The struggle for liberty continues

This spring marks the 30th anniversary of the paperback release of Francis Fukuyama’s controversial book, The End of History and the Last Man. As the Cold War was ending with a triumphant democratic America and a disintegrated Soviet Union, Fukuyama argued that democratic values faced no ideational challenge. In the early 1990s, world politics was at the end of historical conflict between competing views of legitimate politics. Democracy had won.

But, did democracy win? Is democracy winning?

The End of History argued that in the historical evolution of ideas, the notion that democracy—representative government and robust civil liberties of citizens—is not just political architecture, but rather a powerful set of ideas about individual human worth, equality before the law, limited and republican government, a free civil society composed of many other organizations (e.g., churches and businesses), and individual liberty. This socio-political framework is typically associated with some form of market capitalism.

On the one hand, the good news is that it seems that citizens around the world truly want civil liberties for themselves and their families, responsive representative government, and the rule of law. Surveys report time and again that the individual freedoms and civil liberties within democracies are desired by billions of people in every region of the world. The best of these reports in the past decade is Pew Research, which found strong support for individual expression, free media, and freedom of Internet use in all regions of the world. Additionally, most people (well above the 50 percent median in all regions) said religious freedom, gender equality, and free and fair elections are very important.

The evidence of the pro-democracy attitudes among the general public can be seen across the globe. In the 1990s many Latin American countries transitioned from dictatorships to democracy. At the same time, the democratic consolidation of the Asian Tigers, such as Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea, gave hope for a wider democratic entrenchment in the Far East. The next decade saw the first Arab Spring (2004) and the democratic Color Revolutions within Eastern Europe—Georgia (Rose, 2003), Ukraine, (Orange, 2004) and Kyrgyzstan (Tulip, 2005). A more robust Arab Spring broke out in December 2010, with people-power movements toppling dictators in Tunisia and Egypt, and forcing reforms elsewhere.

Unfortunately, the gap between democratic aspirations and actualization has been large and disappointing. From Argentina to South Africa to India, we are witnessing a decline in democratic institutions and culture.

Fukuyama did not predict that the entire world would become democratic. He was arguing that the idea of liberal democracy had no ideological competitors that were morally attractive to the world’s citizens. He believed that the energy of history would push more and more countries beyond the lip service of democracy to concrete political action toward representative government because it was the most likely system to provide political and social goods for its citizens.

The fact is that in 2023, there is no widespread political idea that rivals the desire people have in most places around the globe for civil liberties, the rule of law, and some form of representative government.

That being said, on a practical level, one major challenge is represented by a form of centralized nationalism in which government takes control over sectors of the economy, public life, and some aspects of citizens’ private lives, including their religious faith. China’s President Xi makes this claim in a series of books, articles, speeches, and interviews in which he and his cronies chart the path of a unified Chinese society managed by the communist elite. He claims that rising economic standards demonstrate the utility of this approach and that liberal democratic norms are foreign to the Chinese character. Moreover, “foreign” ideas and identities, including Muslim Uighurs, Tibetan Buddhists, and Western republicans, are enemies.

Other authoritarians have made similar claims, such as the Castros in Cuba, Chavez in Venezuela, and Iran’s ayatollahs. But the proof is in the pudding: when was the last time anyone heard of someone defecting from Miami to Havana, from Zurich to Tehran, or from Seoul to Beijing?

The people-power movements of the past 30 years sought a better political and economic future for their families. Today, the principal challenge to the idea of liberal democracy continues to be the effectiveness of liberal democracy to provide the goods that citizens and families need. Voting and a free press sound great, but if there are no jobs and little prospect for economic success, people will look to alternatives, such as Africa’s many “strong men” who promise to deliver results. Democracy, the idea, continues to be a winning idea in theory, but in practice we are far from the end of history. The struggle for freedom and dignity continues.