About 20 years before the stunning (but ultimately ineffective) revolutions of 1848, Hegel (sort of) declared an "end of history".*
About 20 years before today, Fukuyama (sort of) declared another "end of history".**
As my footnotes allude, it's not that simple: Hegel meant that all the world was inevitably moving towards parliamentary democracy, which on the macro scale it was and still is. (And Hegel never used the phrase "the end of history".) Fukuyama did use that phrase, but also was quite clear that the "end of history" would only produce another and even more turbulent kind of history (dialectical historians are weird that way).
The ending points of history (and, again, I can't stress enough that both writers used that idea in a way nearly approaching satire) both chose are informative. Hegel set as the end of history the battle of Jena, which caused the Prussian army to reform along Gallic lines and (through a delayed but essentially inexorable process) led to Bismark's
Kleindeutschland reunification and all that followed (the brilliant Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld once remarked that World War I started at Jena).
Fukuyama presciently (he's a neocon but a brilliant one) had his history "end" not at the dissolution of the Supreme Soviet but at the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic's declaration of autonomy along lines imposed by the IMF (Fukuyama is something of a cynic and was pretty clear even 20 years ago about what exactly the IMF was after -- another reason to read him even if it means giving money to a neocon). Fukuyama also predicted the rise of rightist elements in all societies (remember, neocons don't actually like this aspect of what they're doing; that's why they're "neo" -- Irving Kristol worked with MLK, etc.).
Demographics make this bigger than 1989, though (hereafter lies Recursion's analysis rather than his rehashing of dead white and asian men's analyses -- because clearly we need more input from middle class white American men in this situation ( :sarcasm: , if that wasn't clear) ...)
When I was in the Marines we went to Lagos. I've been to several third world cities but to me Lagos is the "most third world" of all of them (and I've been to Port au Prince). Let me try to describe Lagos (this actually is relevant, and not just some dude spinning war stories):
Imagine a mid-sized American town. Something like Roanoke, VA, or Columbia, MO, or Wichita Falls, TX. About 100K people in the urban center but none of the High American Urban development you see in larger towns: no skyscrapers, no mass transit to speak of (a parenthesis: last friday on NPR's
http://www.npr.org/programs/talk-of-the-nation/">Talk of the Nation they
interviewed the current chief engineer of the NYC subway system -- it's a wonder of the modern world, and the interview is well worth hearing. Also, most member stations are currently in their winter membership drive; please join.) Now, if you've been to a city like that, imagine that place with about half of the people over 30 dead, having been replaced by people under 25. And also imagine there are no social services, to the point of garbage being left on the street to rot.
I can't overstate the amount of garbage we're talking about. In Lagos it is ankle-deep, and goes on literally for 10 miles in every direction. Every few months a ship comes in with clothes that have been donated by people in the US, which is nice, except that it has absolutely destroyed the native garment industry. People there call them "dead men's clothes" because they believe we must have a taboo against wearing the clothes of dead people; why else would anyone throw away perfectly good clothing?
Now, take that urban center and rather than having affluent suburbs imagine very, very poor suburbs. Suburbs where the UN's $2 per day poverty level sounds like luxury. Where women (and they are mostly women; the men were killed or are still busy killing) from neighboring countries are taken and dumped with their children literally for miles and miles and expected to build a place to live out of the crap that's lying around. Sewage? You must be thinking of Port Harcourt. You find a ditch or you just hope the garbage soaks it up. But let me get back to the demographics: half the people over the age of 30 are dead, and instead you have a seething mass of very young very angry people. There probably is a cafe they can get to that occasionally lets them check email. And there's a Lebanese guy in the actual house up on the heights who lets them send texts for about one tenth of a penny per character (they can earn that in a day). They do more or less get rice and beans from the makeshift NGO operation that finally got set up. So we're not talking death, here, but we are talking misery. And they outnumber the old by quite a margin.
It's ironic: demographers worry about the aging of the world but what they really mean is the youth-ening of the world. We over-30 rich types aren't going to live forever, and these kids are starting to realize the extent to which we've screwed them. History is over because they won't need it: they've lived it, having their world destroyed under their feet. This makes 2011 differ from 1848 and 1989 because it's the first time a
larger younger generation is taking the helm. I don't know if they'll do the right thing, but frankly they probably can't do much worse than we have.
* (It's much more complex than that)
** (It's also much more complex than that)
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