LAUSR

In 1992, in the cultural climate that emerged in the Western world after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the Soviet Union and of the East European socialist countries’ system, Francis Fukuyama published a book entitled The End of History and The Last Man. These events seemed to inaugurate a new era and suggested an irreversible trend. In his book Fukuyama theorised that, with the end of communism, the world would unify under the hegemony of capitalism and liberal democracy. The supremacy of the market not only would end the social conflict — that conflict between owners and servants that Marx considered to be the motor of history — but it would create the conditions for the best of all possible worlds. On the one hand, the market economy and capitalism would meet fundamental needs and guarantee a rational allocation of resources. On the other hand, economic and technological development would progressively even out different national cultures and particularisms, unifying the world on the base of the cultural model of Western capitalism. These were the cornerstones of the hegemony of liberalism, which was rooted in the 1980s and in the so-called neocon revolution of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Economic globalisation furiously developed under the aegis of this basically uncritical and apologetic idea of capitalism. However, we shall recognise that the Left was affected by the influence of this culture too, which in particular arose in the formulation of the so-called Third Way. Actually, the world today looks rather different from the way the prophets of neoliberalism had envisaged it. The big 2007 and 2008 financial and economic crisis has exposed the weaknesses and contractions of unregulated globalisation. The world is neither reconciled nor evened out. Rather, the fear of a gradual cancellation of national, ethnic and religious identities has triggered tragic conflicts and strengthened nationalist impulses that seemed to belong to a very distant past. Paradoxically, on economics and trade, the most developed countries, primarily the United States, react to global competition with nationalist and protectionist retreats. It looks like the West appreciated globalisation only while this allowed relocating production in countries were labour is cheaper, and facilitated selling Western products everywhere, They did not realise that globalisation would increase the emerging economies’ competitiveness and expose industrial nations in the West to competition.