福山播客（二）：历史的终结（下）

这是选·美的第 1028 篇文章

This is Stanford Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law podcast. We are studying why governments fail. We are going to talk about economic and political development at home and around the world.

Today we are listening to Francis Fukuyama, the Mosbacher Director of the Center on Democracy, Development, and the Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli institute of Stanford University.  Welcome to the CDDRL democracy world.

The second problem with my 1992 formulation is closely related and has to do with the fragility of modern states. Modern states can develop out of less developed ones, but they can also decay, that is modern political orders can regress to something less modern. The central problem with modern state is that it is in some sense very unnatural: the modern state is premised on impersonality and merit. The official you select to run the government should not be your friend or your cousin, but someone who’s qualified for the job. Human sociability works differently to favor friends and family. So there’s a constant temptation to erode the impersonal character of the state or we otherwise called political corruption. The temptation is particularly strong for elites who try to translate their wealth and power into private advantages through their capture of the state. This process I labeled with a very long word “repatrimonialization” in my Political Order series and it has unfolded in every political system that tried to create a modern state. It happened at the end of Han Dynasty in China. It happened to the Ottoman system of slave soldiers and under the old regime in France which created the practice of venal office holding. Something similar is going on in the United States today where variety of elites are taking advantage of the US check and balance political system to veto policies that hurt their interest, leading to overall political paralysis.

第二个问题是和现代政府的脆弱性息息相关的。现代政府可以从欠发达的状态发展而来，但是与此同时它们也有可能衰退，也就是说现代政治秩序可能退化到之前的发展形态。问题的核心在于现代政府从某种意义上来说是和人性相违背的：现代政府的构建是基于客观条件以及功劳的，换句话说，一位政府官员的任命是基于任人唯贤而不是任人唯亲的原则，这和人类的社交性是相违背的。这样一来，就存在政治腐败的问题，而这个问题，对于政治精英尤其明显，他们中的一些试图将公器私用。在我两卷本的《政治起源》书籍中，给了它一个专有名词：repatrimonialization。这一过程普遍存在于现代政府构建的过程之中，比如中国汉朝末期，奥斯曼土耳其帝国的奴隶兵役体系，法国的旧政权。而在当今美国也有类似的情况：一些政治精英正是利用了美国权力制衡的体制来否决那些对他们利益有损害的政策，而从大局来说，这会导致政治体制的瘫痪。

The third challenge to my end of history theory is partly related to the problem of political decay. There is a broad perception in many contemporary liberal democracies that existing elites have gamed systems to their own advantage and are so deeply entrenched that ordinary democratic politics is not sufficient to dislodge them. The resulting political stasis or gridlock then leads to demands for a strong leader who can challenge these elites, even if it means undermining the institutional framework that has defined liberal democracy. Political stasis has become linked to the economic distress of the old middle or working class that had secure employment during the decades immediately following World War II but who in recent decades has seen their incomes and social status is slipping. This has led to a wave of new anti-establishment populist movement throughout the democratic world. Viktor Orbán and Jarosław Kaczyński in Hungary and Poland, to Marine Le Pen in France and Brexit fears in the UK, and of course, to Donald Trump in the United States.

第三个挑战和政治衰败有关。在许多当代自由民主国家中，很大一部分的观点认为政治精英利用制度为他们的私利进行博弈，这种行为是如此的根深蒂固以至于民主体制并不足以对他们做出改变。而由此所产生的政治上的停滞或者僵局又让民众渴望强势领导者的出现，即使这种领导者意味着对自由民主政体的破坏也不足惜。现如今，政治的停滞已经和老一代中产阶级或者工人阶级的经济困境联系在了一起，他们在二战后的几十年间还享受着稳定的就业，但是最近的几十年，他们的收入和社会地位都出现了下降。而这直接导致了民主社会出现了一波反建制的民粹主义运动，包括匈牙利的奥班·维克多，波兰的雅罗斯瓦夫·卡钦斯基，法国的马琳勒庞，英国的脱欧，以及美国的川普。

The fourth challenge to my 1992 hypothesis is the one raised by Huntington himself in his book The Clash of Civilizations in which he argued that liberal democracy is the product of western culture, and not an inevitable part of a universal modernization process.

