I was taken aback by this statement in James Dobbins’s Wall Street Journal op-ed, “History Ended in 1945”:
In 1989 Francis Fukuyama published an essay heralding the “end of history,†by which he meant the triumph of representative democracy over all other forms of government. For a decade he appeared prescient, as democracy swept through Central and Southeastern Europe, Latin America and much of Asia. More recently some of those democracies have faltered. Although few have definitively collapsed, the democratic wave seems to have begun ebbing.
Yet in a larger sense, the “end of history†came in 1945. Since then there have been no wars between major powers and few between smaller states. The business cycle has been moderated if not eliminated. The subsequent seven decades saw almost continuous economic growth, lifting nearly half the world’s population into the middle class.
These accomplishments are based on two basic, widely accepted norms of international behavior: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s territory, and thou shall open thy markets to all equally. The norms were buttressed by numerous postwar institutions—the United Nations, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, now the World Trade Organization. Equally important, the norms were backed by U.S. military and economic power and the attractiveness of the American political and economic model.
because it is so Euro- and America-centric. Yes, those two norms are basic and widely accepted—in the United States and Europe. Outside those two areas not so much.
Based on the World Bank’s assessment of tariffs China’s, India’s, and most of Latin America’s trade-weighted tariffs are four times ours. In most African countries they’re ten times ours. And that doesn’t even take into account the enormous non-tariff barriers the very same countries have in place.
Or consider territory. Since 1945 the total territories of the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and even Russia have declined. China’s has expanded and continues to do so.
The first 30 years of the period in question were accompanied by enormous expansion of the U. S. economy and increases in wages for ordinary American workers. For the next 40 years those both slowed substantially.
Perhaps a recalibration of Mr. Dobbins’s thesis is in order. The United States, Canada, and Europe adopted the “two basic, widely accepted norms”. The balance of the world, about three-quarters of the people and land mass, did not. That condition resulted in bringing a lot of people, mostly in China and India, out of poverty while a handful of people in the United States, Canada, Europe, India, and China became fantastically wealthy.
History is alive and well. We’re just ignoring it.
