2024/12/23 by Peter Frankopan · 1 voice
Business, Management and Accounting · Social Sciences · #Island Studies and Pacific Affairs #Political and Economic history of UK and US #State Capitalism and Financial Governance
paper · doi:10.1093/cjres/rsae043
openalex publication_date 2024/12/23 · openalex created_date 2024/12/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
With the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it seemed that the world was moving into a phase of peace and prosperity. The end of the Gulf War of 1990–1991 may not have been as conclusive as some had hoped, but nevertheless represented an emphatic statement of intent by a broad US-led coalition to enforce international law following the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait. And then there was the dramatic change of direction taken by the leadership of the People’s Republic of China that is often dated to Deng Xiaoping’s ‘southern tour’ of 1992 that served as a response both to the demise of the USSR and in the aftermath of the military crackdown Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. Authoritarianism was in decline, as the world opened up and liberalised. Many commentators saw these changes as part of a set of socio-economic and cultural movements that brought the age of confrontation to a close. Some even heralded the ‘end of history’, a term originally coined in the 19th century by the French scholar Antoine Augustin Cournot to mark the moment where civil society was optimised and the rules of logic reigned supreme.1 The phrase was popularised by Francis Fukuyama, first in an article in The National Interest in the summer of 1989 (Fukuyama, 1989), and then in an eponymously titled best-selling book published three years later (Fukuyama, 1992). The horrors that accompanied fascism and communism were so acute and so obvious, went the argument, that it stood to reason that liberal democracy on the one hand and the market economy on the other, had not only triumphed intellectually but proved beyond all doubts to be most likely to deliver the best outcomes to the most people.