ABSTRACT
It is appropriate that a book examining IR as a site of cultural practices imbued with conscious and unconscious ideologies should examine a myth that claims that ideological struggles are over. This is precisely what Francis Fukuyama claims in his famous 1989 essay “The End of History?” and later elaborates on in his book The End of History and the Last Man (1992). Fukuyama argues that liberal democracy as a system of governance has won an “unabashed victory” over other ideas to the point that liberalism is the only legitimate ideology left in the world. Not only are there no coherent ideological challengers to liberalism, liberalism itself is free of irrational internal contradictions which lead to the collapse of ideologies. Having no internal contradictions means that liberalism is a finished idea. For Fukuyama, all this marks “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and means that liberalism is “the final form of human government” (1989: 271). Because the history of the conflict of ideas in the form of ideological struggle is now over, all that remains to be done is to spread liberal ideology throughout the world as a material way of life, through social, political, and economic institutions.
