Not
long after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the
Soviet Union, the neoconservative American political scientist Francis
Fukuyama published The End of History and the Last Man,
which declared that liberal democracy was triumphing all over the world
and would become the final form of human government, bringing history
to an end. Its success would be driven by the inevitable victory of
market capitalism, then sweeping across the former state-socialist
economies of Russia and eastern Europe. Contrary to what some of
Fukuyama’s critics maintained, the model for a post-historical world was
not the United States but the European Union, largely because it
represented the triumph of law on a transnational basis, subjecting
individual states to a higher principle of reason.
Fukuyama did not expect these developments to happen immediately. The
triumph of market-capitalist democracy would take time, maybe decades
or even centuries, but it would continue inexorably until every other
form of government had been eliminated, to the benefit of everyone.
However, in the quarter-century since The End of History, as the Indian essayist and novelist Pankaj Mishra argues,
almost everything that has happened suggests that the market-oriented
democratic state has begun to falter. We have seen not the steady spread
of representative constitutional democracy but a “universal crisis”
caused by the social, economic and political disfranchisement of huge
numbers of people, marginalised by the ruthless search for profit of a
global capitalism largely freed from the constraints of state
regulation.
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