250-300 words
When using specific examples or quotations from the text, please use a parenthetical citation, e.g. (Lesson 7.5).
In 1989, during the waning days of the Cold War, political theorist Francis Fukuyama declared that liberal democracy (liberal in a 19th c./Enlightenment sense, not a politically left/middle left sense) and economics had won the day and “the end of history” (he backpedaled this in an 2018 article), “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 universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”
The last 30 years might disagree on the permanence of that order (or at least the absence of challenges to it), see: the rise of political Islam (al Qaeda’s attacks on liberal democracies, ISIS and the Taliban making efforts to overcome/throw Western-style governments, or attempts at creating Western-style governments, in Iraq and Afghanistan), populist opposition to globalism (ex: Brexit, the politics of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders), the continued existence of forms of colonialism and neo-colonialism (China in Africa, for example), etc.
How would you characterize the last thirty years compared with the previous eras that we have discussed (you can examine multiple ones or focus on one, say, the Atlantic Revolutions or the Cold War)? Does it have particular attributes or characteristics that historians might identity as unifying and/or coherent in the future? Did Fukuyama have a point, or not?
