Fukuyofuturism

The high priest of neoliberalism meets the Nouvelle Droite's no. 1 porn star

In the north-west of England lies the mid-century “new town” of Skelmersdale. It was built for a future powered by what the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson extolled, in a famous 1963 speech, as “the white heat of technology”. The new post-war Britain was to be a distributed, pluralistic hotbed of innovation and technological advancement that would lead the world and make us all rich.

As we all now know, this future was up on blocks by the end of the 1970s, to be stripped for parts by the future we actually got: one of de-industrialisation, financialisation and Progress, and latterly brain drain and warp-speed demographic change. Skelmersdale today is one of Britain’s most deprived areas, not so much home to the “white heat of technology” as that steerage-class subset of globalisation’s beneficiaries euphemistically known as “asylum seekers”.

But the twenty-first may be as littered with abandoned futures as the twentieth. Since Trump’s November 2024 election victory, prophecies once just as inevitable-seeming as Wilson’s are under revision all over the world. Even Francis Fukuyama, notorious herald of “The End of History” at the close of the Cold War, conceded in the Financial Times following the Trump win that the ineluctable global triumph of liberal democracy plus consumer choice may be neither global, nor ineluctable. History is back.

Nowhere does this provoke more anxiety than in those polities that are Americanised, but not explicitly American. This is acutely palpable in those Old World territories whose stability, coherence, and overall direction have been ordered explicitly to New World hard power and an accompanying cultural template, since at least Fukuyama’s moment of hubris. What happens in Europe if, as now seems at least possible, American hard power pivots East, even as the Fukuyamist End of History worldview goes up in smoke?

Many of the unanswered questions here relate to specific ways European cultural and political assumptions differ from the American kind: divergences that have for some time been papered over by American cultural and political influence in the Old World. But these buried differences, along with the political questions they now raise, are revealed by a comparative read of two End of History era takes on Europe’s future: one from the American liberal Left – fittingly, from Fukuyama himself – and the other from the French far right. Together, they foreshadow a possible way forward for Europe – but one that is likely to please no one.

Francis Fukuyama’s 2018 Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment is of interest less for its questionable predictive powers than its surprising continuities with the vision of a very much less respectable thinker - the late Guillaume Faye, as set out in his best-known work, the 1998 Archeofuturism.

In contrast to Fukuyama’s Ivy League public-intellectual respectability, Faye enjoyed what can perhaps most charitably be called a portfolio career, that included a stint at an ethno-nationalist think tank which ended when he fell out with Alain de Benoist, a stretch teaching sociology of sexuality at the University de Besançon, re-invention as the media figure ‘Skyrock’ and - as Faye claimed, in a very Houellebecqian detail - occasional appearances in porn films. And in keeping with this picaresque vibe, Archeofuturism is an uneven book. In it, fulminations about his colleague-turned-enemy Alain de Benoist blend with grumbles about sexual mores, apocalyptic warnings about Islam, and prophecies of a pan-European post-conflict civilisation that, he predicts, will emerge in the wake of the coming cataclysmic ecological, economic, political and interracial convulsions.

Imagine my surprise, then, to find that Fukuyama’s and Faye’s visions for the future of Europe converge, and contrast, in thought-provoking ways. In turn the tensions between these texts sheds light on a thorny political problem often overlooked in today’s America-centric politics: that of Europeans.