| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
IN A 1989 ESSAY, FRANCIS FUKUYAMA ADVANCED the notion that, with the death of communism, history had come to an end.1 This somewhat fanciful, and presumably intentionally provocative, formulation was derived from Hegel, and it has generally been misinterpreted. He did not mean that things would stop happening-obviously a preposterous proposal.2 Rather, he contended that there had been a profound ideological development. With the demise of communism, its chief remaining challenger after the extinguishment earlier in the century of monarchy and Fascism, liberalism-democracy and market capitalism-had triumphed over all other governmental and economic systems or sets of ordering principles. Looking for future challenges to this triumph, he examined the potential rise of destructive forms of nationalism and of fundamentalist religion, but found them unlikely to prevail. Thus, the triumph of liberalism was likely to be permanent.
This article evaluates developments over the subsequent quarter century and argues that Fukuyama seems to have had it fundamentally right. Beginning with the countries of Eastern Europe, democracy continued its progress after 1989. Moreover, capitalism increasingly came to be accepted, so that when the world plunged into widespread economic crisis after 2007, proposed remedies variously recommended tinkering with the system, not abandoning it.
In the meantime, violent forms of nationalism that surged in some places in the last decade of the old century scarcely proved to be much of a challenge to these trends, and the same seems likely to hold for violent forms of fundamentalist religion that surged in some places in the first decade of the new one. In fact, the significance of both of these illiberal developments seems to have been much exaggerated.
In addition, there was a striking decline of civil warfare during the decade after 1989 to low levels that have held now throughout the new century.
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