It is a commonplace that today’s world is the product of the Cold War and its generally satisfactory conclusion to the advantage of the Western alliance in 1989. This thoroughly first-world perspective was perhaps best expressed by political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s highly Whiggish assessment that liberal democracy had triumphed and the “end of history” had been achieved.1 Fukuyama’s argument has to some extent been caricatured, but his thesis came to characterise the hubris of an age that lapsed into a dangerous complacency born of the apparent inevitability of the West’s political and ideological triumph.
