The stubborn grand theory

American political scientists have made a niche in the last twenty years of expounding the "grand theory". As the Soviet Union crumbled in the late 80s, so too did the fundamental premises that framed strategic thinking in Washington and elsewhere. A rash of large ideas (with attached buzz words) rushed into fill the void. 1993 was a bumper year for this species of pontification, notable efforts including Samuel Huntington's now infamous "The Clash of Civilisations" and Francis Fukuyama's "The End of History and the Last Man", which argued that the end of the Cold War was confirmation of the final triumph of liberal democracy and the free market.

They tried to explain the entirety of the new global geopolitics through a single thesis. They bred innocuous spin-offs, such as Dominique Moïsi's "The Clash of Emotions". They jostled for the attention of policy-makers and the public, while specialists and journalists looked on sceptically. Like swollen, leaking boats, many of these world-encompassing theories miraculously stayed afloat in public discourse, weathering the rip-tides of academic correctives and gales of inconvenient fact.

But with the staggering failures of Bush administration foreign policy, the grand theories of the 90s have sunk fast. Liberal democracy struggles to take route in the middle east, while the "petrocracies" of Venezuela, Iran and energy-rich Russia – in addition to the impervious autocratic capitalism of China – provide models of successful "non-democratic" systems and uncritical partners for countries the world over. Fukuyama has been proven wrong. So too has Huntington, despite the supposed evidence of the "war on terrorism". Only the crudest, most simplistic understandings of human identity and culture could excavate broad "civilisational" conflict from the detail of 21st century radical Islamist militancy.

So, what's to be done when the old theories have been proven wrong? Why, of course! Come up with new ones!

Enter Robert Kagan's "The End of the End of History". Even when hammering the final nail into the coffin of Fukuyama's "End of History", Kagan can't help but propose an alternate totalising vision of the new state of geopolitics, arraying the beleaguered liberal democracies of the west against spirited "autocracies", namely Russia and China. He recognises that the world has become far more fragmented than Washington hoped, and that the "liberal international order" is no longer a self-fulfilling prophecy. But even as Kagan calls for the "return of history and the end of dreams", his seeming hard-nosed approach to global politics is anchored in ideological fluff, the quest for simplicity.

Writing in the Financial Times, Philip Stephens offers a bruising critique of Kagan and the grand theory project.

The problem with these theories is that most of them last only as long as the first imprint of the essay in which they appear. One moment democracy is deemed an unstoppable force; then it is said to be in headlong retreat. First the world is flat; next we can see nothing for the mountains.

All this speaks to the impatience of the age. Everything must be compressed. We are addicted to the new. The ease with which new theories are discarded is matched only by the conviction with which they are first proclaimed as eternal truths...

Perhaps that is why the theories mostly share the same weakness. They project the present into an infinite future. Thus now that China and Russia have made authoritarian capitalism work for a while, we are asked to assume the model will endure. Bingo! Autocrats and oligarchs replace commissars as the new bogeymen in the west’s futile struggle to call a halt to history.

Well, no actually. Mr Kagan, we do not know whether China and/or Russia can defy indefinitely the liberalising impulses of the market. Logic says that economic freedom and political repression are antithetical. What we do not know is for how long they can coexist. Either way, there is no reason now to reinvent the bipolar world of the cold war by lining up democracies against autocracies...

We live in an era of jagged lines where established power structures are buckling, yet it is far from obvious what will replace them... Nothing is pre-ordained. The shape of the (dis)order that eventually emerges from these tumultuous changes will be determined by the decisions and choices of statesmen and women, peoples and governments. As for history, well, it never went away.

American presses will continue to churn out over-reaching treatises like Kagan's; the thirst for clarity and purpose in the world order is lucrative for publishers. Success in the market doesn't translate into successful policy-making. At a time when what America's next president needs most is subtle thinking, the grand theory remains as unhelpful as ever.