akes an admission: "This is Samuel P. Huntington's moment" (Kurtz).
Huntington's essay mentions Fukuyama's and seems intended, in part, as a corrective to the comforting notions of Western triumphalism flowing breathlessly from what was held to be the Allied victory in what turned out to be the first Gulf War. Whereas Fukuyama takes the demise of dictatorial regimes such as those of Napoleon, Hitler, and the USSR to confirm the ineluctable logic of human freedom and social progress associated with the democracies of the industrialized West (Fukuyama 58), Huntington takes the view that conflict will continue to play a significant role in human experience but that the basis on which it unfolds has shifted along with the geopolitical demographic and technological configuration of the world. Fukuyama cites "the appearance of democratic forces in parts of the world where they were never expected to exist, the instability of authoritarian forms of government, and the complete absence of coherent theoretical alternatives to liberal democracy" (Fukuyama, End 70) as reasons enough to adopt the view that liberal democracy is the best option available to those concerned about fulfilling human potential. Huntington explains that conceptualizing civil society in terms of competing ideologies does not capture the dynamics of postmodern, post-Cold War international relations. Even nation-state geopolitics does not give an adequate account of the structure of civilization. The politics of culture, hence the attributes of cultural identity, cross international political boundaries,
...