ABSTRACT
In a controversial article on the Cold War, whose theme was later expanded in a book, Francis Fukuyama, then deputy director of the State Depart ment’s policy planning staff and a policy analyst at the Rand Corporation, suggested that with the apparent triumph of Western liberalism over Soviet communism, most, if not all, underlying causes of conflict in the world have been eliminated. As Fukuyama puts it, what we ‘may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of history, but the end o f history [emphasis added] 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’ (Fukuyama, 1989a, p. 4).
