Living Political ideas

The Relevance of Political Ideas in the Post-Cold War Era

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 , and the subsequent dissolution of the Soviet Union a couple of years later , ushered in a new era for international politics , marked by a new optimism for greater international cooperation after decades of discord . Not only did the structure of the international system undergo monumental changes , but also the ideas and worldviews that informed post-Second World War world were no longer taken to be immutable . Our way of thinking about the world and

the course of history changed with the tumultuous incidents on 1989 and 1991 which Francis Fukuyama has labelled as the end of history (Fukuyama , 1992

Fukuyama 's contribution becomes central to our subject of study . He essentially claims that with the fall of the Soviet Union , .there was no longer any alternative , in systemic terms , to a functioning market system and a functioning market democracy (Cox ,

. 27 Therefore , the ideological divide which split the world in 1945 was no longer relevant , and as a form of government (or social organization the resilience of liberal democracy had shown its enduring character

What is emerging victorious . is not so much liberal practice , as the liberal idea . That is to say , for a very large part of the world there is now no ideology with pretensions to universality that is in a position to challenge liberal democracy , and no universal principle of legitimacy other than the sovereignty of the...