Western democracies will be further challenged next year, as populist parties are expected to make gains in Europe, while China and Russia increasingly determine the global agenda, taking advantage of a US withdrawal.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed the “end of history”, seeing the triumph of the United States as the only remaining superpower and the leader of Western democracies.
“The end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government,” he wrote in his best-selling 1992 book, The End of History and the Last Man.
