The End of History All Over Again…

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When I was living in Moscow in 2003, I couldn’t help thinking, “This must be what Weimar Germany felt like. These people don’t know that they lost the Cold War. They think their leaders betrayed them and surrendered. They will try to dominate again.” At the time, I wondered if I was being a bit alarmist. Today, it’s clear that I was not.

I had come to Moscow with the perspective of having spent more than 6 years in the region, most of it in Poland, where the country was rapidly modernizing and westernizing. The fall of the Soviet Union was seen as unambiguously positive there. In Moscow though, you could deeply feel its sense of loss of imperial identity and its visceral desire to restore its national pride.

It seemed, as Francis Fukuyama famously wrote, like the end of history. The conflict between communism and capitalism had come to an abrupt end. Just one model remained. But, as Fukuyama also noted — and as I saw firsthand in Moscow — the human urge to assert identity remained. What we were witnessing wasn’t an end, but the beginning of a major realignment.

The Washington Consensus

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, the West was triumphant. Communism was exposed as a corrupt system bereft of any real legitimacy. A new neoliberal ideology took hold, often called the Washington…