The Cold War’s end did not make liberal democracy inevitable across civilizations

Evidence

First, there is the assumption, discussed in chapter 1, that the collapse of Soviet communism meant the end of history and the universal victory of liberal democracy throughout the world. This argument suffers from the single alternative fallacy. It is rooted in the Cold War perspective that the only alternative to communism is liberal democracy and that the demise of the first produces the universality of the second. Obviously, however, there are many forms of authoritarianism, nationalism, corporatism, and market communism (as in China) that are alive and well in today’s world. More significantly, there are all the religious alternatives that lie outside the world of secular ideologies. In the modern world, religion is a central, perhaps the central, force that motivates and mobilizes people. It is sheer hubris to think that because Soviet communism has collapsed, the West has won the world for all time and that Muslims, Chinese, Indians, and others are going to rush to embrace Western liberalism as the only alternative. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 177

Categorization

• XREF: Contrasts with Fukuyama’s end-of-history thesis; could connect to readings on modernization theory’s teleological assumptions. — connects to: Reagan’s military buildup did not end the Soviet project — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 105; Post-Cold War conventional wisdom held history had ended in Western victory — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 156; Liberal democracy’s post-Cold War triumph masks deep popular disaffection — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 372
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 177