The Twilight of the Francis Fukuyama Era

A small foreign policy magazine, the National Interest, published Fukuyama’s lecture in the summer of 1989. After the fall of the Berlin Wall that November, it appeared prophetic. Fukuyama described the “triumph of the West” and the “total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.” He placed the contemporary moment in a deeper context: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western…