Dirty Dancing

Unholy alliances are forming as governments in numerous European and Latin American states indulge in democratic backsliding.

- Paul Thomas

In mid-1989, The National Interest magazine published an essay by American political scientist Francis Fukuyama entitled The End of History?

Fukuyama wrote that the decline of communism and advent of globalism heralded an end to ideological contention and conflict in politics and international affairs; accordingly, the future belonged to Western liberal democracy.

In January that year, Erich Honecker, the longtime East German leader and prime organiser of the construction of the Berlin Wall, had predicted that stark expression of Europe’s division and Soviet bloc totalitarianism would stand for another 50 or 100 years. In November, the wall began to come down.

The collapse of communism and one-party rule in the Soviet satellite states, the end of Soviet hegemony in Central and Eastern Europe and the normalisation of East-West relations swiftly followed. In 1990, during negotiations over the reunification of Germany, Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev suggested the USSR could join Nato, the organisation whose raison d’être was defending Western Europe against Soviet intimidation and aggression. By Christmas the following year, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics had ceased to exist.

CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM

While events in Europe seemed a spectacular vindication of Fukuyama’s thesis and had the gratifying consequence of sharply reducing international tension and the threat of nuclear war, they could be seen as the culmination of a historical shift that began almost two decades earlier. American political scientist Samuel Huntington coined the term “third wave of democratisation” to describe the transition to democracy or something approaching it that took place in some 60 countries around the world.