Communism
The voluntary disbanding of the communist state of the Soviet Union in 1991 was the practical defeat of a certain theory of communism as the economic, social, and political antithesis and opponent of the liberal democratic capitalist state that first emerged in the developed Western societies. According to Francis Fukuyama (1992), citing Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's theory of history, the "death of communism" marks the triumph of liberal democratic states as the paramount achievement of human history. Any further opposition to the extension of the liberal democratic model could only come in the form of regressive social movements seeking to avoid the trauma of inevitable change by clinging to ancient dogmas.
Still, as capitalism becomes the unrivaled global economic system, spilling over the bounds of the nation-state, the social and political achievements and perspectives of the liberal democracies are increasingly being jeopardized by the economic logic of capitalism itself. That the economic power of global corporations imposes demands that most nation-states ignore at their peril necessitates a reappraisal of a complacent triumphalism. In historical retrospect and freed from much of the ideological partisanship of the cold war period, it becomes clear that the challenge of communist claims of social egalitarianism and economic efficiency did much to stimulate progressive social and democratic changes in Western societies throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Hobsbawn 1994).
