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Women and the Evolution of World PoliticsAuthor(s): Francis FukuyamaSource: Foreign Affairs, Vol. 77, No. 5 (Sep. - Oct., 1998), pp. 24-40Published by: Council on Foreign RelationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20049048 .

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Women and the Evolutionof World Politics

Francis Fukuyama

CHIMPANZEE POLITICSIn the worlds largest captive chimp colony at the Burgers Zoo in

Arnhem, Netherlands, a struggle worthy of Machiavelli unfoldedduring the late 1970s.As described by primatologist Frans deWaal,the aging alpha male of the colony, Yeroen, was gradually unseatedfrom his position of power by ayounger male, Luit. Luit could not havedone this on the basis of his own physical strength, but had to enter intoan alliance with Nikkie, a still younger male. No sooner was Luit ontop, however, than Nikkie turned on him and formed a coalition withthe deposed leader to achieve dominance himself. Luit remained in thebackground as a threat to his rule, so one day he was murdered byNikkie and Yeroen, his toes and testicles littering the floor of the cage.

Jane Goodall became famous studying a group of about 30 chimpsat the Gombe National Park inTanzania in the 1960s, a group shefound on the whole to be peaceful. In the 1970s, this group broke upinto what could only be described as two rival gangs in the northernand southern parts of the range. The biological anthropologistRichardWrangham with Dale Peterson in their 1996 book DemonicMales describes what happened next. Parties of four or five malesfrom the northern group would go out, not simply defending theirrange, but often penetrating into the rival group's territory to pick offindividuals caught alone or unprepared. The murders were oftengrisly, and they were celebrated by the attackers with hooting and

Francis Fukuyama isHirst Professor of Public Policy atGeorge MasonUniversity. His book, The Great Disruption, will be published in 1999.

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Women and theEvolution ofWorld Politicsfeverish excitement. All the males and several of the females in thesouthern group

wereeventually killed, and the remaining femalesforced to join the northern group. The northern Gombe chimps had

done, in effect, what Rome did to Carthage in 146 B.C.: extinguishedits rival without a trace.There are several notable aspects to these stories of chimp behavior.

First, the violence. Violence within the same species is rare in theanimal kingdom, usually restricted to infanticide by males who wantto get rid of a rival's offspring and mate with the mother. Only chimpsand humans seem to have aproclivity

forroutinely murdering peers.Second is the importance of coalitions and the politics that goes with

coalition-building. Chimps, like humans, are intensely social creatureswhose Uves are preoccupied with achieving and maintaining dominance in status hierarchies. They threaten, plead, cajole, and bribe theirfellow chimps to join with them in alliances, and their dominance lastsonly as long as they can maintain these social connections.

Finally and most significantly, the violence and the coalitionbuilding

isprimarily

the work of males. Femalechimpanzees

can beas violent and cruel as the males at times; females compete with oneanother in hierarchies and form coalitions to do so. But the most

murderous violence is the province of males, and the nature of femalealliances is different. According to deWaal, female chimps bond withfemales towhom they feel some emotional attachment; the males aremuch more likely tomake alliances for purely instrumental, calculatingreasons. In other words, female chimps have relationships; malechimps practice realpolitik.Chimpanzees are mans closest evolutionary relative, havingdescended from a common chimp-like ancestor less than five millionyears ago. Not only are they very close on a genetic level, they showmany behavioral similarities as well. As Wrangham and Petersonnote, of the 4,000 mammal and 10million ormore other species, onlychimps and humans Uve inmale-bonded, patrilineal communities inwhich groups of males routinely engage in aggressive, often murderousraiding of their own species. Nearly 30 years ago, the anthropologistLionel Tiger suggested that men had special psychological resourcesfor bonding with one another, derived from their need to hunt cooperatively, that explained their dominance in group-oriented activities

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Francis Fukuyamafrom politics towarfare. Tiger was roundly denounced by feminists atthe time for suggesting that there

werebiologically based psychologicaldifferences between the sexes, but more recent research, includingevidence from primatology, has confirmed that male bonding is infact genetic and predates the human species.

