If Women Ran the World

__"Women, Biology, and World Politics" by Francis Fukuyama, in Foreign Affairs (Sept.–Oct. 1998), 58 E. 68th St., New York, N.Y. 10021.__

If women ran the world, many feminists say, it would be a very different place, with much less aggression and violence. Fukuyama, author of The End of History and the Last Man (1992) and a professor of public policy at George Mason University, not only agrees but believes that "all postindustrial or Western societies are moving" in that direction. But there’s a catch, he says.

The male propensities to compete for power and status and to engage in violence, he writes, are not just the products of a patriarchal culture— they are rooted in biology, according to "virtually all reputable evolutionary biologists today." That, of course, makes those inclinations harder to change, both in men and in societies. Nevertheless, Fukuyama declares, they must be controlled, in international affairs as well as domestic societies, "through a web of norms, laws, agreements, contracts, and the like." In addition, women need to become more involved, he says. "Only by participating fully in global politics can women both defend their own interests and shift the underlying male agenda."

Over the last century, Fukuyama notes, world politics has been gradually becoming feminized, "with very positive effects. Women have won the right to vote and participate in politics in all developed countries, as well as in many developing countries, and have exercised that right with increasing energy."

Though he expects men to continue to play "a major, if not dominant, part in the governance" of the United States and other democracies, Fukuyama predicts that as women do get more politically involved, these countries are likely to become less willing "to use power around the world as freely as they have in the past." American women (like their sisters in other rich countries) have been less disposed than men to favor defense spending and the use of force abroad.

"Will this shift toward a less status- and militarypower-oriented world be a good thing?" Fukuyama asks. For relations among advanced democracies, it will be, he thinks, because it will strengthen their tendency to remain at peace with one another. However, in dealing with other nations, "feminized policies could be a liability....

"[E]ven if the democratic, feminized, postindustrial world has evolved into a zone of peace where struggles are more economic than military," he observes, "it will still have to deal with those parts of the world run by young, ambitious, unconstrained men," such as, say, a future Saddam Hussein armed with nuclear weapons. That doesn’t mean that men must rule the world, Fukuyama adds. "Masculine policies will still be required, though not necessarily masculine leaders." Tough female leaders like former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, rather than more stereotypically feminine ones like Gro Harlem Brundtland, the former prime minister of Norway, may be the wave of the future.