Europe Risks Becoming History’s Victim
Written by Konstantinos Gkikas; Edited by Andrew Ma
Published on May 12th, 2025
Few concepts in modern political thought have been more abused and misunderstood than Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis. Originally posited in 1989 and then analyzed in his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama posited that in this new unipolar world, history was over. Apologies in advance to any philosophy lovers for the vulgar reductionism in the paragraphs to follow; it is worth the simplification in order to effectively grapple with the intellectual roots of this idea at a more easily accessible level.
In his lectures on the philosophy of history, Hegel argued that Reason was the guiding power of history, itself a dialectic between Spirit and Nature. This dialectic, contraposed a thesis to an antithesis, leading to a synthesis. In this process there were heroes, the ones who advanced history and brought about new advances for the Spirit, and victims, those who remained stuck in the past and refused to move on. It’s hard to overstate how influential Hegel was in the history of ideas. With a flair of exaggeration, the Eastern Front has been described as where the “Left” and “Right” Hegelians met. And in Nietzsche’s “superman” the traces of Hegel’s hero can be seen.
Kojève, in analyzing Hegel in the 1950s, saw the end of history as the final victory of the Spirit, the final synthesis. His de facto disciple, Fukuyama, took the concept even further. For him history was centered around thymos, passion in the Aristotelian sense. Humans were motivated by megalothymia (wishing to be better than others), in the context of the master-slave relationship. What Fukuyama saw in the liberal international order forming as the USSR was collapsing was a system where Reason had won. In the place of megalothymia, isothymia¸ had won the day, as now this system ensured satisfaction for the whole of the world and society. No one wished to rein over the other as all were content with this new system. History was over, as the dialectic behind it had reached perfection.
The West was the world’s hero. Advancing liberal democracy and capitalism through an imperial pedagogy of violence, from Yugoslavia to Iraq, and via its considerable soft power all around the world. The victims were either to retreat in humiliation (like Yeltsin’s Russia) and “bide their time” before they could dare step out in the limelight again (like Deng Xiaoping’s China).
It is more than a cliché to say that Fukuyama was wrong and indeed this article doesn’t wish to repeat that claim. From Althusser to Zizek to post-2016 mainstream pundits on Western media and cab drivers in Athens, the concept has been completely ridiculed. The basic idea behind the argument however is less easy to do away with. For let’s assume for the sake of the argument that history is indeed a dialectic of competing ideas. Under that approach the West seemed to have been a perfect synthesis, the final synthesis for that. But it seems to have been after all yet another thesis, now meeting its antithesis.
When reading Fukuyama, it is evident that American liberalism is seen as the end of history. However, Kojève did not see the end of history in the US but in the European Community and her vision of the end of the nation state and of victorious economic liberalism. Under that light, Russia’s and the new administration in Washington DC’s opposition to Europe goes deeper than mere geopolitics. Regardless of whether Putin or Trump have any actual ideological qualms with liberalism, they are in effect building an antithesis to all that the European Union stands for intellectually.
The Ukraine War was seen in Europe as a means of making Russia into an ultimate victim. Stripped of its cordon sanitaire, it would be surrounded by liberal capitalist democracies where history would be over. Three years later, the US and Russia are excluding Europe from negotiations over Ukraine and the Vice-President of the United States didn’t shy away from attacking Europe on European soil, whilst the administration is undermining once-sacrosanct free-trade pieties by imposing tariffs on the Union. In fact, it appears that in the Trump administration’s version of a mean girls’ group chat, Europe is seen as the world’s Cady Heron.
Europe might thus seem to be facing the risk of finding itself in the most unenviable position Hegel envisaged, that of the victim. And most concerningly, it doesn’t seem that she will be joined by the very country that led her to the end of the history-that is the United States. Unfortunately, the prevalent reaction in Europe, when it comes to actual deeds and not just words, recalls the officers in Roth’s Radetzky March, who hear about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand during a reception. Even though they’re in different stages of inebriation, they realize that the world as they knew it is over, for Franz Joseph had no other heirs and war with Serbia (and therefore Russia) would be imminent, yet they are numb to it.
Austro-Hungary was a victim of history par excellence. A liberal (by 19th century standards), multinational and multi-religious empire, united in diversity under a gerontocracy that lived in a different century. It was literally torn apart in a world coalescing around the national principle and economic protectionism. Lest the European Union wish to become the new Austria-Hungary, it seems incumbent to recognize that if she doesn’t take an active role in shaping the world, others will shape it for her and against her.
