ABSTRACT
In 1989 Francis Fukuyama, an official at the US Department of State, heralded the arrival of “the end of history.” By this he meant the unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism on the stage of world history, the triumph of consumerist Western culture, the total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism. History, said Fukuyama, was ineluctably moving in the direction of the “victory of the VCR,” that is, toward a universal homogeneous state characterized by liberal democracy in the political sphere combined with easy access to VCRs and stereos in the economic. The crumbling of the Berlin Wall marked the revelation of liberal democracy and the free market as the paradigmatic form of human society, as the regime that best “satisfies the most basic human longings.”1
