In Fukuyama’s view, communism’s swan song had less to do with political change and more with the economic demands of ordinary people. He pointed his gaze to China and noted, “Marxism and ideological principle have become virtually irrelevant as guides to policy and that bourgeois consumerism has a real meaning in that country for the first time since the revolution.” That trend has exponentially increased since 1989 to the point that China is far more a consumerist society than a socialist one.
By the time he wrote his follow-up book The End of History and The Last Man, published in 1993, Fukuyama could confidently state that one competitor was left “standing in the ring as an ideology of potentially universal validity: liberal democracy, the doctrine of individual freedom and popular sovereignty.” In the 35 years since the publication of “The End of History?” Fukuyama’s argument only seems stronger. For all of liberal democracy’s faults—and Fukuyama has hardly been reluctant to raise them—no serious competitor has emerged to capture people’s imagination or seriously challenge it. To the extent that liberal democracy has faltered, it’s from its own failings not because a better alternative has emerged.
If Fukuyama had gotten only that future prediction correct, his piece would represent a seminal contribution. But what is most striking in rereading Fukuyama today is that he understood—far better than his contemporaries—the larger implications of what “the end of history” would mean for global affairs.
One of the most widely held assumptions in the immediate post-Cold War period was that the coming era would lead to more, not less, conflict. A year after “The End Of History?” John Mearsheimer wrote that a coming wave of regional and sectarian conflicts would make us “soon miss the Cold War.” In 1993, the prominent international relations scholar Christopher Layne said that new Great Powers would arise and that “the coming years will be ones of turmoil in international politics.” That same year, Samuel Huntington indirectly responded to Fukuyama’s thesis, arguing that the world would soon witness a “clash of civilizations.”
All these gloomy predictions proved amazingly wrong.
While the pessimists saw a future of major conflict and global discord, Fukuyama explicitly connected political and economic liberalization and argued that the latter would lead to a far more liberal global future. “The spectacular abundance of advanced liberal economies and the infinitely diverse consumer culture made possible by them,” wrote Fukuyama, would foster greater political liberalism. In his view, “the universal homogenous state” would combine “liberal democracy in the political sphere … with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the economic.” (For younger readers, VCRs were cutting-edge technology in 1989).
