Dan Perry
Thirty-five years ago, as communism was collapsing, U.S. scholar Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed the "end of history." His argument, later expanded in an iconic 1992 book, was that the ideological battles of the 20th century had concluded with the triumph of liberal democracy (and free-market capitalism). With the Cold War over, humanity had supposedly reached its final form of governance—liberal democracy was the "endpoint of mankind's ideological evolution."
It didn't take very long, though, for history to reappear. The disintegration of Yugoslavia and its accompanying horrors, the rise of nationalist authoritarianism in post-Soviet Russia, 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror, and the increasing traction of Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations thesis—all this dismantled the notion that the world was converging toward a harmonious democratic order. Fukuyama's grand vision was, by the mid-2000s, a cautionary tale about the dangers of pat certitudes in ivory towers.
I spoke to Fukuyama about a decade ago. By then, he was notably sheepish about his original thesis—while at the same time clear-eyed and intellectually engaging at a far higher altitude than most figures I've spoken to; his view appeared to be that sometimes you take risks and they might backfire—nothing ventured, nothing gained. He conceded his thesis had been overoptimistic but maintained it still held as a long-term vision.
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