Francis Fukuyama: America’s Putin-esque direction
Paddy O’Connell speaks to US economist Professor Francis Fukuyama about the threats to liberal democracy: ‘We’re definitely moving in a Putin-esque direction’
Paddy O’Connell speaks to Professor Francis Fukuyama about the threats to liberal democracies around the world.
The American political economist and international relations scholar, who is currently a senior fellow at Stanford University, has written widely on issues about development and international politics.
He is best-known for his 1992 book ‘The End of History and the Last Man’. He argued that the end of the Cold War, marked by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union, represented the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution, and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.
But three decades on, Western liberal democracy appears to be struggling to adapt to the many challenges of the 21st century. Amid geopolitical instability, its future does not appear as universal as Fukuyama once proposed, even in the US.
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Presenter: Paddy O’Connell
Producer: Ben Cooper
Editor: Nick Holland
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(Image: Professor Francis Fukuyama. Photo by Thomas Trutschel/Photothek via Getty Images)
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