“”Peace’ seems to be breaking out in many regions of the world,’ Francis Fukuyama exulted in The End of History, the signature manifesto of the moment, published in the summer of 1989, six months before the Berlin Wall came down. In those euphoric days it was still possible to think, with Fukuyama, that ‘the developed world,’ having writhed through a century-long ‘paroxysm of ideological violence, as liberalism contended first with the remnants of absolutism, then bolshevism and fascism, and finally an updated Marxism that threatened to lead to the ultimate apocalypse of nuclear war,’ had suddenly achieved ‘an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.’ It did not take long for the gyre to wobble back onto its dependably blood-soaked course, pushed along by fresh gusts of ideological violence and absolutism. Yet for a brief period it really did seem that history, if it had not actually ended, had at least paused, particularly for people born in the 1950s.” (07/02/07)