American Tianxia: State and Self at the End of History
Channel: Salvatore Babones
Date: 2016-08-08

In 1989, with the Soviet system just starting to fracture, the American political philosopher Francis Fukuyama presciently predicted the "end of history" in the victory of the "universal homogeneous state" based on "liberal democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the economic."  As a technologist Fukuyama may have been an utter failure but as a futurist he was more successful than even he seems to realize.  Beginning in the 2000s and accelerating in the 2010s Fukuyama's universal homogeneous state has come to be realized in a global American Tianxia, a political system focused on the United States but embracing (on a sliding scale of proximity) nearly the entire world.  The American Tianxia can productively be compared to the Ming-Qing tianxia in East Asia and its tributary system, with two key differences: the unifying ideology of the American Tianxia is Enlightenment individualism (not Confucian paternalism) and the American tributary system delivers a net economic benefit to the center (not to the peripheries).  Taken together, these two differences reinforce individual people's levels of attachment to the system as a whole, reduce the salience of national politics in individuals people's lives, and create a strongly hierarchical global world centered on the United States.