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With The End of History and the Last Man Francis Fukuyama proclaims the victory of Western democracy over communism and all other ideologies. Since the 1990s, Fukuyama’s triumphalist image has often been adopted by politicians from centrist parties in the West. Fukuyama looks back at the history of the past centuries and sees a continuous clash of ideologies, driven by the logic of modern science on the one hand and the struggle for human recognition on the other. According to Fukuyama, human history is universal, progressive, and going in one direction. He sees an evolution that started under the impulse of the European Enlightenment, and that evolves towards a global monoculture of liberal capitalism. In The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel Huntington argues that the end of Cold War ideological bipolarity will lead to inevitable instability, but on the cultural axis. He describes civilisations as the highest rank of cultural identity. According to the author, the population explosion in Muslim countries and the economic rise of China would challenge Western dominance. Instead of the false universalism of Western culture, he suggests a strategy that, whilst abandoning the idea of universalism, would reaffirm Western identity in order to “renew and preserve it against challenges from non-Western societies.” An example of extreme cultural determinism, which omits any interdependency of cultures, the book has been criticised by various academic writers and is often regarded as a theoretical legitimisation of the aggressive side of US foreign policy.

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