Where are we 25 years after 'the end of history'?

Does Francis Fukuyama's idea that 'liberal democracy' has triumphed still hold true?

BY  Srecko Horvat

Al-Jazeera - 19 Jun 2014

At a recent conference on the future of "liberal democracy" in Skopje, almost everyone was mentioning Thomas Piketty and his latest book Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
The book's focus on the growth of inequality in relation to "liberal democracy" was a particularly interesting point in the conference discussions. When it was released this year, the volume provoked quite a lot of controversy and produced a great number of discussions in media and academia.
If there is any other book that had such a remarkable impact on the global economic, political and even philosophical debates on democracy and capitalism during the last two decades, it is Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man. Actually, it was the essay "The End of History" published in 1989. The book probably had the same fate as Piketty's: Everyone was talking about it, but no one really read it.
As we all know by now, "the end of history" was not meant to be the real end of history, but the end of competing ideologies. For Fukuyama, liberal democracy triumphed as the only player in town. Many have criticised this hypothesis, but in recent years even his fiercest enemies admit that today we have all become Fukuyamists. As Fredric Jameson put it succinctly, "today it is easier to imagine the end of the world, than to imagine the end of capitalism".

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