Summary Of The End Of History And Man By Francis Fukuyama

Russia Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington were both well known political scientists that had two very different views about the future of the nations of the globe. Fukuyama, in his essay The End of History and Man, argued that with economic growth countries would begin to focus on free market policies and democracy. This move to free markets and democracy would inevitable cause the nations to become so similar, his convergence theory. Samuel Huntington argued, in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, that no matter how similar countries became economically and politically cultural differences would cause civilizations to clash. Now that it has been some years after the publication of these texts we can analyze the dynamic and in this essay we will be discussing Russia since the 1980’s. Russia is a large country that stretches from East Europe to Northern Asia with a population over one million. Russia’s …show more content…
Since he was a part of the new generation of leaders in the Soviet Union, he was a very dedicated reformer and this allowed for vast changes in the Soviet Union. This can be seen when “Gorbachev initiated the twin policies of glasnost(openness) and perestroika (restructuring), with the intentions of liberalizing and reforming communism” (O’Neil, 271). Gorbachev hoped that it would create “the kind of tolerant Western-style political culture”, however the free speech was used by the media to express frustrations that were oppressed for about seventy years (Hauss, 232). Perestroika was the policy where Gorbachev planned to “decentralized economic controls and encouraged enterprises to become self-financing” (“Perestroika”). Most of the changes were not fulfilled due to Communist Officials not wanting to lose their power of some economic aspects in the Soviet