Has Democracy Reached the End of Its History?

The last 15 years have been tough on lots of folks: the UK Labour Party, the New York Jets, Naphtha. But perhaps the greatest bear market has been in political freedom. According to the number-crunchers at Freedom House, the sum of democracies on the globe has shrunk continuously over that time. Worse, perhaps, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Niall Ferguson points out: “Some countries are very large and some are very small. So it is more meaningful to look at shares of the world’s population living under the different regimes ... indeed, the proportion of people in liberal democracies has indeed fallen from a secular high of 17% (1993-2011) to 13% in 2022.”

This is tough to swallow for those of us who remember the heady days of 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell to crowds of exuberant Germans, and 1991, when the Soviet Union fell to a fat guy on a tank. Most of us were gobsmacked by it all — but I’m not sure Francis Fukuyama was. Just months before the Wall came down, Fukuyama, a young political scientist fresh out of the RAND Corporation, published an essay in the National Interest that, as the New Yorker put it, “turned the foreign-policy world on its ear.” It was entitled “The End of History?” — and over the last three decades, many people seem to have forgotten that question mark. In its shortest iteration, Fukuyama’s thesis was that liberal democracy had proven itself the highest form of government any advanced society could attain.