Francis Fukuyama - The End of History

Fukuyama published a book in 1992 called “The End of History”. Keep in mind, this was shortly after the Cold War ended and the Soviet Union splintered into different nation states. In the book, Fukuyama argues that with this victory, liberal democracy was now gospel and that countries like Russia and China were going to quickly model themselves after the U.S. Fukuyama worked in the State Department, and people in the government actually believed this.

The 21st century has been the utter repudiation of this idea that all peoples will be united under a unipolar “international rules based order”. What politicians didn’t realize and don’t realize now is that nationalism is very real. Under Yeltsin, Russia was utterly emasculated and made to look like a red headed stepchild of the U.S., so they turned to Putin. China introduced some of the free market into their economy, but they are hardly liberal or democratic.

The Russians and the Chinese both want to have their own spheres of influence and regional power in the way we have ours. People identify with a homeland much more than they do abstract ideas like liberal democracy. This is what we should want; we shouldn’t want a unipolar world where one country dominates the others. Given that the natural tendency of any state is to expand, the more competition among states and nationalities, the more of a check there is on those tendencies.