History Never Ended

I think its fair to say that the era of political 'globalisation' .....

A Popular Movement Defeated Marcos

 ..... could perhaps be said to have started when the US refused to give political support to the autocratic President Marcos in the Philippines in 1986.

They withdrew their support in the waning years of the Cold War, when a popular uprising toppled his regime, after he had tried to steal a snap re-election that he had clearly lost ... signifying that the US wasn't going to continue to blindly back 'anti-communist' autocratic regimes anymore.

The Marcos Family Fled With The Loot

 

The family infamously stole $10bn (£8.1bn) from the countries coffers (only about a third of it, $4bn was ever recovered), and the US military helicopters that spirited the Marcos family out of Manila was, according to official US customs records, carrying crates of valuables with them, including jewellery, high-end clothes and millions in cash.

The globalisation of liberalisation only accelerated after the collapse of the USSR, which helped pro-democracy movements to be inspired across the world, and many countries showed signs of nascent democracies. In particular, most of the ex communist bloc countries of Eastern Europe all threw out the communist party and held free elections, integrated into the global market economy, and the majority joined the European Union and NATO to ensure that they couldn't be drawn back into Russia's influence.

Of course there were failures and outliers such as Belarus in eastern Europe (which has remained under the rule of its old soviet style ruler Alexander Lukashenko since 20 July 1994), the Ukraine (which until 2013 had pro-Russian governments, so made little progress towards EU standards of governance), the central Balkan countries such as Serbia and of course the various Arab Spring countries, which largely either ended in Jihadists hijacking the resistance, or the return of military regimes e.g Syria, Egypt etc and only the uprising in Tunisia has resulted in a transition to constitutional democratic governance.

But this era has now apparently come to an end, with the invasion of the Ukraine, the breakdown of China-US relations, and the rise of populist leaders around the world such as, Victor Orban, 'Bongbong' Marcos, and dare I say it President Putin and even Donald Trump, often by riding a tidal wave of social media disinformation and open antagonism to the mainstream media that they deem 'unfriendly'.

We now seem to have book ended the optimistic era between the 1990's and 2020 with a return to the era of the cold war and despotic autocrats, or populist politicians, who are supported by one bloc or another .... actually a rather depressing realisation, as many of us had hoped that outside of the ongoing threat of Islamic extremists (especially Iran's attempts to get nuclear weapons and attack Israel), and North Korea (who are a nuclear weapon rogue state who can hit any country), we had seen an end to the extremist regimes and particularly the old doomsday threat of total obliteration by super power conflict.

.... if the 'end of history' could be famously claimed by a US political scientist when the soviet bloc collapsed ... we can now confidently assert that we have seen the resurgence of history, and that actually it never ended.