There is one particularly disturbing example of what he calls “political decay” in the world today: Fukuyama’s own country. He also warns that liberal democracy is not a once-and-for-all achievement. Fukuyama’s new book seeks to explain why. What we have had to learn the hard way since 1989, though, is just how difficult it can be to build lasting liberal democratic institutions, even if lots of people desperately want them.

Will millions be rushing to live in the Islamic State do westerners dream the Chinese dream? Fukuyama doesn’t think so. The question is not whether we still see one damn thing happening after another – as Henry Ford is supposed to have defined history – but whether there are serious rivals to liberal democracy in the global political imagination. But Fukuyama had never been so naive as to claim that conflicts would cease overnight his point in 1989 had been that only liberal democracy could ultimately fulfil human aspirations for freedom and dignity. Whoever had nothing interesting to say about the era since the end of the cold war felt they could at least land a blow against a famous American intellectual by sneering that history had not ended, after all. Twenty-five years after his essay on “the end of history”, Francis Fukuyama still believes that liberal democracy is the final stage of human political development – but worries that his own country has entered a path of political decay.įor exactly a quarter of a century Fukuyama has been a kind of intellectual punchbag.

Political decay fukuyama