ABSTRACT
Democracy used to be a word that international legal commentators preferred to avoid. The elision of democracy with certain liberal institutions can be linked to a more general perspective evinced in the claims concerning the norm of democratic governance and liberal internationalism. This chapter considers to what extent, and with what consequences, that scholarship exhibits a liberal millenarian perspective. Liberal millenarianism finds its most extreme, and certainly its best known, expression in the work of Francis Fukuyama in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Fukuyama's central thesis is that the end of the Cold War confirms a worldwide consensus in favour of liberalism, including not just capitalism but liberal democracy as well. The norm of democratic governance appears to be growing out of, or building on, earlier developments. This evolutionary logic also informs the work of scholars who put forward liberal internationalist and Kantian theses.
