Francis Fukuyama famously wrote an essay, The End of History, after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics two years later.
By the end of history, Fukuyama meant that the millennia-old struggle for the ideology of freedom had finally triumphed.
No more was anyone arguing for the superiority of communism, of socialism, of Nazism or of any other ideology that glorified the collective over the individual. Once and for all, the evils of collectivization which inevitably led to mass murder were not only acknowledged, but defeated. Hitler was no more. Stalin was no more. The USSR was irretrievably subdivided into independent states, freed of their shackles to a massive, centrally planned regime.
No doubt, since those heady days of the fall of communism, not all has worked out as hoped. There has been backtracking in the leading member of the former USSR, Russia itself. Surely not all of the new independent states created by the disintegration of the USSR have become models of democracy. Nonetheless, on balance, the states of the former USSR are places of freedom. Truly, the USSR is no more, even if the full actualization of freedom does not yet characterize each of its former republics.
Remember, it has taken the US 235 years and 27 amendments to the US Constitution to actualize its freedom. And its a work in progress. So are the states of the former USSR; its just that they have had less time to take the freedom journey.
Hidden, unseen, unacknowledged, naively overlooked, by Fukuyama and The End of History was the Muslim world. With the fall of communism, no freedom came to a certain large segment of the world. Despots still reigned in Egypt, Libya, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran and many other Arab and Middle East countries.
The struggle for freedom in history was still being waged sort of. The necessity of fighting for freedom in that part of the world was barely acknowledged even by those societies in the West long accustomed to freedom. Europe tolerated a despotic Middle East. So did our leaders, both Republican and Democrat.
But now, the end of history might finally be on the horizon. Freedom, or so we hope, is coming to Egypt. At the very least, a despotic leader has been overthrown there. Ditto for Tunisia. And now, the leaders of Libya and Bahrain are under severe challenge. The Jordanian monarchy is figuratively shaking in its boots. The Palestinian Authority the most unacknowledged despotic regime of all has, under panic, scheduled elections.
Demonstrations rack Yemen. The biggest despotic regime, Saudi Arabia, has announced additional benefits for citizens.
Clearly, what began in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall is now striking at the heart of the Middle East.
Can China be far behind?
We hope not.
With the democratization of China, truly we will be at the end of history.
Copyright © 2011 by the Intermountain Jewish News
