In his seminal essay in the National Interest in 1989 Francis Fukuyama posited that the end of the Cold War represented something greater than just the passing of a particular phase of history. Rather it represented the “victory of liberalism” in the realm of ideas or consciousness, and these ideas would inevitably come to govern the “material world in the long run.” As such the world was soon likely to see the “universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Three-and-a-half decades later this expectation comes across as fatally flawed, at least in the political realm. Our material world – if not (yet) the political and spiritual one – is dominated by the manufacturers of the People’s Republic of China. Many liberal democracies, especially in Western Europe, are in a state of dysfunction.

They are, for the most part, eking out 1% growth rates, and drowning in debt. Their governing elites are unable or unwilling to respond effectively to these and other challenges and voters are, in desperation, looking to parties and figures from the fringes for salvation.

An obvious and pressing question this raises is whether the dysfunction of so many Western democracies today stems from a failure of liberalism per se – as, it is important to emphasise, it was understood at the time that Fukuyama wrote his essay – or whether it is a consequence rather of a hollowing out of liberalism in the West.

South Africans, at least, were provided with a vivid insight into that question earlier this year. In January President Cyril Ramaphosa signed the Expropriation Act into law, over the objections of his coalition partners in the Government of National Unity. This was racial nationalist legislation intended – as the ANC has repeatedly made clear – to allow for state organs to target minority-owned property for confiscation, and to offer below-market-value-to-nominal compensation for it.

Liberal perspective

From a principled liberal perspective this is quite obviously a pernicious and dangerous piece of legislation. It undermines property rights, targets racial minorities, and will have damaging (and potentially disastrous) consequences over the medium- to long-term for investment, economic growth, and the country’s food security. Three decades ago, it would have undoubtedly been recognised as such in the Western press.

Yet after US President Donald Trump roughly attacked this law in his executive order of 7 February 2025 "Addressing Egregious Actions of the Republic of South Africa" it was he (and not the Act) which was subjected to a wave of condemnation from across the elite Western media. It was simply intolerable, so the push back went, for the white minority in South Africa to continue to own a share of the land multiples greater than their nominal (7%) proportion of the population. The spurious and misleading statistic that “black South Africans own only 4 percent of the land while white South Africans own about three-quarters” was widely cited as authoritative. In these circumstances, the Washington Post declared in an editorial, the Act was just a “baby step toward addressing this inequity”.

What this incident revealed was that while larges sections of the progressive Western intelligentsia may be passionate about many things – racial equity being one of them – they are no longer animated or guided by basic liberal values. The quick resort to the principle of race proportionality to justify state efforts to deprive individuals of their property and livelihoods was particularly startling given that, as any fule kno, the same argument was previously employed across continental Europe to legitimate the dispossession of disfavoured minorities in the 1930s (and after).

Liberal spirit

If one is to identify those responsible for this fading away of the liberal spirit in many elite Western institutions a useful place to start looking for culprits is the End of History thesis itself. Aristotle observed in Politics that constitutional orders were threatened not just when their enemies were upon them, but by the absence of enemies as well, for it was the fear of them which “makes the government keep in hand the constitution”.

In such circumstances those who have care of the constitutional order “should invent terrors, and bring distant dangers near, in order that the citizens may be on their guard, and, like sentinels in a night watch, never relax their attention.”

Clearly then one of the dangers facing a hegemonic West in the aftermath of the collapse of Soviet communism was precisely that it no longer faced an imminent and menacing threat. Rather than “bring distant dangers” near, however, the End of History thesis (admittedly in vulgarised form) promoted the idea that the triumph of liberal democracy was both inevitable and irreversible. Liberalism could be expected to glide to victory everywhere except for Iraq and Afghanistan, where it could be imposed by force of arms.

It is possible with hindsight today to just tick off the damaging consequences of the End of History delusion. With no fear of the communist alternative Western political elites started governing in their own interests, and not for the common good.

The US, with Europe following some distance behind, decided there was no danger in (and immense profits to be made from) shifting the West’s manufacturing capacity to the PRC, as it was liable to liberalise at some point anyway, and so on.

Taken for granted

There was also felt to be no compelling need for the youth to be actively educated in Western liberal values, given that the ultimate triumph of those ideals could be taken for granted. Since hostile forces apparently did not exist – or, if they did, could never pose any threat (outside a few regions) – there was no need to seriously study and understand opposing worldviews either.

This led to a situation whereby an entire generation was left in complete ignorance of the revolutionary racial nationalism that swept across the Asian, Arab, and African worlds following the retreat of European empire. Even more astoundingly, the moral and ideological instruction of the youth was routinely handed over to adherents of such radical, racial Leftist ideologies in elite universities across the West. These students have emerged from these institutions ignorant of the destructive nature of their ideology, and its appalling history, while imbued with the belief that they can now go out and exert a power for good practically unbounded. Hence the loud support from many young Western intellectuals for racial nationalist initiatives in South Africa.

There was a further consequence of the End of History delusion, which is critical to understanding the mess most Western countries are in, and that is Western thinking became increasingly utopian, but that will have to be the subject of a future article….

James Myburgh is Director of Bremen Democratic Research (BRE-DE-RE), an initiative to identify and counter threats to the liberty, comity and prosperity of democratic societies through historical and comparative research.