I am a member of Generation Fukuyama. Well, how could I not be? I turned 21 in 1989, the year that the Berlin Wall fell, triggering the implosion of the Soviet bloc and the end of the Cold War. It was an astonishing moment of emancipation, a colossal release of human energy and a real-time drama of geopolitical realignment on a grand scale.
In the summer of that year, a US State Department official, Francis Fukuyama, published an article in policy journal The National Interest entitled The End of History? — expanded in 1992 into the book, The End of History and the Last Man. Liberal democracy, he argued, had revealed itself as the “final form of human government”. In this transformative phase, we were seeing “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy”.
