Part III: Fukuyama was right

A liberal international order if you can keep it

Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?” is among the most widely misinterpreted arguments ever made. The confusion arises from a misunderstanding of what Fukuyama meant by “end” and “history.” He wasn’t referring to “history” as a sequence of events (wars, recessions, political upheavals, etc.) — he used the word to describe a developmental process that moves humanity in certain directions rather than others.¹ And “end” doesn’t mean conclusion, but rather “purpose” or “goal” — as in: “to what end?” or the “ends justify the means.”

Fukuyama argued that liberal democracy and capitalism have proven to be the most sustainable political and economic systems — a thesis that’s every bit as viable in 2023 as it was in 1989. But to this day, interviewers routinely ask Fukuyama to consider some new development (the election of Donald Trump or the Russian invasion of Ukraine, for instance) as evidence that his thesis has been discredited. With each of these challenges, the implication is that the forces arrayed against liberal democracy have turned some kind of historical tide. But the critics who make this case can’t see that their position requires far more justification than Fukuyama’s.

Liberal democracy has survived for hundreds of years, and it has outlasted its most dangerous and implacable enemies — particularly fascism and communism. Even Vladimir Putin is a petty tyrant compared to the great totalitarians of the twentieth century — he certainly didn’t mean to expose the weaknesses of modern Russia when he invaded Ukraine, but that’s exactly what he has done. If Russia can’t defeat Ukraine on the battlefield, imagine how it would perform in a conventional war against NATO. Under some of the most punishing economic sanctions in recent history, Moscow has been forced to rely on military support from Iran and North Korea. Russia’s GDP is $1.86 trillion (about $770 billion less than Apple’s current market cap) compared to the EU’s $18.35 trillion and the United States’ $26.95 trillion. Many former Soviet states are now part of the political, economic, and security architecture of the liberal democratic West. And after the disastrous invasion of Ukraine, even more countries are desperate to move as far away from Russia’s sphere of influence — and as close to the West — as possible.

In what way is Russia still “competing” with the liberal democratic West?

None of this is to say the leaders and citizens of liberal democracies should be complacent. While institutions like NATO and the EU are vital for the maintenance of the liberal international order, they’re only as strong as their individual member countries. Despite the decades of nuclear buildups, proxy warfare, and trillions of dollars spent to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the most potent threat to that system came from the inside. Similarly, the health of democracy within the countries that make up the international liberal order is the most crucial determinant of that order’s long-term success. This is why the popularity of modern authoritarians like Trump and Viktor Orbán — as well as the political discontent incited and exploited by populists on the right and left more broadly (see part II of this series) — is the most urgent threat to the liberal international order today.

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The only conceivable ideological and economic challenger to liberal democracy today is China’s blend of absolutism and state-controlled capitalism. It’s unsurprising that Fukuyama is among the most incisive critics of this system, which (he argues) is plagued by structural issues like the “bad emperor problem.” This term refers to the perils of centralized power — while an effective dictator can use the lack of checks on his power to get things done much more quickly than democratic leaders (who must navigate endless constraints like laws, legislatures, and elections), a horrible dictator like Mao Zedong can set the country back decades. Surveying the carnage of Maoism in the late 1970s, Deng Xiaoping addressed the bad emperor problem by establishing institutional constraints such as term limits — but Xi Jinping (whose second five-year term would have ended in 2022) abolished these limits in 2018.

Beyond Xi’s demand to be confirmed as dictator-for-life (never a good sign), there’s mounting evidence that he’s a very bad emperor indeed. He’s fixated on absorbing Taiwan, and he often insists that Beijing will “take all necessary measures” to seize control of the island. He has overseen the most sweeping expansion of China’s totalitarian security and surveillance apparatus in the country’s history. He has ordered the internment and “reeducation” of more than a million Uyghurs in Xinjiang. His “zero-COVID” policy was a social and economic catastrophe, which the CCP only abandoned when waves of Chinese protesters took to the streets in the largest demonstrations in decades. In the early days of COVID, Xi often declared that China’s approach to the pandemic demonstrated the superiority of one-party rule to liberal democracy. But the humiliating failure of “zero-COVID” had the opposite effect, as such a draconian and destructive policy never could have lasted so long in a liberal democracy.