第四点挑战是亨廷顿在他的文明的冲突一书中所提出来的，他认为自由民主只不过是西方文明的产物，这并不是现代化过程中普适的一部分。

Here CN is far and away the biggest challenge to the end of history narrative. Of all the illiberal nondemocratic challengers, I have from the beginning maintain that CN is the most serious. Islamism is often raised as another competitor. But I’m reasonably certain that no society governed as Islamic theocracy will ever be able to reach the levels of economic and technological modernity necessary to sustain it as a successful society. Chief evidence for this is that none has come close to doing so yet. The only economically successful places in the Middle East are tiny outposts like Dubai and Qatar that have adopted liberal autocratic political systems. Iran, which led the region into Islamic fundamentalism, is seething on the inside as a new generation of well-educated, young people, longed for a more open and genuinely democratic society. CN is different. CN remains an illiberal autocracy that has successfully maintaining high levels of growth and is proving that it can master a wide range of technologies necessary to sustain growth into the future. For a while, people question whether such a society can truly innovate as opposed to copying and catching up with the world’s leading economies. But CN with its huge and expanding tech sector is out competing its western rivals on a number of fronts. The question then is how sustainable the CN model is. No society can be judged by its performance over the short run and there are reasons for thinking that CN has serious challenges in the decades ahead. The high levels of growth in recent years have been sustained using extremely high levels of debt. The country has a huge savings rate, its net debt position is not sustainable. Its growth model is based on high levels of infrastructure investment. And that has come to a halt whether this can be exported abroad through the Belt and Road Initiative is questionable. It has privileged economic growth for so long over other goals like environmental protection that has poisoned its own environment. While the government is trying to clean up, it’s not clear it will be able to fix these problems and continue to grow as it has. Finally the legitimacy of Chinese Communist Party remains highly dependent on its performance. The country has not experienced a serious recession since 1978. But economic setbacks are inevitable as it seeks to move into high income status. How will the new middle class in CN feel about continued party rule during a long economy downturn. If CN in the coming years continues to grow, and remains stable as the world’s largest economic power, then I would say that my 1992 thesis has been conclusively refuted.

在这里，我国的因素是我历史的终结论中最大的挑战。而且我一直都认为，在所有的非民主自由的挑战中，我国是最严峻的。与此同时，伊斯兰经常被认为是另一个同西方文明的竞争对手，但是我有理由相信，依靠伊斯兰神权政治是不可能达到一个成功社会所需要的经济和技术现代化的条件的。这方面的主要证据就是还从来没有一个国家靠此成功过。中东地区的一些小型的前哨国家，诸如卡塔尔或者迪拜，他们在经济上的成功所仰赖的是一种自由专制的政治体制。另一个例子，伊朗，这个伊斯兰原教旨主义国家，其国家内部却正在孕育一批受过良好教育，渴望更加开放和民主社会的年轻人。

但是我国的情况就不同了。我国目前仍然是一个非自由的专制政体，并且成功的保持了高速的经济增长，而且拥有维持未来继续增长所需的各项技术。曾经有人质疑说像我国这种模式是否能够真正的激发创新，而不是通过山寨来和世界上发达的经济体展开竞争。但是现实却是，我国拥有庞大且不断扩张的科技产业，这使得他们能够在很多方面同西方的竞争对手展开竞争。被这个问题打脸之后又提出了新的质疑就是我国模式是可持续的吗？我认为这不能通过短期的表现来轻易的做出判断，并且有理由相信，我国在未来的几十年中会面对比较严峻的挑战：我国近年高速的经济增长是以极高的债务水平为代价的，我国还拥有巨额的储蓄，这导致其净债务状况的不可持续性。而且它的经济增长模式很大程度上依赖于基建投资，而这种模式是否可以通过一带一路的倡议输出到国外也是存疑的。我国长期的经济增长是以牺牲其他考虑比如环保为代价的，虽然政府也体现出了治理的决心，但是目前来看并不清楚问题是否会得到解决，并且与此同时又能保证经济的增长不会受到影响。最后，CCP的合法性目前仍然高度依赖其执政表现，而我国自从1978年之后就再也没有经历过严重的经济衰退，但是经济的起伏是不可避免的。试想一下，如果我国的经济出现长时期的衰退，新兴的中产阶级会如果看待CCP的统治。我把话放这儿了，如果我国在未来的几年之间仍然能够保持经济的持续增长，其世界最大经济体的地位依然保持稳定，那么我的观点就完全被驳斥了。

Fifth challenge has to do with technology, actually this is a series of challenges posed by different technologies that are either already visible or are over the Horizon. Given the framework of my original argument and the role of the technological changed played in it, it’s hard to see how there could be an end of History without an end of technological development. I made note of this in my 2001 book Our Posthuman Future in which I argued the possibilities for manipulation of human behavior were expanding in dramatic ways as a result of progress in the life sciences. My hypothesis about the sustainability of liberal democracy rested, in the end, on its compatibility with the human nature. But if that nature could be deliberately altered through genetic engineering or psychotropic drugs then all bets were off. The kinds of social engineering pioneered by the 20th century’s totalitarian regimes were absolutely crude by comparison to what is possible today through biotechnology. This is not the only technological challenge contemporary political systems face. Weapons of mass destruction including biological weapons threaten to undermine the link between the social development and military power, giving small terrorist groups and weak states potent leverage over their more developed rivals. WMDs in a sense return the world to the situation it was in for a number of centuries when nomadic horsemen could defeat the armies of more developed agrarian societies, as a condition that lasted up until the invention of gunpowder. Automation has been widely blamed for job loss in developed economies and is very likely to affect ever higher levels of skill, increasing overall inequality, imposing particular challenges to countries dedicated to the principle of equality. Finally, if there are absolute limits to growth imposed by global warming, resource scarcity, or plateauing productivity enhancing change, then liberal democracies will face special challenges. Market economies produce inequalities that are politically tolerable only to the extent that there is a perception that everyone’s benefiting to some degree. If there’s and end to growth, we may return to the pre-modern Malthusian zero-sum world in which predation rather than the creation of new wealth becomes the easiest route to riches. All of these technological developments are possibilities not certainties and we may yet be surprised at ways in which technological change benefits human development. There’s no finality to this process.