by John Arquilla
Foreign Policy
Where have all the leaders gone? So much has happened in 2011, but there is precious little evidence of world events being guided by a few great men and women. From the social revolution in Egypt's Tahrir Square to the impact of the Tea Party on American politics, and on to the Occupy movement, loose-knit, largely leaderless networks are exercising great influence on social and political affairs.
Networks draw their strength in two ways: from the information technologies that connect everybody to everybody else, and from the power of the narratives that draw supporters in and keep them in, sometimes even in the face of brutal repression such as practiced by Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria. Aside from civil society uprisings, this is true of terrorist networks as well. The very best example is al Qaeda, which has survived the death of Osama bin Laden and is right now surging fighters into Iraq -- where they are already making mischief and will declare victory in the wake of the departure of U.S. forces.
The kind of "people power" now being exercised, which is the big story of the past year, is opening a whole new chapter in human history -- an epic that was supposed to have reached its end with the ultimate triumph of democracy and free market capitalism, according to leading scholar and sometime policymaker Francis Fukuyama. When he first advanced his notion about the "end of history" in 1989, world events seemed to be confirming his insight. The Soviet Union was unraveling, soon to dissolve. Freedom was advancing nearly everywhere. Fukuyama knew there would still be occasional unrest but saw no competing ideas emerging. We would live in an age of mop-up operations, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq -- for which he had initially plumped -- and this year's war to overthrow Libya's Muammar al-Qaddafi. As Fukuyama noted in his famous essay, "the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world."
Comments
I don't think Fukuyama meant that the advent of liberal democracy meant the elimination of either refinements or challenges to it. Without going over every detail of the article, I will just say he mentions Jena in 1806 could have been considered the end of history, but there were refinements to make such as ending slavery, etc. He also correctly identified future challenges to liberal democracy such as religion and nationalism. A further challenge we can add to the list, something he could not have predicted back in 1989, is the effects of social media and electronic communications in uniting like-minded people. Call it Googolism, but it does have its challenges for a liberal democracy.
However, I think we will see these leaders come to light soon. I don't feel we are close to the United States of Google anytime soon. People still want and need local leadership, especially as we are clinging to our state system. Even if we trend toward grouping more by ideology and values vice race, nationality, and territory, we as humans can only go without leadership for so long.
What the author above skirts around, but does not state is that for the "people power" movement to hold, it will actually REQUIRE leadership to provide...wait for it...purpose direction and motivation. Think back to the Flower Power of the 1960s in the US. Who were the leaders? Now think to the civil right movement and its leaders. The leaders will show or the movements will fail.