China must also figure out how to address a looming demographic calamity in which a declining population and labor force will make it impossible to pay for hundreds of millions of elderly Chinese (a subset of the population which could reach half a billion by the middle of the century). Meanwhile, China’s economic growth has slowed in recent years, and the country faces a sprawling real estate crisis which has caused property values to plummet — a particularly ominous development for an economy in which property and related industries account for a quarter of GDP. “Zero-COVID” contributed to China’s staggering youth unemployment rate of over 21 percent, which could lead to mass political and social instability. The tacit deal that China offers its vast middle class is steady economic growth at the expense of any semblance of political freedom, and if it turns out that the Chinese people get neither, Beijing will confront the most profound challenge to its legitimacy in decades.

“The triumph of the West, of the Western idea,” Fukuyama wrote, “is evident first of all in the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.” While China may appear to present a viable alternative now, there are several reasons why liberal democracy will still prove to be the most successful system over the long run. Note Fukuyama’s use of the word “systematic.” Unlike liberal democracy, which has been successfully adopted in dozens of countries around the world (including those with very different cultural and political histories, like South Korea and Japan), the Chinese “model” isn’t really a model at all. How many countries can you name that have put Xi Jinping Thought into practice? How many people are clamoring to move to China versus the United States or Europe? Gallup reports that around 900 million people would permanently leave their countries if they could, and their top destinations are the U.S., Canada, Germany, and other liberal democracies.

Liberal democracies are far more attractive than the alternatives.

Many Western politicians and intellectuals are convinced that the United States has entered “Cold War II” with China, but this is truer in an economic and military sense than an ideological sense. While China certainly wants to undermine liberal democracy and present its own system as superior, this is nothing like the USSR’s concerted global effort to foment socialist revolution in as many countries as possible. Soviet communism was built around the idea that it was a universal system which could be established in every corner of the globe. This system was irreconcilable with the political and economic systems it sought to replace, and it had fervent ideological adherents everywhere in the world — including the West. At one point, around one-third of the planet lived under communism. As Fukuyama explains, the Chinese take a fundamentally different approach: “I don’t think that they are particularly interested in exporting their model. I don’t think they think that anyone can duplicate their model anywhere else.”

When Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to modernize the Soviet Union with glasnost and perestroika, he started a process that would quickly lead to dissolution. One theme of “The End of History?” is the disconnect between the stubborn outward allegiance to communism in the Soviet Union and the internal recognition that the system no longer functioned. “Marxism-Leninism is dead as a mobilizing ideology,” Fukuyama wrote, “under its banner people cannot be made to work harder, and its adherents have lost confidence in themselves.” While Fukuyama observed that the “liberal Soviet intelligentsia rallying around Gorbachev have arrived at the end-of-history view in a remarkably short time,” he also acknowledged the “very strong current of great Russian chauvinism” in the Soviet Union and considered the possibility that the “fascist alternative is not one that has played itself out entirely there.” After the Cold War, the central question was whether Russia would revert to the nationalism and aggression of earlier eras or follow Europe’s lead and move toward democracy and integration. After two decades of Putinist autocracy and corruption — which culminated in the devastating imperial war in Ukraine — we have the answer.

Although China is an expansionist power, it has been more practical and less ideological than the Soviet Union for most of its rise since the 1970s. When Deng began the process of economic liberalization in China, he said, “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.” This was an ethos that seemed to govern China’s development for much of the post-Mao period, which is why Western leaders were once optimistic about the prospect of political liberalization in China (see part I of this series). In 2014, a year after Xi came to power, Fukuyama said he still expected the Chinese to “become more like us.”

One reason for optimism was China’s extraordinary success at opening up its economy. China had several advantages over the Soviet Union when it came to liberal market reforms: the existence of a consolidated Chinese state; less pressure from countervailing political and economic forces within the country (such as Russian military interests that were still invested in the status quo at the end of the Cold War); and perhaps most importantly, a more pragmatic and technocratic political culture. But now that China has emerged as a great power, this culture has shifted toward a cult of personality around Xi and an extreme form of nationalism. This is why Beijing has no intention of joining the existing liberal international order and submitting to rules and norms overseen by other powers. If China will ever become more like us, there’s no telling when that shift will finally occur.

