The end of history

The single most influential book written about the post Cold War era was "The End of History and the Last Man", by Francis Fukuyama, a former US diplomat turned scholar who became famous practically overnight on the strength of this provocative title. Countless books, articles and pamphlets were written mocking, denouncing and seeking to disprove Fukuyama's thesis, many of them by people who had never read him and thoroughly misunderstood him. The last such attempt, by noted pundit Robert Kagan -  who also reached a kind of fame with his "Paradise and Power", positing that Europeans are from Venus while Americans are from Mars -  is called, significantly, "The Return of History and the End of Dreams". Kagan argues that a new era of great power politics is upon us and that the organizing principle of this new era is not the "clash of civilizations" - another book title which gained great currency as an unfortunate slogan in the last 10 years  - but the struggle between liberal democracy and autocracy. History is back in a most traditional guise: just like in the good old days of the XIXth century but now played out in a global scenario. But, even if this were true, does it really disprove Fukuyama's thesis? Fukuyama never meant that history had ended in the sense that all conflict had or would end. He merely argued that, with the collapse of communism, we had reached the end of ideological evolution, in the Hegelian sense. Liberal democracy had triumphed. There was no ideological alternative to it and none would appear. Now, does anyone really believe that autocracy, as practiced today, mostly in Russia or in China, offers any kind of ideological alternative to democracy? Autocracy can be a very efficient and practical method of government, but I very much doubt that it offers any kind of serious ideological competition to liberal democracy, as communism did in its heyday. Fukuyama's totem still stands.