Introduction: International Cooperation in Times of Post-Cold War (Dis)order

Abstract

In the summer of 1989, US political scientist Francis Fukuyama published an essay entitled ‘The End of History?’ in which he argued that the countries of the world would progressively converge towards Western liberal market democracy. Now that totalitarian communism had collapsed, the East would adopt the West’s model of democratic capitalism. ‘What we may be witnessing’, wrote Fukuyama, ‘is not the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: that is the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government’ (Fukuyama 1989: 3; see also Fukuyama 2006). The end of history would mark the triumph of liberalism over all other ideologies and political systems. It would usher in a liberal world order and an era of Western hegemony. What started as an idea soon pervaded the political discourse in the West. George Bush Sr., Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, Angela Merkel, Nicholas Sarkozy and Barack Obama all believed that the Western brand of globalisation had established a new consensus on liberal political values and a market society.