Xi isn’t just the most powerful leader since Mao — he’s also the most ideological. But his ideology diverges from the communist movements of the twentieth century in many ways. Xi Jinping Thought touts “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which reflects CCP’s formal commitment to Marxism-Leninism while highlighting the stark nationalist turn under Xi’s leadership. Whereas Soviet communism purported to be a universal system, the CCP’s animating doctrines are all about what makes China uniquely superior. This is why Xi has embraced Confucianism (which Mao ruthlessly suppressed as a bourgeois impediment to “progress”) — to present himself as the steward of a 5,000-year-old civilization. To the extent that Beijing wants to weaken the liberal international order, it is happy to see authoritarian governments flout the rules and norms of that order. But this project isn’t about providing a coherent ideological alternative to liberal democracy — it’s about projecting Chinese power as widely as possible; forging economic relationships around the world with large-scale lending to foreign borrowers and strategic investments in infrastructure; and establishing regional hegemony.

When the historian Niall Ferguson (one of the most prominent proponents of the Cold War II thesis) was asked to explain China’s global ideological influence, he claimed that the situation today isn’t all that different from the contest with the Soviet Union in Cold War I. He summarized the “appeal of the Chinese model in Sub-Saharan Africa, in Latin America, in the Middle East, in Central Asia, indeed all over the so-called developing or emerging world”:

If you are running a chaotic African country which is poor economically, the Chinese offer you a solution to the crowd control problem which is better than anything yet available … You have surveillance technology, you have the AI, you have the cameras. You can nail down your civilian population. And the Chinese have a second thing to offer you, and that is infrastructure: you don’t have roads, we’ll do roads. You don’t have telecoms, we have Huawei.

None of these observations support Ferguson’s assertion that Cold War II is an ideological struggle in the same way as Cold War I. Providing impoverished dictatorships with tools for suppressing their own populations is hardly comparable to the Iron Curtain in Europe and the establishment of communist dictatorships around the world. There is no Chinese communist international; no “model” to which foreign emulators could aspire. Xi Jinping Thought isn’t revered as an alternative to capitalism in the Western intelligentsia in the same way Soviet communism was, and while the CCP has a few defenders in the West, they’re marginal. China’s most important ideological ally is Russia, but the two countries have little in common beyond imperial ambitions and contempt for the liberal international order.

Recall Fukuyama’s argument that there has been a “total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism” (italics added). While the viability of the Chinese system remains an open question, there’s no sense in which it can be considered a systematic alternative to liberal democracy.

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The case for liberal democracy remains as strong as ever, but many citizens of democratic countries have lost confidence in their own system. A recent survey conducted by the AP and the NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that just one in ten Americans give their democracy high marks for performance and representation. Gallup reports that 26 percent of Americans trust the U.S. presidency as an institution, while just 8 percent trust Congress.

It’s easy to see where this lack of confidence comes from — threats to shut down the government or default on the United States’ debt are now routine negotiating tools. Political polarization has become increasingly extreme since the 1990s, which has exacerbated what Fukuyama describes as “vetocracy” — too many competing interests have the power to stop the government from getting anything done, which leads to gridlock and dysfunction. Congress is unable to handle routine business like passing a budget, voting on important nominations (the U.S. currently has no ambassadors to Israel or Egypt), and electing a Speaker of the House. By finally handing the Speaker’s gavel to Louisiana Rep. Mike Johnson — a loyal member of the far-right populist insurgency in Congress and one of the most enthusiastic supporters of Trump’s effort overturn the 2020 election — House Republicans have guaranteed that the chamber will remain chaotic and unproductive.

