The end of history? It hasn’t come yet

In a 1989 essay scanning the global political and economic landscape, US political scientist Francis Fukuyama wondered about “the end of history”.

He was prescient, as the Berlin Wall fell a few months later, on November 9, 1989. The watershed moment marked the end of the 50-year Cold War. History was apparently becalmed, having witnessed the triumph of the ideals of individual freedom over communist ideology; the existential threat of a nuclear World War 3 was over. Humankind could breathe out and embrace a new era of global peace and prosperity.

Fukuyama expanded the essay into a book, The End of History and the Last Man, published in 1992. Events in the subsequent decades have refocused judgment on the work, often criticising its naivete and Fukuyama’s pre-emptive reading of the signs of a new world order.

This is a misreading of the book, or a misdirection attributable to half of its title.

Mainly, Fukuyama references and assesses the German philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose concepts of freedom, reason, self-awareness and recognitioncan be broadly classified as idealism, and Friedrich Nietzsche, and20th centuryRussian-FrenchphilosopherAlexandre Kojève, who interpreted Hegel from a Marxistperspective. Kojève postulated, long before Fukuyama, an end to history in the sense that wars and class struggles would at some stage be unnecessary in a more egalitarian world.

As such, Fukuyama’s book is a sweeping inquiry of humankind’s progress — rational, technological, socio-economic and political — and what it portends for the future.

On a certain level it is fair to appraise one of his thesis points: that liberal democracy had emerged as the strongest form of government and would become the norm throughout the world.

Judged narrowly, Fukuyama’s idea hasn’t aged well. A Western economist’s perspective may be that the world order now changes every week depending on US President Donald Trump’s tariff tactics and China’s response. Right-wing populism is on the march — Jair Bolsonaro and Javier Milei, Viktor Orbán and Giorgia Meloni, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Narendra Modi — as encapsulated in the title of political journalist and historian Anne Applebaum’s 2020 book The Twilight of Democracy.

Developments in the US augur an alarming trajectory from the quasi-plutocracy to autocracy, to a second civil war

A Sinophile sees Xi Jinping’s pre-eminence: despite China’s particular set of economic challenges, it holds the rare earth metals card, renewed Silk Roads geostrategic influence, and leads the new dimension in space — its militarisation.

Russia under Vladimir Putin exerts an existential Sword of Damocles power; perceived as sabre-rattling when he moved nuclear missiles to the border with southeastern Ukraine in 2024, his undermining of international laws and imperial quests recasts a nihilistic Cold War shadow which, in a heartbeat, could spread across Europe.

Indeed, the world’s unstable sociopolitical state makes it easily within the power of imagination that one of 12,400 nuclear warheads owned by at least nine countries, including Russia, could launch a catastrophe.

Meanwhile, developments in the US augur an alarming trajectory from quasi-plutocracy to autocracy, to a second civil war.

During Trump’s first term conservative commentators were scornful of perceived threats to the country’s revered constitution and to warnings of how prophetic Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale may have been. Now, they earnestly debate legal semantics as to whether the constitution could be circumnavigated, and, after rulings by the most conservative Supreme Court in US history, abortion rights have been significantly curtailed across the majority of states.

It is impossible to watch Alex Garland’s 2024 film Civil War without the grim realisation that life is imitating art: National Guard troops patrol progressive-leaning cities, masked ICE agents storm refugee centres and places of work, and the government is deliberately kept shut so that the Trump administration can sow deeper discontent as a reason to deploy more troops and to employ further dictatorial or oppressive measures.

Banning books, rewriting and propagandising history, pushing fundamentalist Christianity as a foundation for the organisation of the state, demanding the military’s political allegiance, enacting covert extrajudicial killings beyond the country’s borders: the US is still the world’s dominant superpower, but it increasingly resembles the workings of the regime over which Fukuyama said it had triumphed.

The US will behave in this fashion for at least another three years. Next year is the 250th anniversary of its founding. It seems a serendipitous opportunity for a Trumpian move which, rather than confirming its history of championing democracy and freedom, would embed a more recent history: admiration for authoritarians and dictators, divorce from traditional Western allies, multilateralism replaced by gloves-off power.

