Metanarratives of the new world order: Analyzing narrative discourse and 'The End of History' as case study

The years 1987 to 1991 simultaneously marked the end of the Cold War world order, the end of the "Cold War" as a framework for interpreting the world, and the emergence of "the end of the Cold War" as a phrase for narrating contemporary events. The end of the Cold War created a context both for the development of new frameworks for interpreting "the new world order" and for the elaboration of new meta-narratives of world history.;Conceived as a detailed case study and an intellectual history of the present, my dissertation analyzes the first internationally-popular text that presented an interpretation of the "new world order" within a larger meta-narrative: Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man (1992). First, I elaborate how I propose to analyze a single, relatively recent text as a form of intellectual history. I then appropriate views from Michel Foucault and Hayden White to develop a method of discursive analysis that I call a "historical ontology and historical epistemology". My central methodological contention is that texts and the objects to which they refer participate in the mutual and historical constitution of one another. To examine The End of History specifically as narrative discourse, I critically revise and employ White's method in Metahistory, which outlined twelve categories for analyzing different strategies of narration employed in historical narratives.;In the remaining chapters, I analyze the narrative strategies that Fukuyama uses in The End of History to configure events into an overarching meta-narrative and numerous sub-narratives. I also examine how Fukuyama's text patterns relationships between terms, and between terms and the objects to which they refer. I argue that, in his universalistic narrative of "liberal democracy" and "capitalism" as the telos of human history, Fukuyama's use of these terms to refer to heterogeneous states and economies is inconsistent and untenable. Relatedly, I critique Fukuyama's reification and separation of politics, economics, and culture throughout his meta-narrative. Finally, while Fukuyama characterizes relativism as an "intellectual crisis of Western rationalism" that he seeks to counter, he ultimately concedes to historical relativism in a way that fundamentally destabilizes his universalism.