I heard the term 'the end of history' in mid-1995 in Carlos Pabón's 'Problems of the Contemporary World' history class at the University of Puerto Rico. Right from the beginning I opposed the pomposity with which Francis Fukuyama thrusted the idea into academic and policy circles. I was also taken aback by the arrogance of making such a declaration. But the main objection I put forth was, of course, ideological.
I was convinced that the supremacy of the market would not stop being questioned, even though the economic model of the United States and Great Britain was implented generally in Latin America except Cuba. The market still produced poverty and social inequality, which the state apparatuses of these countries could not bear nor would they regulate in order to balance its outcomes; only now do we begin to see its product. One only has to look at the economic histories of Argentina, Perú and Bolivia during the 1990's to surmise that something went terribly wrong in these countries.
Of course, events in Central Europe (mainly in the former Yugoslavia) and Central Africa (Rwanda and Burundi) would also belie Fukuyama's arguments. It was especially disturbing, given the events happening in the former Soviet Union at the time, to realize that in the absence of a bi-polar world a more unstable one surfaced, especially since the United States rather reluctantly and belatedly assumed leadership. Its only enthusiasm was making rather sure that free-market economic ideology would install itself permanently in the former European socialist bloc without any consideration as to what this model would do to systems that were decades-long submitted to a command economy.
Read this essay in The Guardian (London) by E. Hobsbawn, reflecting on fifteen years of 'end of history' politics. A copy is also available here.
I was convinced that the supremacy of the market would not stop being questioned, even though the economic model of the United States and Great Britain was implented generally in Latin America except Cuba. The market still produced poverty and social inequality, which the state apparatuses of these countries could not bear nor would they regulate in order to balance its outcomes; only now do we begin to see its product. One only has to look at the economic histories of Argentina, Perú and Bolivia during the 1990's to surmise that something went terribly wrong in these countries.
Of course, events in Central Europe (mainly in the former Yugoslavia) and Central Africa (Rwanda and Burundi) would also belie Fukuyama's arguments. It was especially disturbing, given the events happening in the former Soviet Union at the time, to realize that in the absence of a bi-polar world a more unstable one surfaced, especially since the United States rather reluctantly and belatedly assumed leadership. Its only enthusiasm was making rather sure that free-market economic ideology would install itself permanently in the former European socialist bloc without any consideration as to what this model would do to systems that were decades-long submitted to a command economy.
Read this essay in The Guardian (London) by E. Hobsbawn, reflecting on fifteen years of 'end of history' politics. A copy is also available here.
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