But we should avoid the belief that a sclerotic Western political culture will be the new norm and that strongman rule will spread further and prevail.

The academics Lucan Way and Steven Levitsky note that, despite some backsliding, the vast majority of what they call third-wave democracies have survived the end of Western liberal hegemony, which they pinpoint to the 2010s, “when autocrats could turn to Beijing, Moscow, or emerging regional powers such as Iran and Saudi Arabia for military and economic support”.

Fukuyama was not entirely off-beam in his assessment of how geopolitics would reshape from the end of the 20th century

Further waves of globalisation and technology transformation, and urbanisation, have underpinned the resilience of democratic institutions adopted between 1975 and 2000 when there were favourable global conditions for their formation. “Perceptions of global democratic decline do not match reality,” they conclude.

Studies such as theirs support Fukuyama’s argument that democracy, incorporating capitalism, is the most stable form of government. Critiques based on the failings of liberal democracies ignore the fact that alternative forms — communism, authoritarianism, monarchy — have similar as well as deeper problems, with less prospect of evolving to solve them. The statistician and risk thinker Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the term “antifragility” to describe systems that are notably shock-proof precisely because they are flexible, transparent, open to new ideas — qualities present in most liberal democracies.

So Fukuyama was not entirely off-beam in his assessment of how geopolitics would reshape from the end of the 20th century.

The second part of the book’s title, often bypassed, is just as interesting. “The Last Man” is a direct reference to Nietzsche’s foretelling of the end of human ambition. Wealth, security, and guaranteed peace will diminish drive; Nietzsche’s view was that this moribund state was inevitable.

Fukuyama evaluates whether, in the context of what he believed would be a more harmonious, smoother 21st-century political backdrop, Nietzsche’s pessimistic prediction would prevail. A key factor, he believed, was people’s intrinsic need for respect and recognition, rooted in Plato’s ancient Greek philosophy idea of thymos – a spiritedness, self-worth, like a life force. Democracies provide the framework for thymos whereas other forms of government generally do not, and totalitarianism seeks to suppress it.

But there’s a contradiction in this, Fukuyama wrote. The ideological triumph of the West, were it to lead to the end of striving and struggle, would have a negative impact on people’s outlook, on their very souls. A new risk would arise: people would channel ambitions differently, creating new threats to liberal democracy itself.

British-Indian essayist Pankaj Mishra’s 2017 book explained the state of the world precisely according to this development. The Age of Anger, subtitled A History of the Present, was a depressing narrative of the rise of rage attributable to identity politics rather than ideology, to resentment of others’ achievements, and the dumbing down of discourse.

Fukuyama’s other major point in the book’s thesis is that liberal democracies will face a profound challenge in resisting what is essentially the outcome of their success — a facile internal discord and an external apathy. Perhaps the clearest illustration today is the unfolding war in Ukraine.

Oleksandra Matviichuk, head of the Centre for Civil Liberties in Ukraine, believes Ukraine is paying the ultimate price for freedom. Does the West mirror this? Ukraine “is the wake-up call … the most important historic lesson”, says her interviewer for The Atlantic, former world chess champion Garry Kasparov. “[T]here will be pivotal moments in history where you have to show your readiness to pay and to make a sacrifice. This is something that’s been forgotten in the free world.”

The last paragraph of The End of History and the Last Man references Kojève’s belief that history “vindicates its own rationality”, meaning that time reveals a pattern of logical development, though people living through it cannot see it. So history will end, Fukuyama wrote, when “any reasonable person looking at the situation would be forced to agree that there had been only one journey and one destination”.

But even in the context of the events of 1989-1992 he doubted this point had been reached: “… despite the recent worldwide liberal revolution, the evidence available to us now concerning the direction of the wagons’ wanderings must remain provisionally inconclusive”, questioning, too, whether societies, “having looked around a bit at their new surroundings, will not find them inadequate and set their eyes on a new and more distant journey”.

Fukuyama’s concluding words indicate the futility of seeing history as a destination, and seem to mock the title of his own book.

When Babylon fell to Cyrus the Great of Persia in 539 BCE, did his political advisers have similar thoughts to Fukuyama 2,500 years later?

History, of course, never ends.