THE NOT-SO-NOBLE SAVAGEIt is all too easy to make facile comparisons between animal andhuman behavior to

provea

polemical point,as did the socialists who

pointed to bees and ants to prove that nature endorsed collectivism.Skeptics point out that human beings have language, reason, law,culture, and moral values that make them fundamentally differentfrom even their closest animal relative. In fact, for many years anthropologists endorsed what was in effect amodern version of Rousseau sstory of the noble savage: people living in hunter-gatherer societieswere pacific in nature. If chimps and modern man had a commonproclivity

for violence, the cause in the latter case had to be found incivilization and not in human nature.

A number of authors have extended the noble savage idea to argue thatviolence and patriarchy were late inventions, rooted in either theWesternJudeo-Christian tradition or the capitalism to which the former gavebirth.FriedrichEngels anticipated thework of later eminists by positingthe existence of a primordial matriarchy, which was replaced by a violentand repressive patriarchy only with the transition to agricultural societies.The problem with this theory is, as Lawrence Keeley points out in hisbook War Before Civilization that the most comprehensive recent studies of violence in hunter-gatherer societies suggest that for them war wasactually more frequent, and rates ofmurder higher, than for modern ones.

Surveys of ethnographic data show that only 10-13 percent of primitive societies never or rarely engaged inwar or raiding; the othersengaged in conflict either continuously or at less than yearly intervals.Closer examination of the peaceful cases shows that theywere frequentlyrefugee populations driven into remote locations by prior warfare orgroups protected by a more advanced society. Of the Yanomam?tribesmen studied by Napoleon Chagnon inVenezuela, some 30 percentof the men died by violence; the !Kung San of the Kalahari desert, once

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Women and theEvolution ofWorld Politicscharacterized as the "harmless people/' have a higher murder ratethan New York orDetroit. The sad

archaeologicalevidence from sites

likeJebel Sahaba inEgypt, Talheim inGermany, orRoaix inFranceindicates that systematic mass killings of men, women, and childrenoccurred inNeolithic times. The Holocaust, Cambodia, and Bosniahave each been described as a unique, andoften as a uniquely modern, form of horror, ^he HolocaustExceptional and tragic they are indeed, butwith precedents stretching back tens if not v^ambodia, and Bosniahundreds of thousands of years. have precedents goingIt is clear that this violence was largely * 1^1 _ r, ,n wu.i 11 . ?./ back at least tens ofperpetrated by men. While a small minorityof human societies have been matrilineal, thousands of years.evidence of a primordial matriarchy inwhichwomen dominated men, or were even relatively equal tomen, has been hard to find. There was no age of innocence. The line from chimp tomodern man is continuous.It would seem, then, that there is something to the contentionof many feminists that phenomena like aggression, violence, war, andintense competition for dominance in a status hierarchy are moreclosely associated with men than women. Theories of internationalrelations like realism that see international politics as a remorselessstruggle for power are in fact what feminists call a gendered perspective,describing the behavior of states controlled by men rather than states perse.A world run by women would follow different rules, itwould appear,and it is toward that sort of world that all postindustrial orWesternsocieties aremoving. As women gain power in these countries, the lattershould become less aggressive, adventurous, competitive, and violent.The problem with the feminist view is that it sees these attitudestoward violence, power, and status aswholly the products of a patriarchalculture, whereas in fact it appears they are rooted in biology. This makesthese attitudes harder to change inmen and consequently in societies.

Despite the rise ofwomen, men will continue to play amajor, ifnot dominant, part in the governance of postindustrial countries, not tomentionless-developed ones. The realms of war and international politics inparticular will remain controlled by men for longer than many feministswould like.Most important, the task of resocializing men to be more like

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Francis Fukuyamawomen?that is, less violent?will run into limits. What is bred in thebone cannot be altered easily by changes in culture and ideology.

THE RETURN OF BIOLOGYWe are living through a revolutionary period in the life sciences.Hardly aweek goes by without the discovery of a gene linked to a disease, condition, or behavior, from cancer to obesity to depression, withthe promise of genetic therapies and even the outright manipulation ofthe human genome just around the

corner. But while developments inmolecular biology have been receiving the lions share of the headlines,much progress has been made at the behavioral level aswell. The pastgeneration has seen a revival in Darwinian thinking about humanpsychology, with profound implications for the social sciences.For much of this century, the social sciences have been premised onEmile Durkheims dictum that social facts can be explained only by priorsocial facts and not by biological causes. Revolutions and wars are causedby social facts such

as economic change, class inequalities, and shiftingalliances. The standard social science model assumes that the humanmind is the terrain of ideas, customs, and norms that are the products ofman-made culture. Social reality is, in other words, socially constructed:ifyoung boys like to pretend to shoot each other more than young girls,it is only because they have been socialized at an early age to do so.The social-constructionist view, long dominant in the social sciences,originated as a reaction to the early misuse of Darwinism. Social Darwinists likeHerbert

