The end of history ???

“The end of history” thundered the American intellectual Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent end of the cold war. What Fukuyama concluded was that the evolutionary process of mankind governing itself had reached its conclusion with the advent of liberal democracy and history will stop its ever continuous process of evolving henceforth.

Fukuyama and many of his intellectual counterparts had the benefit of watching the “victory” of the West and its model of liberal, capitalist democracy in the background and then declaring the eventual superiority of that system of governance as the final phase of human evolution but what they did not consider was the glorious uncertainty of History.

But History can sometimes be much stranger than fiction and certainly stranger than many western intellectual thinkers could have considered. Indeed many of his considerations were derived out of the absolute superiority of Western countries both economically and politically. The fact that the United States maintained an absolute supremacy in terms of military power in the world obviously helped the United States to get others to listen to its version of the story and ignore the rest. This was the background which helped Fukuyama to come up and declare his idea of “end of history” and many serious intellectuals and thinkers believed in his epoch-shattering ideas.

Now two decades hence the World looks a lot different that Fukuyama had probably thought about. Indeed the Western countries still dominate the global scenario as in the 1990-s but their overwhelming supremacy has been somewhat halted by the emergence of rival powers and rival ideas.

The western model of liberal democracy faces some considerable challenges in the coming decades. One of them is in terms economic growth. The west has long dominated the World in terms of economic growth and prosperity but in the last decade of 20-th century and in the present 21-st century we have seen the meteoric rise of potential rivals like China in particular. The Chinese successes in terms of commercial and economic growth put cold waters on the Western claim of overwhelming superiority in the world of businesses and commerce. As China has continued to grow strongly some of the established major Western economies like Spain, Ireland, France, UK and even the USA has not been able to match their pre-1980 growth rates let aside double-digit economic growth rates of China. Indeed all these major Western economies have slowed down considerably over the last decade or so and they have not shown any clear signs of gearing up in the new millennium to match that of the Chinese. The success of the Chinese have come largely without that nation bringing in all the democratic and pollitical reforms as prescribed by the Western pundits and specialists and the success of the Chinese economic model contradicts the Fukuyama line of thinking that western - model of liberal , democratic model is the only model able to bring in economic prosperity.

The second significant challenge that the Western democracies increasingly face is the challenge regarding economic inequality in their own societies. One of the major positive aspects of the Western system has been its ability to provide a considerable amount of income to its unemployed and matured age populations. Indeed this has been one quality of the Western model which has been loudly praised by all the major intellectuals (of both western and non-western backgrounds). But as economic growth has stagnated in the Western societies so has been the prospect of governments doling out large sums of money to their underprivileged and unemployed populations. Indeed after the last recession in 2008 many of the countries in Europe have been considering cutting down benefits to their unemployed and underprivileged in a considerable way. Large popular demonstrations have been observed in countries such as Greece and Portugal against any possible efforts by their governments to cut down social benefits. Protests can also be seen in the US against plans by individual states like Wisconsin and Michigan against proposed cuts to these benefits for the underprivileged and unemployed. The wedge between the governing establishments and their people is getting bigger as time slowly passes by. Indeed the very stability of the Western societies could be a major issue in the coming decades as the gap in wealth between the “have”-s and the “have-not”-s continue to grow in the Western societies. There is a perceivable sense among the population as well as the general intelligentsia in the Western world that their elected representatives do not keep in mind the interests of those who elected them in the first place. The protests and demonstrations are only the signals of the same attitude.

Another major challenge the West will continue to face will be the future of the western concept of the nation state. The Western model of democratic governance was based upon the foundation of single language-speaking homogeneous nation-states. Thanks to the global outreach of the Western multinational corporations many people from the non-Western speaking countries had the opportunity to go to the Western countries, work in those affluent places and then report back home about the success the Western societies were enjoying. This particular method brought both the Western and the non-Western worlds together and allowed both to enrich each other. But the post-2008 recession West has struggled to get rid of its national prejudices and biases. In an increasingly globally connected world where the national boundaries are becoming increasingly irrelevant each day; we can observe the existing national prejudices also becoming more widespread in the West. The recent backlash against Chinese and Indian Workers in the US, the banning of head scarves in France, the derogatory comments on Muslims by the German ministers, the popularity of extreme-nationalists in many parts of continental Europe, the discriminatory bills passed by the parliament of Israel or for that matter the incidents of beatings of Indian students in Australia all point to the same direction. The Western world is not comfortable about the rise of the “Eastern” powers like China and India and in this environment the “alien” in the society i.e. those who are not from the Western-ethnicity gets to be blamed by the majority of the Western societies for their miseries. The more the Westerners demand assimilation of their non-Western minorities to the western mainstream; the less will be the popularity of the Western ideas among the non-Westerner populations.

The West needs to reconcile itself with the current world scenario where it needs to take into consideration the views of others like China. Without reconciling to that as well as not finding constructive answers to the challenges I have mentioned, will not help the West to adopt itself to the new realities of the 21-st century World.