russia, too, has put the trials and tribulations of empire collapse and 70 years of communism behind her and is fast re-emerging as the leading Eurasian military power, a status that it used to hold undisputed from the middle of the 18th century. 

Such examples conclusively prove that today's American policymakers would be well-advised to discard theories of history, like Fukuyama's, that can only lead to huge errors, especially in foreign policy. Adopting a cyclical approach to assessing historical developments could indeed yield much more positive outcomes for American experts and politicians alike.

Accordingly, German reunification and de facto leadership of the EU, the re-emergence of Russia as a major military power in Eurasia, or China's rise as a global economic actor should be considered normal historical developments . Moreover, even these countries' quest to have their spheres of influence recognised has deep historical roots and should be considered by Washington as legitimate, instead of being treated as offensive, as it is now the case.