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Francis Fukuyama on Western Liberal Democracy

6 Pages 1535 Words January 2015

As both the 20th century and the Cold War drew to a close, the world became witness to a radical reshaping of world politics. Where power was previously balanced in a bipolar system, between the capitalist United States and the communist Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), the clash between the two resulted in the US rising to its current hegemonic position. In seeking to explain the post-Cold War world, Francis Fukuyama described this result, and what the world was bearing witness to, as "an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism  (1989, pg.3).
Fukuyama extended his description of victory to claim that there "is no ideology with pretensions or universality that is in a position to challenge liberal-democracy, and no universal principle of legitimacy other than the sovereignty of the people  (1992, pg.45); that there can be no progression from liberal democracy to an alternative system.
To this extent, he argues that Western liberal democracy “representative democracy in which elected representatives are limited by constitution for the protection of individual liberties and equality (Baylis, Smith, and Owens, 2007) “is the end point of mankind's ideological evolution  and the "final form of human government" (1989, pg.1).
While even those commentators who support Fukuyama's thesis, such as Herscovitch, recognize his claim as "bold and confrontational  (2011, pg.40), and in spite of arguments from detractors such as Dahrendorf (1990, pp.37-39), the Arab Spring provides a contemporary reason to sustain agreement, now more than twenty years since its writing.
One of the primary arguments which can be used in favor of Fukuyama's thesis is the democratic peace theory, which argues that mature democracies rarely or never go to war with one another (Baylis, Smith, and Owens, 2007).
Following the Cold War and the collapse of the USSR, there was a positive correlation between the increase of liberal democ...

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