Spenceror

outrightracists likeMadsen Grant in the

late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used biology, specifically theanalogy of natural selection, to explain and justify everything from classstratification to the domination of much of theworld bywhite Europeans.Then Franz Boas, aColumbia anthropologist, debunked many of thesetheories of European racial superiority by, among other things, carefully

measuring the head sizes of immigrant children and noting that theytended to converge with those of native Americans when fed anAmerican diet. Boas, aswell as his well-known students Margaret

Mead andRuth Benedict, argued that apparent differences between human groupscould be laid at the doorstep of culture rather than nature. There were,moreover, no cultural universals bywhich Europeans orAmericans could

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*y*

CORBIS-BETTMANN

Beating men at their own game: A woman floors her beauy i?io.

judge other cultures. So-called primitive peoples were not inferior, justdifferent. Hence was bom both die social constructivism and the culturalrelativism with which the social sciences have been imbued ever since.

But there has been a revolution inmodern evolutionary thinking. Ithas multiple roots; one was ethology, the comparative study of animalbehavior. Ethologists like Konrad Lorenz began to notice similarities inbehavior across awide variety of animal species suggesting common evolutionary origins. Contrary to the cultural relativists, they found that notonly was it possible tomake important generalizations across virtually

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Francis Fukuyamaall human cultures (for example, females are more selective than malesin their choice of sexual partners) but even across broad ranges of animalspecies. Major breakthroughs were made byWilliam Hamilton andRobert Trivers in the 1960s and 1970s in explaining instances of altruismin the animal world not by some sort of instinct towards species survivalbut rather in terms of "selfish genes" (to use

Humans are hard-Wired Rehar? Dawkins' phrase) thatmade socialbehavior in an individual animals interest. Fito act in Certain nally, advances in neurophysiology have shownpredictable ways. th**thebram isnot aLockean tabularasawaiting tobe filledwith culturalcontent, but rathera highly modular organ whose componentshave been adapted prior to birth to suit the needs of socially oriented

primates. Humans are hard-wired to act in certain predictable ways.The sociobiology that sprang from these theoretical sourcestried to provide a deterministic Darwinian explanation for justabout everything, so itwas perhaps inevitable that a reaction wouldset in against itas well. But while the term sociobiology has goneinto decline, the neo-Darwinian thinking that spawned it has blossomed under the rubric of evolutionary psychology or anthropologyand is today an enormous arena of new research and discovery.Unlike the pseudo-Darwininsts at the turn of the century, most

contemporary biologists do not regard race or ethnicity as biologicallysignificant categories. This stands to reason: the different human raceshave been around only for the past hundred thousand years or so, barelyablink of the eye in evolutionary

time. As countless authors havepointedout, race is largely a socially constructed category: since all races can (and

do) interbreed, the boundary lines between them are often quite fuzzy.The same is not true, however, about sex.While some gender rolesare indeed socially constructed, virtually all reputable evolutionarybiologists today think there are profound differences between the sexesthat are genetically rather than culturally rooted, and that thesedifferences extend beyond the body into the realm of the mind. Again,this stands to reason from aDarwinian point of view: sexual reproduction has been going on not for thousands but hundreds of millions ofyears. Males and females compete not just against their environment butagainst one another in a process that Darwin labeled "sexual s?lection,"

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Women and theEvolution ofWorld Politicswhereby each sex seeks tomaximize its own fitness by choosing certainkinds of mates. The psychological strategies that result from this neverending arms race between men and women are different for each sex.In no area is sex-related difference clearer than with respect toviolence and aggression. A generation ago, two psychologists, Eleanor

