After the Cold War ended in 1991, authors and political scientists shared their opinions on what the world’s future would be like. Francis Fukuyama, an American political scientist, proposed in his book “The End of History and the Last Man” that the Cold War marked the end of man’s ideological evolution. He predicted Western Liberal Democracy as the universal and final form of government. The US-led system of open markets, multilateral institutions, democratic values and rule-based cooperation prevailed for many years. But this idea that liberal democracy is the inevitable goal of mankind has started to erode.
The post-2006 trend of democratic regression started. A decline in civil liberties, a rise in political elites, and the dominance of experts over popular participation have widely proven the failure of liberal democracy. Authoritarian resurgences in many regions of the world, including Central Europe (Hungary, Poland), parts of Asia, and Latin America, strongly emphasise this erosion. The 21st century has shown us the rise of populism, wars, and withdrawal from important accords that democratic liberalism has now left far behind. Setbacks are evident even in established democracies. The US, which spread this ideology, is now a victim of a populist, authoritarian leader, challenging democratic liberalism.
The EU was the most advanced experiment in liberal internationalism, but Brexit showed that even that could reverse.
The LIO has not really ended but collapsed in many ways. The rise of China and assertive Russia has created strong competition to US hegemony, which is no longer the only power setting global rules. This multipolar world order, with socialist China and democratic US coexisting, shows that Fukuyama’s end of history has already collapsed. Multilateral institutions such as the WTO, UN, WHO, and IMF have all proved to be Western tools, serving only the interests of the West and incapable of handling global conflicts unbiasedly. There exist clear contradictions in the theory and practice of these institutions.
The wars of aggression such as in Gaza, Ukraine, and Nagorno-Karabakh highlight that norms against annexation by force are dead in practice. Rules-based order is now seen as hypocritical, and the global South refuses to align with it. Though capitalism and democracy still exist, the core assumption of liberal int’l order, i.e. rules-based cooperation, has fragmented into power politics and competitive coexistence.
The peace and cooperation that liberalism promised is now fading, and the world is projected into a different type of chaos. Realism, which focused on state survival, security, and power projection, has stood its ground still because this is what is seen in the world. The competition to be the most powerful and control the resources shows that peace and cooperation are only temporary and conditional. The real politics in the int’l world is controlling.
The rising competition between China and the US, Russia and Western states is highlighting the end of the liberal int’l order. Socialism in China has proved more successful than liberalism. The attempt to spread democratic liberalism in the Western Asian states (the Middle East) has also failed badly, and it signals that this idea is not as globally practical as it was shown to be. The future world might not see the death of this liberal order completely, but there will be alternatives (communism, socialism) as powerful as this. A multipolar world order will be established, where different actors project power in different ways to keep themselves relevant in the global world.