Leibowitz on Trade: What Went Wrong with China and Russia?

The post-Cold War history of trade has certainly been turbulent. Readers may remember – if they are old enough – the euphoric days after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union fell apart.

A key marker of the philosophical development explaining these cataclysmic events was an essay (1989) and book (1992) by Francis Fukuyama, the American philosopher that described the end of the Cold War as “the end of history.”  By this, he meant that mankind has arrived “not just … [at] the passing of a particular period of post-war history, but the end of history as such: That is, the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”