By Rudy Nadler-Nir (@rudyn) Early 21st century society is adopting globalised political and cultural principles and subjects both to business paradigms. Products and services are measured by reputation, as expressed through peer-to-peer interaction. Marketers may find it increasingly difficult to differentiate their brand.
Portable politics takes over
In 1989, American political scientist Francis Fukuyama generated an enormous amount of interest – and controversy – with an essay named “The End of History?” in which he set out an intriguing, some said revolutionary, premise.
The world, he said, seems to be dumping existing ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism and communism and moving towards a global, liberal democratic system of government. He pointed out that, while the twentieth century saw the developed world descending into horrendous acts of ideological violence, it ended with economic and political liberalism.
The so-called ‘Western idea’ overshadowed, then annihilated, other ideologies – so 1989 saw a world in which there were no viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism. Throwing his ideological cat among the pigeons, Fukuyama said that it may very well be that liberal democracy constitutes the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government,” and as such, it may have heralded the “end of history.”
In other words – since humans seemed to be opting for a globalised, liberal political system, one that can be easily exported and transferred to anywhere in the world — there will soon be very few differentiators between nations, since the ‘one-size-fits-all’ nature of this portable liberal democracy precludes differentiating ideologies.
A ‘globalised’ political system had increasingly offered ‘universal’ ideologies that subsumed, then replaced, unique national ideologies. And of course globally politics is increasingly being exposed to – and influenced by – global business players.
Unsurprisingly, Fukuyama’s idea did not go down well with the powers that be – political, financial and academic. In subsequent written works, he hastened to explain his use of the term ‘history’ — which, he says, many people understood as a linear series of occurrences, or events. His view of history, however, was of an evolutionary process encompassing human experience through time.