by Heleen Mees
Suddenly, Francis Fukuyama, the philosopher who proclaimed the end of history in 1989, is hoisted on the shield. Wasn’t he right, Joost de Vries wondered in Sunday. Sander Schimmelpenninck was more adamant when on Monday morning Fukuyama saw very clearly in The End of History and the Last Man from 1992 that material security would be a driver of extreme right-wing misery instead of protection against it.
The reason for the revival is the publication of Fukuyama’s memoirs In the Realm of the Last Man. In it, Fukuyama argues that he was not so much concerned with the end of history as with the fate of man at the end of history, in a society in which fundamental contradictions no longer exist. Where politics has been impoverished into technocratic governance and the passions that were once focused on the future have moved to the past.
The last man would resist peace and prosperity out of sheer boredom, just to experience a bit of drama and conflict again. The problem is that you first need the end of history before you arrive at the last person. Has history really come to an end? Fukuyama suggests so. According to him, there is no alternative to liberal Western democracy as communism was during the Cold War.
‘You have religious theocracies, small Latin American dictatorships. And then there are Russia and China, which have little more in common than their hostility to the West.” None of these, according to Fukuyama, claims to be universally valid for everyone in the world as communism and liberalism did. But ‘socialism with Chinese characteristics’, as Deng Xiaoping coined it in 1982, does have universal pretensions.
According to Xi Jinping’s foreign policy doctrine, which has replaced Deng Xiaoping’s “Hide your strength, bide your time,” China wants to use “superpower diplomacy” to create a community with a shared future for humanity. China wants to show that there is an alternative path of modernization. China is putting its money where its mouth is with programs such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the Global Governance Initiative.
The fact that China can now rightly call itself a superpower is partly due to Fukuyama’s essay from 1989 in which he wrote very firmly that we had arrived at a point where we cannot imagine a world that is essentially different from ours and history has therefore come to an end. Fukuyama saw proof of this in the spread of Western consumer culture, in particular the fact that color televisions could be found everywhere in China.
This is the first part of Heleen Mees’ column in the Volkskrant of October 4, 2026. (link to the whole article (for subscribers:
Heleen Mees is an economist with a focus on geoeconomics, an opinion maker and regularly writes about China. She obtained her PhD in 2012 on the consequences of China’s rise for the West.
