‘The rumour was going around that politics was dead”, the French novelist Annie Ernaux wrote in The Years about how many people experienced the fall of the Berlin Wall. “The advent of a ‘new world order’ was declared. The end of history was nigh, democracy would cover the earth. Never had we believed with such conviction that the world was headed in a new direction.”
A “collective autobiography”, as novelist Edmund White described it, The Years tells the story of the second half of the 20th century simultaneously through the eyes of an individual and of the world. The strangeness of Ernaux’s melding of historical fact and autofiction beautifully captures the strangeness particularly of the 1990s, and of the hopes that the “death of politics” might bring with it a new era of democracy and prosperity.
Thirty years on, the age of “post-politics” has given way to an age of popular cynicism about politicians and of politicians’ cynicism about democracy, an age in which politics seems omnipresent, permeating every aspect of our lives from work to sex, and yet in which real social change appears difficult to achieve. An age of “extreme politicisation without political consequences”, as the political philosopher Anton Jäger puts it in his forthcoming book Hyperpolitics.
It was the American foreign policy analyst Francis Fukuyama who coined the term “the end of History” in a celebrated 1989 essay. “What we may be witnessing,” Fukuyama wrote, is “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalisation of western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” With the end of the cold war, “the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism will be replaced by … the endless solving of technical problems … and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”
A very different diagnosis came from the political scientist Samuel Huntington. The post-cold war world he insisted would be defined not by the end of history but by a “clash of civilisations”, of which the main ones were western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic Orthodox, Latin American and African. For Huntington, “the cultural fault lines separating these civilisations” would be the source of future conflicts.
Today, as liberal universalism lies in the mire while identity politics has become the currency of social exchange, there is a common perception that Fukuyama has been proved wrong and Huntington right. The story, though, is not so simple. For all his mistaken assumptions, Fukuyama understood that the cold war had not been merely a geopolitical conflict between the west and the Soviet Union but also a fundamental ideological struggle pitting one social and economic system against another. With capitalism having been left “standing alone”, as the economist Branko Milanović has put it, not just the struggle between capitalism and communism but also, in Fukuyama’s eyes, all ideological conflict would cease.
Huntington was right that as ideological conflict faded, the politics of identity would come to replace it. Yet, the end of history and the clash of civilisations were not merely opposing ways of looking upon the post-cold war world, they were also complementary responses to the confusions created by the fall of the Berlin Wall. In a world in which ideological attachments and class solidarity had become weakened, the question people came to ask themselves was less “what kind of values and institutions do I want to establish?” than “who are we?”; or, rather, values and institutions came to be defined less in political or ideological terms than in terms of history, heritage and identity. This is what appeared to give substance to Huntington’s thesis.
What the end of the cold war couldn’t bring to an end, though, was disaffection with the existing system or the yearning for change. This became particularly clear after the financial crisis of 2008. The upsurge in political activism over the following decade led some to declare “the end of the end of history”. Yet, if the 2010s was a “decade of protest”, it was also a decade during which, as Jäger notes, “unions, political parties, and churches continued to bleed members”. Whatever may have ended, there were still no beginnings of anything else.
Twenty-five years ago, the American sociologist Robert Putnam famously observed that more Americans were “bowling alone” – going to the bowling alley not as part of a group but as individuals. It illustrated for Putnam the wider decay of “social capital”, of people interacting less with each other, as witnessed in everything from lower rates of volunteering to talking less with neighbours.
Jäger takes Putnam’s metaphor to suggest that we now also protest alone, that as collective organisation and action have declined, oppositional politics has become more individualistic and ephemeral, as “citizens turn out to demonstrate for a day, influencers petition or protest with a monosyllabic tweet”, leaving us with a form of politics that is “low-cost, low-entry, low duration, and all too often, low-value”, a politics driven as much by ennui as by a positive vision of a new world. That is why, as we enter 2026, we seem so often to be driven by rage and impotence, ensnared as we are by a world in which anything can be politicised and yet political action appears to bring about little change. Without collectively organised politics, democracy itself ails.
Ernaux’s narrator seeks to tell the story of the past by “retrieving … collective memory in an individual memory”. If we are to write the story of the future, we too need to restore that link between individual and the social.
Photograph by Ali Wright