Maccoby and Carol Jacklin, produced an authoritative volume on whatwas then empirically known about differences between the sexes. Theyshowed that certain stereotypes about gender, such as the assertion thatgirls were more suggestible or had lower self-esteem, were just that,while others, like the idea that girls were less competitive, could not beproven one way or another. On one issue, however, there was virtuallyno disagreement in the hundreds of studies on the subject: namely, thatboys were more aggressive, both verbally and physically, in theirdreams, words, and actions than girls. One comes to a similar conclusionby looking at crime statistics. In every known culture, and from whatwe know of virtually all historical time periods, the vast majority ofcrimes, particularly violent crimes, are committed by men. Here thereis also apparently a genetically determined age specificity to violentaggression: crimes are overwhelmingly committed by young menbetween the ages of 15 and 30. Perhaps young men are everywheresocialized to behave violently, but this evidence, from different culturesand times, suggests that there is some deeper level of causation atwork.At this point in the discussion, many people become uncomfortableand charges of "biological determinism" arise. Dont we know countlesswomen who are stronger, larger, more decisive, more violent, or morecompetitive than their male counterparts? Isn't the proportion of femalecriminals rising relative to males? Isn't work becoming less physical,

making sexual differences unimportant? The answer to all of these questions is yes: again, no reputable evolutionary biologist would deny thatculture also shapes behavior in countless critical ways and can oftenoverwhelm genetic predispositions. To say that there is a genetic basisfor sex difference is simply to make a statistical assertion that the bellcurve describing the distribution of a certain characteristic is shifted overa little for men as compared with women. The two curves will overlapfor the most part, and there will be countless individuals in each population who will have more of any given characteristic than those of theother sex. Biology is not destiny, as tough-minded female leaders like

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Francis FukuyamaMargaret Thatcher, Indira Gandhi, and Golda Meir have proven. (It isworth

pointing out, however,that in male-dominated societies, it is

these kinds of unusual women who will rise to the top.) But the statistical assertion also suggests that broad populations of men and women,as opposed to exceptional individuals, will act in certain predictableways. It also suggests that these populations are not infinitely plastic inthe way that their behavior can be shaped by society.

FEMINISTS AND POWER POLITICSThere is by now an extensive literature on gender and internationalpolitics and a vigorous feminist subdiscipline within the field of international relations theory based on the work of scholars likeAnn Tickner,SaraRuddick, JeanBethke Elshtain, Judith Shapiro, and others. Thisliterature is too diverse to describe succincdy, but it is safe to say thatmuch of itwas initially concerned with understanding how internationalpolitics is "gendered," that is, run by men to serve male interests andinterpreted by other men, consciously and unconsciously, according tomale perspectives. Thus, when a realist theorist like Hans Morganthauor Kenneth Waltz argues that states seek tomaximize power, they thinkthat they are describing a universal human characteristic when, asTickner points out, they are portraying the behavior of states run by men.

Virtually all feminists who study international politics seek the laudable goal of greater female participation in all aspects of foreign relations, from executive mansions and foreign ministries tomilitaries anduniversities. They disagree as towhether women should get ahead inpolitics by demonstrating traditional masculine virtues of toughness,aggression, competitiveness, and the willingness to use force whennecessary, or whether they should move the very agenda of politicsaway from male preoccupations with hierarchy and domination. Thisambivalence was demonstrated in the feminist reaction toMargaret

Thatcher, who by any account was far tougher and more determinedthan any of the male politicians she came up against. Needless to say,Thatcher's conservative politics did not endear her to most feminists,who much prefer aMary Robinson orGro Harlem Brundtland as theirmodel of a female leader, despite?or because of?the fact thatThatcher had beaten men at their own game.

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Women and theEvolution ofWorld PoliticsBoth men and women participate in perpetuating the stereotypical

genderidentities that associate men with war and

competitionand

women with peace and cooperation. As sophisticated feminists likeJean Bethke Elshtain have pointed out, the traditional dichotomybetween the male "just warrior" marching to war and the female"beautiful soul"marching for peace is frequently transcended in practiceby women intoxicated by war and by men repulsed by its cruelties. Butlike many stereotypes, it rests on a truth, amply confirmed by much ofthe new research in evolutionary biology. Wives and mothers canenthusiastically send their husbands and sons off to war; like Sioux

women, they can question their manliness for failing to go into battleor themselves torture prisoners. But statistically speaking it is primarilymen who enjoy the experience of aggression and the camaraderie itbrings and who revel in the ritualization of war that is, as the anthropologist Robin Fox puts it, another way of understanding diplomacy.A truly matriarchal world, then, would be less prone to conflict andmore conciliatory and cooperative than the one we inhabit now.Where the new biology parts company with feminism is in the causalexplanation it gives for this difference in sex roles. The ongoing revolution in the life sciences has almost totally escaped the notice of much ofthe social sciences and humanities, particularly the parts of the academyconcerned with feminism, postmodernism, cultural studies, and the like.While there are some feminists who believe that sex differences have anatural basis, by far the majority are committed to the idea that menand women are psychologically identical, and that any differences inbehavior, with regard to violence or any other characteristic, are the resultof some prior social construction passed on by the prevailing culture.

