Crisis, Populism, and Protests: How Resistance to Western Capitalism was Revived in the Modern Era

In 1989, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama hypothesized that the ongoing collapse of communist states indicated the end of human sociopolitical development, and that our present Western-style democracy represented the “final form of human government.” The battle between political ideologies that had defined the human odyssey was supposedly concluding and we had reached the “end of history.” As globalization continued to progress, Fukuyama said, liberal values associated with democracy and capitalism would gradually but surely spread across the world, revealing themselves to all peoples as the most superior values by which to organize society.