“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” — W. B. Yeats
There was a time, not long ago, when history had a direction. It moved, however imperfectly, toward a destination imagined in the polished corridors of post-war Western capitals, universities, and international organizations. The ideal was clear and broadly shared: that nations, however wayward or encumbered by history, would arrive, eventually, at liberal democracy. That they would grow into secular polities, governed by reason, law, and a consensus shaped not by faith or tribe, but by individual rights and public deliberation. The road was hard, certainly, but the destination was not in question.
That conviction peaked in 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell not only as a concrete barrier but as an emblem of historical contest. The Cold War had been won—not merely militarily or diplomatically, but morally. Francis Fukuyama, then a relatively unknown American thinker, gave this moment its most exuberant phrasing. In his now-famous essay, “The End of History?” in The National Interest, Fukuyama wrote: “What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar 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.” The phrase was widely mocked, often misunderstood, and occasionally misquoted. But at its core was a belief that history, defined as the evolution of political systems, had culminated in the liberal, secular, democratic West.
That belief lies in ruins.
To walk through the global order today is to wander in a graveyard of that post-war dream. The world is not converging on liberal democracy. It is fragmenting, drifting, in many places, into something older, more familiar, and more dangerous. Authoritarianism now comes adorned not in the language of revolution, as it did in the twentieth century, but in the vestments of religion, heritage, and identity. And it comes not just to countries with no liberal tradition, but to those that were once its standard-bearers.
India offers the clearest view of this transformation. At its independence in 1947, India made a bold and improbable choice: it would be both democratic and secular, despite its overwhelming poverty, its diversity, and the scars of Partition. Nehru’s vision was of a country that might outgrow its sectarian past, rising on the twin wings of science and law. That vision endured for decades, more a hope than a fully realized system, but a guiding star nonetheless.
It has since dimmed.
The language of Indian politics today is unmistakably religious. When India and Pakistan recently engaged in a brief, sharp military conflict, they did so under banners that revealed far more than any diplomatic communiqué. Pakistan responded to India’s campaign with Bunyan Al-Marsoos, a Qur’anic allusion. India had commenced its operations with Sindoor, the vermilion mark of Hindu devotion. These were not accidental. They were assertions of identity – ancient symbols returned to the center of national purpose.
This sacralization of the state is only to be expected in Pakistan. After all, its raison d’être was to be the home for Muslims. But in India, a nation that once dreamed of transcending its ancient divisions, it also now runs deep. This regression is not merely symbolic. As the Financial Times noted, devout leaders – one Hindu, one Muslim – drove the conflict, a sign of faith entwined with the state. A telling sign of how faith and state now walk together. More troubling still is the erosion of the democratic order beneath this surface. Courts bend. Dissenters are jailed. The press, once unruly, now compliant, peddles jingoistic patriotism in place of truth.
This is not an Indian story alone. It is mirrored, in tone and content, in Erdogan’s Turkey, a nation that once aspired to join Europe but now reaches back toward Ottoman grandeur. Erdogan is no Atatürk. He rules not by promising a separation of state from religion, but by invoking it. Hagia Sophia has become a mosque again, and Turkey, like India, has grown less plural, less open, more autocratic.
One might expect the West to resist this global reversion. It does not. Even in the lands that once forged the democratic consensus, that consensus falters, as Yeats foretold. In America, leaders invoke “Judeo-Christian values” with fervor, a phrase that once signaled pluralism but increasingly marks exclusion. A retiree in Ohio, casting his vote beneath a church’s shadow, seeks a nation defined by faith, not law. In Europe, identity politics dominates the cultural and electoral landscape. The far right campaigns openly on nostalgia for blood and soil. The progressive center, timid, struggles to defend its creed. Yet, faint echoes of the dream endure. Scandinavia’s ballot boxes hum with democratic faith, and Canada’s quiet pluralism holds firm, even as democratic indices falter in weaker corners of the West
Fukuyama himself has retreated from his earlier optimism. In his 2018 book Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, he reflects: “I did not grasp how identity politics would challenge liberalism from within.”
His key omission, he now believes, was thymos, Plato’s term for the soul’s craving for recognition, dignity, and honor. Liberal democracy mastered reason and material want, but neglected this deeper hunger. A Polish shopkeeper, hoisting a flag of heritage in Warsaw’s market square, seeks not wealth but pride, his voice echoing this forgotten force. This neglected thymos, Fukuyama argues, now reasserts itself, often in illiberal ways.
One must ask, was the post-war ideal a mirage, a fragile skin stretched over the deeper pulls of faith, tribe, soil? Or was it real, yet too frail to endure our complacency? As Yeats’s falcon spirals, the evidence is clear. The telos of history, if it ever existed, lies undone. The world moves not toward liberal democracy but toward a pluralism of systems, some democratic, many not, some secular, many theocratic or ethno-nationalist. The moral hierarchy that crowned the liberal West has collapsed. In its place, a jostling world of civilizations rises, temples and minarets piercing the sky, each indifferent or hostile to the others
Ironically, it is China, illiberal, unyielding, that upholds the ghost of globalization. It’s Belt and Road weaves trade across continents, a reaffirmation of the liberal economic order, yet sustained without the democracy Fukuyama foretold. Samuel Huntington, wiser perhaps than Fukuyama, saw this fracture coming. History, he wrote, is no march to an endpoint, but a clash of civilizations; each asserting its own truth. India’s temples, Turkey’s minarets, China’s markets: these are not convergences but divergences, a world splintering into its primal selves.
We must now confront the possibility that the world will not become more like the post-war West. The reverse may be more likely. The “end of history,” as Fukuyama framed it, may not have been a prophecy, but a parenthesis—a brief moment of clarity in a long, clouded history.
Return to the past.
And so we return, as we so often do, not to the future, but to the past.
