Coronavirus and the new world

The West’s failure to reap economic benefit from its greater levels of personal and political freedom has broken what I call the ‘Fukuyama Curve’ and its confidence. Given one parent was Sri Lankan and the other Singaporean, a commonly-cited stat in my childhood home was that both countries had similar GDPs back in the early 1970s (turns out this is true). The question of how countries diverge economically and culturally over time isn’t just theoretical to me. The current Covid-19 pandemic provides a moment to pause and reflect on the divergence of reactions to the crisis between different states, and on how different states have developed over the past thirty years.

The tenor of Western society is anxious and uncertain. This picture differs starkly from the optimistic afterglow of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Francis Fukuyama’s End of History – the thesis that Western liberal democracy would inexorably become the model for government worldwide – seemed to temporarily play out across the West.