THE DEMOCRATIC AND FEMININE PEACEOnce one views international relations through the lens of sex andbiology, it never again looks the same. It is very difficult to watchMuslims and Serbs in Bosnia, Hutus and Tutsis inRwanda, ormilitiasfrom Liberia and Sierra Leone to Georgia and Afghanistan dividethemselves up into what seem like indistinguishable male-bondedgroups in order to systematically slaughter one another, and not thinkof the chimps atGombe.

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Francis FukuyamaThe basic social problem that any society faces is to control the

aggressive tendencies ofits

youngmen. In

hunter-gatherer societies, thevast preponderance of violence is over sex, a situation that continues tocharacterize domestic violent crime in contemporary postindustrialsocieties. Older men in the community have generally been responsiblefor socializing younger ones by ritualizing their aggression, often bydirecting it toward enemies outside the community. Much of thatexternal violence can also be over women. Modern historians assumethat the Greeks and Trojans could not possibly have fought awar for tenyears

over Helen, but many primitivesocieties like the Yanomam? do

exactly that.With the spread of agriculture 10,000 years ago, however,and the accumulation of wealth and land, war turned toward the acquisition of material goods. Channeling aggression outside the communitymay not lower societies' overall rate of violence, but it at least offers themthe possibility of domestic peace between wars.The core of the feminist agenda for international politics seemsfundamentally correct: the violent and aggressive tendencies of menhave to be controlled, not simply by redirecting

them to externalaggression but by constraining those impulses through a web ofnorms, laws, agreements, contracts, and the like. In addition, morewomen need to be brought into the domain of international politicsas leaders, officials, soldiers, and voters. Only by participating fully inglobal politics can women both defend their own interests and shiftthe underlying male agenda.The feminization of world politics has, of course, been taking placegradually over the past hundred years, with very positive effects.Women have won the right to vote and participate in politics in alldeveloped countries, aswell as inmany developing countries, and haveexercised that right with increasing energy. In the United States andother rich countries, a pronounced gender gap with regard to foreignpolicy and national security issues endures. American women havealways been less supportive than American men of U.S. involvementinwar, including World War II, Korea, Vietnam, and the Persian Gulf

War, by an average margin of seven to nine percent. They are alsoconsistently less supportive of defense spending and the use of forceabroad. In a 1995 Roper survey conducted for the Chicago Council onForeign Relations, men favored U.S. intervention inKorea in the event

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Women and theEvolution ofWorld Politicsof aNorth Korean attack by amargin of 49 to 40 percent, while womenwere

opposed bya

marginof 30 to 54 percent. Similarly,

U.S.militaryaction against Iraq in the event it invaded Saudi Arabia was supported

by men by amargin of 62 to 31percent and opposed by women by 43 to45 percent. While 54 percent of men felt it important to maintainsuperior world wide military power, only 45percent of women agreed. Women, more- Maje tendencies to actover, are less likely than men to see force as alegitimate tool for resolving conflicts. OUt aggressive fantasiesIt isdifficult to know how to account for toward one another canthis gender gap; certainly, one cannot move ? y . *from biology to voting behavior in a single neVer De elimmateastep. Observers have suggested variousreasons why women are less willing to use military force than men,including their role asmothers, the fact that many women are feminists(that is, committed to a left-of-center agenda that is generally hostileto U.S. intervention), and partisan affiliation (more women voteDemocratic than men). It is unnecessary to know the reason for thecorrelation between gender and antimilitarism, however, to predictthat increasing female political participation will probablymake theUnited States and other democracies less inclined to use poweraround the world as freely as they have in the past.Will this shift toward a less status- and military-power-orientedworld be a good thing? For relations between states in the so-calleddemocratic zone of peace, the answer is yes. Consideration of genderadds a great deal to the vigorous and interesting debate over thecorrelation between democracy and peace that has taken place in thepast decade. The "democratic peace" argument, which underlies theforeign policy of the Clinton administration aswell as its predecessors,is that democracies tend not to fight one another. While the empiricalclaim has been contested, the correlation between the degree ofconsolidation of liberal democratic institutions and interdemocraticpeace would seem to be one of the few nontrivial generalizations one canmake about world politics. Democratic peace theorists have been lesspersuasive about the reasons democracies are pacific toward one another.The reasons usually cited?the rule of law, respect for individual rights,the commercial nature of most democracies, and the like?are

