Francis Fukuyama is a brilliant phrase-maker, there's no doubt about that. In 1989 he published an essay entitled 'The End of History', which proposed that all viable alternatives to liberal democracy would soon have exhausted themselves. The fall of the Berlin Wall a few months later briefly enshrined Fukuyama as the American Right's pre-eminent prophet, and the title of his book passed into intellectual legend. Then came the Gulf war, however, followed by the Balkan conflicts and Rwanda, and many of those looking for a catch-all model for third-millennial history turned away from Fukuyama, to the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, who in 1993 proposed that instead of history ending 'the clash of civilisations' was soon to begin.

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