While Americans’ frustration with their government is understandable, this doesn’t justify support for a would-be dictator like Trump. The past several years have demonstrated that the United States now confronts one of the most severe democratic crises in its history. Millions of Americans aren’t just dissatisfied with their government — they no longer care about the integrity of their democracy. Despite Trump’s relentless effort to undermine American democracy before the 2020 election and overthrow it entirely after he was defeated, he leads his closest competitor for the 2024 presidential nomination (Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis) by 49 points among potential GOP voters. An analysis by the New York Times found that huge proportions of Republican state legislators had taken steps (as of May 2022) to discredit or overturn the 2020 election, including 81 percent in Arizona, 78 percent in Pennsylvania, and 73 percent in Wisconsin. On January 6, 2021, the United States’ most hallowed civic tradition — the peaceful transfer of power — was trampled by a mob incited by the president. And many voters want to reward him for it.

In a 2023 lecture, Fukuyama made a connection between how democracies perform (in delivering essential services like high-quality infrastructure, for example) and how “liberal democracy is perceived around the world.” Congress is in disarray at a time when the reputation of liberal democracy — particularly in the U.S. — has already suffered major blows in recent years. According to the Pew Global Attitudes Survey (published a few months after January 6), just 17 percent of respondents said American democracy is a “good example for other countries to follow,” while 57 percent said it “used to be a good example.” When pro-Trump rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol, America’s enemies wasted no time in declaring that liberal democracy is a sham. Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei declared that the “U.S. & ‘American values’ are ridiculed even by their friends.” A spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry said the insurrection demonstrates that the “U.S. electoral process is archaic.” Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying jeered at American officials: “What phrases did they use for Hong Kong [during the pro-democracy protests there]? What phrases are they using for America now?”

The predictable consequences of placing an authoritarian demagogue in charge of the most important liberal democracy on earth.

January 6 was one of the ugliest moments in modern American history, and it was a travesty which allowed dictators around the world to present liberal democracy as a failure. But democracy once again proved its resilience — the President Biden took office as planned on January 20, 2021, the U.S. criminal justice system has held many of the January 6 insurrectionists accountable (with some receiving decades-long prison sentences), and Trump faces a long list of court dates for his own alleged crimes. Meanwhile, it was only a matter of time before the projections of strength, stability, and superiority coming from autocrats in places like Tehran and Moscow would be exposed as rickety facades. Less than two years after the Ayatollah sneered at American values, his ossified theocracy was shaken by the largest Iranian protest movement since the 1979 revolution. These protests exploded after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran’s morality police, they but were simmering under the surface of Iranian society thanks to decades of economic stagnation, fraudulent elections with preordained outcomes, and a young population that’s more secular and progressive than the theocrats in charge.

A year after the Russian Foreign Ministry derided American democracy as “archaic,” Putin decided to behave like a capricious tsar and unilaterally launch an imperial war against Ukraine. Beyond Russia’s surprisingly dreadful performance on the battlefield, the stated purpose of the invasion — to prevent the expansion of NATO — has backfired, now that Finland has joined the alliance and Sweden’s accession won’t be far behind. Hundreds of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians have been killed or wounded, the ruble has collapsed, and the war has turned Russia into even more of an international pariah than it already was. Meanwhile, Putin should consider himself the father of the modern Ukrainian state — nobody has done more to create a sense of national unity around a distinctly Ukrainian identity, consciously shorn of its historic, cultural, and linguistic connections to Russia. In September 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky applied for NATO membership and requested “accelerated accession.”

China faces an imminent demographic and economic emergency, the Iranian regime is struggling to recover from the most serious challenge to its authority in its history, and Russia is mired in a brutal attrition war that was launched to satisfy one man’s delusional imperial hubris. While this is a difficult period for liberal democracy, the perils of polarization, vetocracy, and even Trumpism suddenly seem a little more manageable when they’re compared to the colossal liabilities of one-party rule. The worst mistake citizens of liberal democracies could make would be to elect their own authoritarians. This wouldn’t just lead to the corrosion of democratic norms and institutions within their own countries — it would also empower anti-democratic forces around the world.

It’s a problem that Orbán is Putin’s useful idiot, posing for photos, refusing to ratify Sweden’s NATO application, and continuing to do business with Russia. It will be an even bigger problem if Marine Le Pen becomes the president of France. And it will be a tragedy if Trump — who wants to abandon Ukraine and get the United States out of NATO — returns to the Oval Office in the middle of the largest conflict in Europe since World War II. There has never been a clearer reminder that the strength of the liberal international order depends on the strength of democracy at home.