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Francis Fukuyamaundoubtedly correct. But there is another factor that has generally notbeen taken into account: developed democracies also tend to be morefeminized than authoritarian states, in terms of expansion of femalefranchise and participation in political decision-making. It shouldtherefore surprise no one that the historically unprecedented shift in thesexual basis of politics should lead to a change in international relations.

THE REALITY OF AGGRESSIVE FANTASIESO N T h E other hand, ifgender roles are not simply socially constructedbut rooted in genetics, there will be limits to how much internationalpolitics can change. In anything but a totally feminized world, feminizedpolicies could be a liability.Some feminists talk as ifgender identities can be discarded like anold sweater, perhaps by putting young men through mandatory genderstudies courses when they are college freshmen. Male attitudes on ahost of issues, from child-rearing and housework to "getting in touchwith your feelings," have changed dramatically in the past couple of generations due to social pressure. But socialization can accomplish only so

much, and efforts to fully feminize young men will probably be no moresuccessful than the Soviet Unions efforts to persuade its people toworkon Saturdays on behalf of the heroic Cuban and Vietnamese people.Male tendencies to band together for competitive purposes, seek todominate status hierarchies, and act out aggressive fantasies toward oneanother can be rechanneled but never eliminated.Even ifwe can assume peaceful relations between democracies,the broader world scene will still be populated by states led by theoccasional Mobutu, Milosevic, or Saddam. Machiavelli s critique ofAristotle was that the latter did not take foreign policy into account in

building his model of a just city: in a system of competitive states, thebest regimes adopt the practices of theworst in order to survive. So evenif the democratic, feminized, postindustrial world has evolved into azone of peace where struggles aremore economic than military, itwillstill have to deal with thoseparts

of theworld runby young, ambitious,unconstrained men. If a future Saddam Hussein is not only sitting ontheworld soil suppliesbut isarmed to thehilt with chemical, biological,and nuclear weapons, we might be better off being led by women like

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Margaret Thatcher than, say, Gro Harlem Brunddand. Masculinepolicies will still be required, though not necessarily masculine leaders.The implications of evolutionary biology for the hot-button issueof women in the military is not as straightforward as one might think.The vast majority of jobs in amodern military organization are in theenormous support tail that trails behind the actual combat units, andthere is no reason that women cannot perform them as well if notbetter than men. While men have clearly evolved as cooperativehunters and fighters, it is not clear that any individual group ofwomenwill perform less well than any individual group of men in combat.What ismuch more problematic is integrating men and women intothe same combat units, where they will be in close physical proximityover long periods of time. Unit cohesion, which is the bedrock onwhich the performance of armies rests, has been traditionally builtaround male bonding, which

canonly be jeopardized

when men startcompeting for the attention of women. Commanders who encouragemale bonding are building on a powerful natural instinct; those who

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Francis Fukuyamatry to keep sexual activity between healthy 20-year-old men andwomen in check through "zero tolerance" policies and draconianpunishments are, by contrast, seeking to do something very unnatural.Unlike racial segregation, gender segregation in certain parts of the

military seems not just appropriate but necessary.

THE MARGARET THATCHERS OF THE FUTUREThe feminization of democratic politics will interact with otherdemographic trends in the next 50 years to produce importantchanges. Due to the precipitous fall in fertility rates across the developedworld since the 1960s, the age distribution of countries belonging tothe Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development willshift dramatically. While the median age forAmerica s population wasin the mid-20s during the first few decades of the twentieth century, itwill climb toward 40 by 2050. The change will be even more dramaticinEurope and Japan, where rates of immigration and fertility are lower.Under the U.N. Population Divisions low-growth projections, themedian age inGermany will be 55, in Japan 53, and in Italy 58.The graying of the population has heretofore been discussedprimarily in terms of the social security liability itwill engender.But it carries a host of other social consequences as well, amongthem the emergence of elderly women as one of the most importantvoting blocs courted by mid-2ist century politicians. In Italy andGermany, for example, women over 50,who now constitute 20 percentof the population, will

