The end of the end of history

The ongoing crisis in Ukraine serves as a reminder of the ways – some naïve, some triumphalist – that the collapse of the Soviet Union was misunderstood in the West. For some, it represented, simply, a victory in the Cold War precisely as if that had been a war in the conventional sense, with a determinate winner and loser. More grandiosely, as in Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, it represented the universalization of western liberal democracy as having displaced