There are points of ferment in world politics when one is tempted to define the zeitgeist of the current or the emerging world order. Many times the tumult is cast in a way that it takes the form of a Hegelian contest of ideas and the systems representing them; sometimes even stating that one of them is prevailing over the other.
The recent decades show that such claims have been fraught with the risk of being belied too soon. American political thinker Francis Fukuyama’s famous ‘end of history’ claim in a 1989 essay – equating the end of the cold war with the eventual victory of liberal democracy – ran out of steam by the turn of the present century. A chastened Fukuyama had to moderate such triumphalism in his later writings – sample the mellow tone of his Liberalism and Its Discontents published last month. Perhaps this followed the realisation that there are many turning points when history “refused to turn”, as British historian APJ Taylor had once put it.