account for 31 percent in 2050. There isno

way, of course, of predicting how they will vote, but it seems likelythat they will help elect more women leaders and will be less inclinedtoward military intervention than middle-aged males have traditionallybeen. Edward Luttwak of the Center for Strategic and InternationalStudies has speculated that the fall in family sizesmakes people inadvanced countries much more leery of military casualties than peoplein agricultural societies, with their surpluses of young, hotheadedmen.According

todemographer

Nicholas Eberstadt, three-fifthsof Italy's offspring in 2050 will be only children with no cousins,siblings, aunts, or uncles. It is not unreasonable to suppose that insuch aworld tolerance of casualties will be even lower.

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Women and theEvolution ofWorld PoliticsBy the middle of the next century, then, Europe will likely consist of

rich, powerful, and democraticnations with rapidly shrinking populations of mostly elderly people where women will play important leader

ship roles. The United States, with its higher rates of immigration andfertility, will also have more women leaders but a substantially youngerpopulation. A much larger and poorer part of the world will consist ofstates inAfrica, theMiddle East, and South Asia with young, growingpopulations, ledmostly by younger men. As Eberstadt points out, Asiaoutside of Japan will buck the trend toward feminization because thehigh

rate of abortion of female fetuses has shifted their sex ratiossharplyin favor of men. This will be, to say the least, an unfamiliar world.

LIVING LIKE ANIMALS?InWrangham and Petersons Demonic Males (said to be a favoritebook ofHillary Rodham Clinton, who has had her own to contend

with), the authors come to the pessimistic conclusion that nothingmuch haschanged

sinceearly

hominids branched off from theprimordial chimp ancestor five million years ago. Group solidarity isstill based on aggression against other communities; social cooperationis undertaken to achieve higher levels of organized violence. RobinFox has argued that military technology has developed much fasterthan mans ability to ritualize violence and direct it into safer channels.The Gombe chimps could kill only ahandful of others;modern mancan vaporize tens of millions.While the history of the first half of the twentieth century does notgive us great grounds for faith in the possibility of human progress, thesituation is not nearly as bleak as these authors would have us believe.Biology, to repeat, is not destiny. Rates of violent homicide appear to belower today than during mankind s long hunter-gatherer period, despitegas ovens and nuclear weapons. Contrary to the thrust of postmodernistthought, people cannot free themselves entirely from biological nature.But by accepting the fact that people have natures that are often evil,political, economic, and social systems can be designed tomitigate theeffects of mans baser instincts.

Take the human and particularly male desire to dominate a statushierarchy, which people share with other primates. The advent of liberal

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Francis Fukuyamademocracy and modern capitalism does not eliminate that desire, butit opens up many more peaceful

channels forsatisfying

it.Among

theAmerican Plains Indians or the Yanomam?, virtually the only way foraman to achieve social recognition was to be awarrior, which meant,of course, excelling at killing. Other traditional societies might add afew occupations like the priesthood or the bureaucracy inwhich onecould achieve recognition. A modern, technological society, by contrast,offers thousands of arenas inwhich one can achieve social status, and inmost of them the quest for status leads not to violence but to sociallyproductive activity.

Aprofessor receiving

tenure at aleading university,a politician winning an election, or a ceo increasing market share may

satisfy the same underlying drive for status as being the alpha male ina chimp community. But in the process, these individuals have writtenbooks, designed public policies, or brought new technologies tomarketthat have improved human welfare.Of course, not everyone can achieve high rank or dominance inany given status hierarchy, since these are by definition zero-sumgames inwhich every winner produces

a loser. But theadvantage

ofamodern, complex, fluid society is, as economist Robert Frank haspointed out, that small frogs in large ponds can move to smallerponds inwhich theywill loom larger.Seeking status by choosing theright pond will not satisfy the ambitions of the greatest and noblestindividuals, but itwill bleed offmuch of the competitive energy thatin hunter-gatherer or agricultural societies often has no outlet savewar. Liberal democracy and market economies work well because, unlike socialism, radical feminism, and other Utopian schemes, they do nottry to change human nature. Rather, they accept biologically groundednature as a given and seek to constrain it through institutions, laws, andnorms. It does not always work, but it isbetter than living like animals.?

[40] FOREIGN AFFAIRS- Volume77N0.5

Francis Fukuyama_women and World Politics

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