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Like the conviction that democracy is in terminal decline, the idea that the liberal international order has failed — especially since the end of the Cold War — has become an unexamined assumption among many intellectuals and politicians today. This is particularly true among populists on the left and right (see part II of this series), who have built their political movements around the perceived failures of the globalist “establishment.”

The first essay in this series discusses some of the monumental achievements of the liberal international order — achievements which aren’t limited to the liberal democratic world. For example, one of the main reasons that the number of people living in extreme poverty plunged from 2 billion in 1990 to less than 650 million in 2019 was China’s shift toward market liberalization. Almost 72 percent of the Chinese population lived on less than $2.15 per day in 1990, and this proportion was just 0.14 percent by 2019. This is the greatest exodus from poverty in human history.

China’s economic success is now cited as evidence against the liberal international order. In his 2018 book The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy, the Harvard international relations professor Stephen Walt observes that China was “relatively weak” in 1990, but within a couple of decades, it was “using some of its rapidly growing wealth to modernize its military forces, with an eye toward contesting the dominant position in Asia that the United States had enjoyed since the end of World War II.” The “rise of China” is constantly blamed on the failures of the liberal international order, but nobody who makes this argument bothers to explain which policies could have arrested the rise of a modernizing economic titan with a population of 1.4 billion people. China’s rise was inevitable, and we shouldn’t be nostalgic for a world in which hundreds of millions of Chinese were stuck in abject poverty.

Walt criticizes the United States for its failed effort to integrate China into “existing international institutions” and argues that the Obama administration’s “pivot” to Asia couldn’t stop Beijing from forging trade agreements and economic partnerships across the region. However, he also admits that Obama’s signature trade agreement — the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), which Trump abandoned once he took office — would have curbed China’s influence, improved the United States’ relationships with regional allies and trading partners, provided “open access to a large and growing market,” and allowed Washington to set rules and regulatory standards in the region. After the U.S. withdrew, TPP became the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which still includes Japan, Mexico, Canada, Australia, and other regional economies. Even China wants to join. The United States’ weaker economic position in the Pacific is the result of a refusal to uphold one of the key pillars of the liberal international order: free trade.

Critics of the liberal international order often present its victories as defeats. Imagine telling an American policymaker in the mid-1970s that, by 2023, NATO would more than double in size. Not only that, but many of its new members would be former members of the Soviet Union — that’s right, former members, because the Iron Curtain would fall in 1990. In July of that year, New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan marveled at how wrong the American intelligence community had been about the Soviet economy: “In the mid-‘70s, the size of the Soviet economy in relation to the United States was thought to have passed into the 60 percent range.” The CIA was convinced that the Soviet Union’s GDP growth rate was significantly higher (and more sustainable) than it actually was. In the early 1960s, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was boasting about how the Soviet economy would inevitably overtake the United States. A U.S. policymaker in the 1970s wouldn’t be surprised that Russia would still be a geopolitical threat 50 years later — but the idea that the American economy would be 14 times larger would have been difficult to imagine.

As we discussed in part II, populists on the left and right blame NATO expansion for the war in Ukraine. Walt agrees, arguing that the decision to expand NATO was a tragic example of “hubris, wishful thinking, and liberal idealism.” This is a position echoed by the University of Chicago’s John Mearsheimer, who argues that the “West, and especially America, is principally responsible for the crisis” in Ukraine. Walt and Mearsheimer are both proponents of “realism,” a theory of international relations that focuses on the distribution of power in the international system (I’ve criticized the theory at length). Because that system has no centralized authority, realists believe states act purely on the basis of mechanistic calculations about how they can improve their strategic position relative to their rivals — geopolitics is really just about weights and counterweights. This view ignores ideology, history, and a range of other potential determinants of state behavior, which is why Fukuyama criticizes realism as the “billiard ball” theory of international relations. As he writes in his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man:

International politics, then, is not about the interaction of complex and historically developing human societies, nor are wars about clashes of values. Under the ‘billiard ball’ approach, the slender knowledge of whether an international system is bipolar or multipolar is sufficient to determine the likelihood of peace or war.

