Remember those halcyon days when pundits were declaring that the world is witnessing an end of history with liberal democracy and freemarket capitalism emerging triumphant after the collapse of the Soviet Union? How distant those days seem and how out of touch with reality those pronouncements. History, the clash of ideologies declared to be at an end by Francis Fukuyama in 1989, is clearly not as dead as reported. The Chinese regime is at the height of its popularity with the Olympics giving a boost to the Communist Party’s legitimacy.

The Russian bear, meanwhile, is growling again as imperialist sentiment grows in the corridors of the Kremlin. But it is not simply great power politics that is back in vogue; regimes in minor states such as Zimbabwe, Sudan, Burma and North Korea have also been emboldened, and have begun to pursue their own brand of “values-based” foreign policy. Russia and China along with other authoritarian states have used their positions in the UN Security Council to block almost all proposed forms of intervention in places like Sudan, Myanmar and Zimbabwe. 

This divided world stands in stark contrast to the situation after the victory of the West in the Cold War. Neo-conservative commentators in the United States were ecstatic about a victory they took to be the ultimate triumph of Western values, especially of liberal democracy and capitalism. And in a fit of optimism after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, Fukuyama declared not only an end to ideological struggle, but the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. This enthusiasm was infectious; liberals soon began to argue that the spread of liberal political and economic values was important for global security; consequently, a coalition of liberals and neo-conservatives pushed a global interventionist agenda throughout the ’90s.

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