Last Thursday, noted political scholar Francis Fukuyama visited campus under the auspices of the Dickey Center. The former neoconservative and current director of John’s Hopkin’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) sat down with TDI to discuss, among other things, where his beliefs depart from typical neoconservative doctrine and the future of Muslim integration in Europe.

The Dartmouth Independent: In the National Interest , you once suggested that we should have a Realistic Wilsonian foreign policy. What do you mean by that?

Francis Fukuyama: Well I think that classical realism of the sort that Henry Kissinger articulated does not believe in promoting democracy—it in general doesn’t worry about what happens within states as long as long as state-to-state relations are stable. I don’t think that is really possible for the United States considering that what happens within states is important for their external behavior.

On the other hand I don’t think that regime change can be a central component of U.S. foreign policy in the sense that a lot of Neoconservatives, like Bill Kristol and Bob Kagan, suggested in the early 2000s before the Iraq War.

Realistic Wilsonianism maintains the goals but tries to use, in my view, more realistic means, based on soft power, to promote democracy.

TDI: You published an article in Public Interest “How to Regulate Science.” As such a vocal supporter of the cause of liberal democracy this seems to be an odd position to take. Why is it necessary to regulate science?

FF: Well, I don’t think it’s important to regulate science as a whole. There are new areas of biomedicines and reproductive technologies that really do need to be regulated because they affect very basic human values. If and when we get into genetic engineering I don’t think that it should be a simply free individual choice of parents whether to endow your kids with specific genetic characteristics that people might find potentially troubling.

A great deal of human biomedicine is already regulated; you have the FDA, all sorts of rules about human experimentation, etc. There are already many things scientific research in this area cannot really do because it conflicts with important moral values within society. I just think we have to update this system of regulation to take into account technological development that’s about to come down the pike.

TDI: Can you elaborate on the problem Transhumanism poses to human rights?

FF: It’s simple. In my view, we derive our basic understanding of human rights from a view of human nature. This view of an underlying foundation of what is the essence of human beings—what we want to protect when we say we want to protect human rights. If you can genetically engineer an individual that doesn’t have those characteristics, that individual would not be a human being. You would raise very complex question of what sort of rights these creatures have. They could be either superior or inferior. Supermen or undermen, I think that is really the core issue.

TDI: You wrote in the Wilson Quarterly that the internal problem of integrating culturally diverse populations into a single, cohesive national community is the greatest threat to liberal democracy. How can this problem be overcome?

FF: Fortunately it is not up to me to rectify. Since I wrote that we’ve had all these riots in the French suburbs; there were the second generation British citizens that have been accused of these various terror plots. In a way [these examples illustrated] what I had been writing about. There is something especially in Western Europe that has not been working right in the integration of culturally different people. And I think that in the U.S. in general, because we have a more politically based political identity, it has been less of a problem. On the other hand we have fewer people to integrate and the people we do have to integrate, Hispanics, are culturally much closer to main stream America than Muslims in Europe.

What to do about it? That is a really complicated issue. Part of the solution is one that I think Europeans are starting to take more seriously, which is they have to give up this blood-and-soil based notion of identity –what it means to be a German, a Dutch, or Italian person -- and move to a more American model where identity is political.

TDI: The next few questions are about you, personally. What is your favorite work of fiction?

FF: I have a really hard time answering that question in general because I like a lot of things. I really liked Never Let me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, novel about cloning one that is done extremely subtly.

TDI: Who do you think is the best up-and-coming political scientists, one who has not reached the mainstream at this point?

FF: You know there is probably a really great answer to that question but I’m just blanking at the moment. There are a lot of people I like a lot who are very promising but that’s a little different from someone who is really paradigm-changing.

TDI: If you could recommend one book that every serious student of political science should read, what would it be?

FF: Probably either Plato’s Republic or Aristotle’s Politics. I think that you have to start at the books that ask the most basic questions.

TDI: Do you think Hegel and Kojeve are still relevant to the study of IR? How?

FF: Haha. Well I don’t think that they’re--they’re not directly relevant.
I think that whether people admit it or not, people have a Hegelian view of history. That is to say, they have a certain vision of progress that involves economic development and growth of democracy. And most people have no idea who Hegel was, but they still think you have to get in on “the right side of history.” I think it is one of those hidden influences that people don’t recognize that is very important.

TDI: How would you like to be remembered? What would you like written next to “Francis Fukuyama” in the Encyclopedia Brittanica 100 years from now?

FF: It’s easier to say what I don’t want written. You can imagine a future world in which we have really big setbacks to democracy as you did 1930s. Then you have an encyclopedia entry that says, “Fukuyama thought that democracy would triumph and now we see here in the year 2050 that he was wrong.” I think that would be quite undesirable in terms of my own reputation and for the state of the world in general, which is much more important.