The Return of History: Conflict, Migration, and Geopolitics in the Twenty-First Century by Jennifer Welsh (review)

In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War in 1992, Francis Fukuyama brought out his path-breaking book, The End of History and the Last Man. It was based on a very recondite philosophical idea borrowed from Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Alexandre Kojève, which posited that history is not merely a meaningless succession of events but rather has a purpose and will reach an end point in the future. The message of the book was simple and straightforward: in the course of the twentieth century two powerful ideologies directly challenged the liberal democratic tradition inherited from the Enlightenment that predominated in the Western World. The first of these, Fascism, was buried in World War II. The second, Marxism-Leninism, was vanquished as the Communist bloc in Eastern Europe disintegrated and the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist. The result was not the end of history in the literal sense, but rather the end of ideologies that competed with Western liberal democracy for the allegiance of the world's population. As the former Communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Russian Federation eagerly adopted Western political and economic institutions, it seemed that those institutions would spread across the globe to create a single unifying ideology of liberal democracy and market capitalism for the entire world. Fukuyama's book unleashed a powerful sentiment of triumphalism in the West as well as a sunny optimism about a peaceful, prosperous, democratic future.

In The Return of History, Jennifer Welsh lucidly persuasively, and directly challenges this popular interpretation of Fukuyama. She records the long line of political, social, and economic developments in the twenty-first century that have given rise to a dark pessimism about the future: the massive dislocation of people seeking a haven from unspeakable living conditions, which inspired strong opposition to immigration and the granting of refugee status in the Western world; the yawning gap in income and wealth between the one percent at the top and everyone else; the rise of autocratic governments in countries in Eastern Europe, such as Poland and Hungary, which had thrown off the yoke of Communist autocracy; the transformation of Russia under Vladimir Putin into a kleptocratic, oligarchic, autocratic system that prevents free elections, stifles a free press, and crushes all attempts to establish and maintain a civil society.

Professor Welsh contrasts the heady optimism of the 1990s with the growing pessimism of the past ten years. The rise of right-wing populism in many parts of the world took all observers by surprise. She notes that the assumption that popular sovereignty and liberal democracy go hand in hand has been disproved by the rise of xenophobic demagogues in liberal democracies who exploit popular fears of foreigners to win elections. This fear of the other has economic as well as cultural roots. On the economic side, it is ironic that as Western societies age, they will need more rather than less immigration to bridge the demographic gap as the baby boomers leave the workforce. Yet the concern about the loss of jobs to immigrants continues to resonate and results in restrictive limitations on immigration. On the cultural side, the expanding anxiety that foreigners with different customs, religions, and appearances will inundate society and disrupt its cultural unity inspires the growth of ethnic and racial nationalism that rejects the cosmopolitanism and liberal tolerance that Fukuyama believed would flourish in the twenty-first century.

Another key theme of this book is the astonishing increase in economic inequality in developed nations. Relying on the work of the French economist Thomas Piketty and the American economist Joseph Stiglitz, Welsh emphasizes the negative consequences of the exploding gap in wealth and income between the super-rich and the rest of society. Not only does this development leave a large number of citizens in developed societies less economically secure than...