Is the age of democracy over?

Twenty years ago, Francis Fukuyama forecast the final triumph of liberal democracy and the ‘end of history’. As pro-democracy movements falter from Ukraine to China, he revisits his thesis — and asks if history has a few more surprises to spring

It looked like a revolution in reverse. The announced victory of Viktor Yanukovich in Sunday’s Ukrainian presidential election undid that country’s Orange Revolution of 2004 by returning to power the very man whom tens of thousands of pro-democracy protesters came out to defeat. And this is only the latest in a series of apparent setbacks for democracy in recent years. Over the last decade we have seen the collapse or discrediting of not just the ‘Orange’ movement, but many of the other so-called ‘rainbow revolutions’ across eastern Europe: the ‘Rose’ revolution in Georgia, the ‘Cedar’ revolution in Lebanon. Then there’s Vladimir Putin’s transformation of Russia into an ‘electoral authoritarian’ state, the undermining of democratic institutions by Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, and the rise of China as a successful authoritarian moderniser.

So what to make of it all? What Samuel Huntington described as a ‘third wave’ of democratisation began with Spain and Portugal in the 1970s and culminated in the fall of the Berlin Wall. Do the events of recent years mean this is now over? I argued in my book the End of History and the Last Man (1992) that liberal democratic principles are universal — have they been revealed not to be?

I think they are universal. But it is important to draw some careful lessons from the recent past. The first concerns the importance of institutions. The collapse of the Orange Revolution should teach us that enduring democracy is not just a matter of ideas and political passions, but of concrete institutions embodying democratic values. It is also about the human agents who create them: the right leaders can make or break a transition to democracy.