This simplistic conception of international politics gives realists an impoverished and warped view of what’s happening in the world. For example, while it’s true that Putin was angry about NATO expansion, he is also an imperialist who believes he has a duty to restore as much Russian power and influence as possible. Ukraine has always been at the center of this project — a view Putin has painstakingly and explicitly articulated in speeches and essays for years. He says there’s no historical basis for the “idea of Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians.” He believes Ukraine was created on the “lands of historical Russia.” He describes the collapse of the USSR as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the twentieth century. He regards Ukrainian independence as a symptom of the “disease of nationalism.” Despite all this, Mearsheimer claims there’s “absolutely no evidence” that Putin is an imperialist who’s “trying to create a Greater Russia.”

The reason Mearsheimer refuses to acknowledge that Russia is a uniquely aggressive imperial power is his belief that all sufficiently powerful states behave according to a fixed set of patterns. On the realist view, there’s no such thing as human progress on a scale sufficient to alter state behavior. This is why realists mocked Secretary of State John Kerry when he criticized Putin’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014: “You just don’t in the twenty-first century behave in nineteenth century fashion,” Kerry said, “by invading another country on completely trumped up pretext.” Realists argue that there’s no such thing as twenty-first or nineteenth century behavior — would billiard balls have broken any differently in the time of Bismarck?

This view leads realists to make absurd analytical errors, such as Mearsheimer’s argument at the end of the Cold War that Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Austria should be worried about the possibility of a German invasion without a nuclear deterrent. The idea of Germany invading its neighbors at any point since Mearsheimer published his essay in 1990 is unthinkable. Mearsheimer thought Germany would behave like Russia in the post-Cold War era, but this was never going to be the case due to Germany’s unique history and political culture. The memory of World War II conjures feelings of horror and shame in Germany, for example, while Putin urges Russians to feel a sense of triumph and vindication about the great Soviet victory. He has even tried to rehabilitate Stalin as the face of a heroic Russian past. Try to imagine a German chancellor doing the same with Hitler to appreciate the depth of the historical and political chasm between the two countries.

In “The End of History?” Fukuyama recognized that Russia’s fate after the Cold War wasn’t predetermined. He observed that a modernizing Russia wouldn’t inevitably “return to foreign policy views a century out of date in the rest of Europe.” He worried about the “ultranationalists” who may try to restore Russia to past glories, but he also recognized that the leadership in Moscow could take the country in a different direction: “It can start down the path that was staked out by Western Europe forty-five years ago, a path that most of Asia has followed, or it can realize its own uniqueness and remain stuck in history.” Russia chose the latter, and the consequences have been more evident over the past two years than at any point since the Cold War. This doesn’t mean Russia is doomed to remain an aggressive dictatorship forever (as some academics would have you believe), but it means the prospects for liberal democracy are remote for now. This is a tragedy for the whole world — including the Russian people.

The question now is whether China will make the same mistake, and the likely answer doesn’t look promising. But Fukuyama was right about the prospects for liberal democracy three and a half decades ago, and his argument remains compelling today. No matter how powerful and permanent nationalist dictatorships have seemed throughout history, liberal democracy has always won in the end.

1. Fukuyama’s theory of historical mechanics and progress draws heavily upon the work of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, particularly as interpreted by Alexandre Kojève. As Fukuyama explains in his 2011 book The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman times to the French Revolution:

Alexandre Kojève, the great Russian-French interpreter of Hegel, argued that history as such had ended in the year 1806 with the Battle of Jena-Auerstadt, when Napoleon defeated the Prussian monarchy and brought the principles of liberty and equality to Hegel’s part of Europe. In his typically ironic and playful way, Kojève suggested that everything that had happened since 1806, including the sturm und drang of the twentieth century with its great wars and revolutions, was simply a matter of backfilling. That is, the basic principles of modern government had been established by the time of the Battle of Jena; the task thereafter was not to find new principles and a higher political order but rather to implement them through larger and larger parts of the world. I believe that Kojève’s assertion still deserves to be taken seriously.

This is one of the clearest articulations of Fukuyama’s central thesis, reiterated decades after “The End of History?” was originally published. As his recent writings indicate, he still takes Kojève’s argument seriously.