French-English schools were suddenly everywhere, catering to a hungry new custom. In most wealthy families, people sent their offspring to the US for education, when France had been the only option before. The pull reached deeper into society, as even migrants of humble backgrounds, whose ambitions had until then gone no further than the towns of the Gulf of Guinea, began to picture themselves in any number of American cities, whose names circulated like talismans, spread by the first explorers who had flown there at the start of the decade.
Statemania eventually swept up even those who felt an ideological disdain for the US as the symbol of whatever their nemesis was. The pan-Africans, orphaned of revolutionary socialism after losing their Soviet parent, were not immune. I often heard their voices tremble with excitement when they alluded to the place-to-be. I was only half-surprised when the editor of Niger’s leading Islamist newspaper, a man who had spent years fighting for an Islamic Republic, turned up in New York in the 2000s, in hot pursuit of the American Dream.
That moment of universal American allure almost begged for a prophet like Fukuyama and his gospel of The End of History – first proclaimed in the summer of 1989, and expanded into a bestselling book a few years later. It came and, as we know, it hypostasised America’s massive pull into the idea of the final ideology, the climax of mankind’s career in a liberal post-history.
In interviews and op-eds, Fukuyama often summed up his ideas less grandly as ‘the West has won’ – a line closer to the truth than the lofty Hegelian constructions he used to give his account its quasi-liturgical weight. Saying ‘the West has won’ cuts through the haze of metaphysics and puts us face to face with the reality of brute force.
Statemania, the clearest proof of the West’s triumph – America’s, more exactly – was not an ideology, and so couldn’t be countered on ideological grounds. It was the pull of a utopia, which is why I had called it an ‘error.’ As such, the error of those who rushed toward it like moths to the light was natural. I was not so free from it myself.