Liberal International Order: Bursting at the Seams

Introduction

With the collapse of the Soviet Union in late 1991, US political scientist Francis Fukuyama in his book The End of History and the Last Man (Citation1992) triumphantly declared that the event marked the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government (Fukuyama Citation1992).

However, time has since mellowed the now septuagenarian Fukuyama, whose earlier writings made him an ideologue of neo-conservative thought. In his book, Liberalism and Its Discontents, he accepts that the war-like misadventures of neo-liberals and the race and gender-based Left-wing identity politics of US ‘progressives’ have increased inequality around the world and caused the perception that liberal ideas are outdated (Fukuyama Citation2022).