Why Women Can't Run the World: International Politics according to Francis Fukuyama

Résumé du document

Humans are like chimps. The social-constructionist theory was a wrong methodology to study human behaviors and the social sciences should turned towards sociobiology. So males are more aggressive than females, it is engraved in their genetic code and this is the cause of insecurity around the world. Living in the democratic zone of peace tamed this aggressive nature because a feminist point of view emerged with the women's right to vote. Nevertheless, there is a zone of turmoils where young men are still victims of their instincts. That is why women shouldn't take in charge international relations. This is highlighted in Women and the Evolution of World Politics, an article written by F. Fukuyama and published in Foreign Affairs which used an argumentation based on sociobiology to take up with the clash of civilization and a patriarchal vision of international politics against feminist scholarships. It is easy to understand why this article provoked a strong controversy and many responses like the sum of articles untitled Fukuyama's Follies: So What if Women Ruled the World? published in Foreign Affairs. In this context, J. A. Tickner, quoted by Fukuyama like one of the major feminist scholars on international relations theory, wrote her own response to Fukuyama and stood back from the controversy. In her article Why Women Can't Run the World: International Politics According to Francis Fukuyama, like in her working paper You Just don't Understand, Tickner hope to create a productive dialogue between classical IR scholars and feminist in order to promote feminist point of view on international relations.Though, Tickner could be wrong about willing to refocus the debate on the feminist IR scholars concerns and not on the basement of Fukuyama's thesis. Because there is a real danger to based social sciences on biology, in other words on human nature. That is what I will attempt to demonstrate in this essay. In the first part, I will make an analytic abstract of Tickner's article. In the second part, I will criticize her argumentation in order to demonstrate that Fukuyama's thesis based on the concept of human nature is not only a deeply conservative vision of the women's role in IR and in our society but is deeply against any human progress.

Extraits

[...] Tickner says that women and men should work for a better future but she sees the world first through feminist lenses. She is first concern about women's problems. If I had to wrote a response to Fukuyama's article, I wouldn't do the same maybe because I am a man and from an other generation. As a man, I am less conscious of feminine oppression. Moreover, I was born and raised at the end of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the postmodern era in which patriarchal values like other values are no more so obvious. [...]

[...] This is roughly abstracted Women and the Evolution of World Politics, an article written by F. Fukuyama and published in Foreign Affairs which used an argumentation based on sociobiology to take up with the clash of civilization and a patriarchal vision of international politics against feminist scholarships. It's easy to understand why this article provoked a strong controversy and many responses like the sum of articles untitled Fukuyama's Follies: So What if Women Ruled the World? published in Foreign Affairs. [...]

[...] She wants to promote feminist IR theory, refocus the debate on that against Fukuyama's article, she could say that . feminist theoretical approaches are grounded in social and political theory and sociological traditions which have not been central to the discipline or international relations” and we construct rather than discover our world(s).” The Enlightenment is the historic context in that theories of social contract and human nature emerged. This philosophic tradition is linked to misogyny and/or a depreciative view on women, frequent among philosopher. [...]

[...] These two country belongs to the Fukuyama's zone of peace, nevertheless their young men appears to have more or less aggressive behavior (if aggressiveness and crime rate are linked which is not evident). She uses even some arguments from Fukuyama Follies. For example, in Father Knows Best, Katha Pollit argues against Fukuyama that voters don't make foreign policy. So, in some way Tickner contradicts herself. One could say that to contradict the opponent's arguments is an obliged way of rhetoric. Thus, to prove that everything is wrong about Fukuyama's article is not the focus of Tickner's article contrary to Fukuyama's Follies. According to Tickner, feminist IR scholars agendas are her focus. [...]

[...] However, since the nineties there were be also the war on Afghanistan and Iraq and the jail of Guantanamo Bay. Structural social hierarchies, inequalities, civil casualties and human rights are still secondary and the realistic point of view on IR remains the majority. Nevertheless, I think we can hope for a better future and that one day IR scholars like Fukuyama will be marginal to the discipline like feminist perspectives on IR have been once and that an article like Women In the World Politics will be largely view as unbearable attack not only against women but against mankind. [...]