The End of the Twentieth Century and the End of the Modern Age.

For John Lukacs, the nineteenth century extends from 1815 to 1914; the twentieth from 1914 to 1989. The end of the twentieth century - Lukacs's main theme - is seen as the prelude to the end of the Modern Age. Lukacs writes near the end of his book:

So in the 1990s we also know what people five hundred years ago did not know: that we are approaching the end of an entire historical era. This book addresses the end of the twentieth century, not the end of the Modem Age, which is not yet. But many of the main features of the Modern Age, which began around 1500, have come to, or very near to, their end now: the expansion of Europe; the expansion of the white race, the colonial empires; the Atlantic as the center of history; the predominance of sea power; liberalism; humanism; bourgeois culture; the predominance of urban and urbane civilization, the increasing permanence of residence; the cult of privacy, the Newtonian concept of the universe and of physical reality; the ideal of scientific objectivity; and Age of the Book. Many of these conditions and ideals have now weakened. Some of them disappeared altogether. None of them proved to be perennial or leakproof. They were created by and incarnated in institutions that still exist and function, but in ever more different ways and for different purposes; and many of them have become antiquated and sclerotic.

This book consists for the most part of historical and political reflections, but these are interspersed with fragments of autobiography and accounts of

journeys mostly in Eastern Europe, especially in the author's native Hungary. A specimen of autobiography:

17 August 1991. I was an early anti-Communist. At the age of 17 I read Marx, and found him almost always unrealistic, at times unreadable. I wrote about this intellectual experience in my Confessions of an Original Sinner, and about error after error in Marxist philosophy elsewhere. I shall not sum up these things here. I left my native country and my family in 1946, at the age of 23, even before Hungary became entirely Communist-ruled; I knew that this would happen because of the Russian presence, and soon. The future, including my own future, was America.

John Lukacs now lives in Pennsylvania. He applauds the anti-Communism of "those who have lived in countries and in places where Communists or their satellites are in power." He goes on:

Where they are not, a self-identification with anti-Communism suggests a kind of self-satisfaction, the source of which is, more than often, the desire for respectability, the wish to assert that one belongs within the mainstream of public opinion, and within the authentic community of the nation. I have seen plenty of opportunistic Communist fellow travelers in my life (and not only in the twilight years of 1945-46 in Hungary); I have, alas, seen even more opportunistic anti-Communists in the United States, many former leftists among them.

He diagnoses the reasons for the collapse of the Soviet Empire with a neatly sustained metaphor:

Yet the digestive problems of the Russians were insufficiently understood in the West, and especially misconstrued in the United States. From the Russians' bad table manners people concluded that their appetite was insatiable, whereas the opposite was rather true: their digestion was poor.

He identifies with precision the nature of the transition of power in the former Soviet Union:

What has already happened is the replacement of one kind of state bureaucracy by another one: a nominally (but often only nominally) Communist one by a populist nationalist one, often composed of the same kind of people, and sometimes of the very same ones.

Lukacs sees a limited but significant revival of German nationalism, and a great expansion of German influence to the East. On nationalism:

Are the Germans immune to the revival of their nationalism? Yes and no. Yes: because for most Germans the rejection of the Hitler past is not merely the result of a politic calculation. No: because that rejection is not necessarily identical with a rejection of German nationalism, including its memories. In the event of a surge of a populist nationalist party, people such as Kohl and others of his party will not be immune to the temptation to seek some kind of compromise, to adopt some of the rhetoric and some of the politics of the new nationalists of a younger generation. Again there will be more to that temptation than politic calculation. The official repudiation of the Hitler era will not cease. Nor will the cultivation of good German relations with Israel. But the time may come when at least some of the German memories of the Third Reich and of the Second World War may undergo a deeply felt revision, a matter of memory, which will be more than a matter of quarrel among historians; for, as Kierkegaard once said, "we live forward but we can only think backward" - and there is, of course, an inseparable connection between memory and knowledge, between a view of the past and a view of the future, between thinking and hving.

On expansion:

Then there is the prospect of returning German power. Not yet. The Germans have their hands full with the East German mess for some years to come. Also - and this is more important - most of the West German people have come to terms with their history, so that the idea of a recurrent German expansion to the east is still alien to them. Yet there is a great political vacuum in Eastern Europe; and it is reasonable to assume that this will be filled eventually by Germany. This applies to the political configurations within each nation, too; there will be (indeed, there already are) certain political parties attracted to and willing to depend on German, rather than on other Western European or American, political support. Keep in mind the prospective fragmentation of Eastern Europe: Slovenia, Croatia, Slovakia, the Baltic states, and the Ukraine are natural allies of Germany. What is already happening in Eastern Europe (consider but the Yugoslav crisis as I write this) is not only the dismantling of Yalta - that is, of the results of the Second World War. Here and there we see the dismantling of Versailles, of the results of the First World War. Indeed, the twentieth century is over.

Without being entirely explicit about it, Lukacs appears to see German influence replacing American throughout most of the Old World. Where he is explicit is in seeing the end of the twentieth century as also the end of the American Century:

The twentieth century was the American Century not only because of the overwhelming power of the United States but also because of the overwhelming influence and prestige of things American. The American dollar became the universal standard of currency throughout the world. Many of the most valuable objects of European art and many of the greatest European artists came across the Atlantic to the United States. American universities became global centers of research and study. American customs, American practices, American music, and American popular culture were emulated in the farthest corners of the globe. As early as 1925, millions of people in Europe knew the names and faces of American movie stars while they knew not the name of their own prime minister. Much of this is still going on. Yet many of these movements - movements of power, of prestige, or presence - continue no longer. It seems that the twenty-first century will not be an American Century. There is nothing particularly ominous in that prospect, and I mean for Americans. What is ominous is that the end of the twentieth century, the end of the American Century, is part and parcel of the ending of the entire Modern Age.

Without reaching a definitely pessimistic conclusion, Lukacs is clearly apprehensive about what may follow the End of the Modern Age. In the kinds of rampant populist nationalism which have now taken the place of Communism in the former Soviet Union and in former Yugoslavia, as well as in stirrings of the Far Right in Germany and France, Lukacs discerns a potential for what he calls "a New Barbarism":

"To bring out of a state of barbarism": that was apposite to the beginning of the Modern Age. Near the end of the Modern Age our task - and our problems - are different: how not to accept the descent to a New Barbarism. We know something that people at the beginning of the twentieth century could not even imagine: that the advance of technology and barbarism are no longer irreconcilable. Goebbels realized that as early as 1939: "National Socialism had understood how to take the soulless framework of technology and fill it with the rhythm and hot impulses of our time." Not National Socialism: rather, the New Barbarians of whom the Nazis were but one variant of forerunners.

Whether or not we accept all of Lukacs's insights, we surely have to recognize, as we read The End of the Twentieth Century, that we are in the presence of one of the most powerful, as well as one of the most learned, minds formed by that century. It is an ominous symptom of the state of our culture, as that century nears its end, that John Lukacs is relatively little known, while quackery which should be obvious, such as Francis Fukuyama's "End of History" theory, has been very widely and solemnly discussed, and is still taken seriously, even after it has been comprehensively refuted by history itself.

When I compare the reception of Lukacs to that of Fukuyama, I detect an encroachment of the New Barbarism.

Mr. O'Brien has just published The Great Melody: A Thematic Biography of Edmund Burke (University of Chicago).