ABSTRACT
The title of this chapter is meant as a reference to the famous argument by Francis Fukuyama that after the collapse of communism in different places around the world we are witnessing ‘the end of history’ in a sense that history itself resolved the biggest twentieth-century dispute about the best political system and capitalist democracy proved to be the only alternative for the future. As far as the analysis of post-Cold War developments in the former Soviet Union is concerned, the ‘end of history’ argument is everyone’s favourite straw man, so rigid it seems and so strongly reminiscent of the Cold War paradigm. And yet, I show in this chapter that its impact on the domain of international assistance in the post-Cold War period is substantial. I focus on a particular component of this envisioned ‘post-historical’ world – the emergence and development of civil society that is actively supported by foreign donors. My argument is that assistance is largely responsible for the rapid growth and further institutionalization of particular types of civic organizations in the former Soviet Union. In this sense, assistance itself became an important governance player in the former socialist space.
