What’s that I hear? Francis Fukuyama back-pedalling frantically

The problem with a futuristic thesis — particularly when summarised by a futuristic title — is that it is likely to be thrown back at you in the future. This is the problem that Francis Fukuyama has faced ever since he published his daring and now much derided book, The End of History and the Last Man, in 1992. In it, Fukuyama argued that history had been buried beneath the rubble of the former Berlin Wall and that the teleological process was now at an end: ‘What we may be witnessing… is the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of government.’

To many, this theory was literally exploded when the first plane hit the World Trade Center. Since then it has been undermined further by the financial crisis, the failures of the Arab Spring, the continual rise of Islamic extremism, the failures of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the crisis in the eurozone and two wars in Eastern Europe (Georgia and Ukraine).