Francis Fukuyama on the New World Order (Part Two)

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Mia Sorenti (1:24)

Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm senior producer Mia Sorenti.

In this episode, we return for part two of our live event with political thinker and author Francis Fukuyama. Fukuyama joined us at Union Chapel in London to discuss the crisis facing liberal democracy and the changing world order.

Drawing on his new political memoir, In The Realm of the Last Man, he explores the forces challenging liberal democracy and asks how the West can respond to an era of growing geopolitical instability, populism and authoritarianism. Fukuyama was in conversation with Financial Times Chief Economics commentator Martin Wolf. If you haven't heard part one yet, we recommend jumping back an episode to catch up. But now let's return to the conversation live at Union Chapel.

Martin Wolf (2:12)

I think this is a fascinating thesis, deeply pessimistic. So let's go, let's look at it. I mean, we don't have several hours that we need to go through all of this, but at least a few minutes.

Obviously, if you look at the attempted empirical evaluations of the state of democracy after 1989, there was an extraordinary rise in the number of democracies across the world. And in the legitimacy of democracy, we saw it, of course, in Central East Europe, much of Africa, South America. I mean, there was a big shift away from various kinds of autocracy and tremendous reversal in the former communist realm.

And most people felt, well, that showed, democracy had won. In the last, I mean, I think Larry Diamond was the first to use this phrase. I may be wrong about it. You're going to tell me it was you. In 2006, when he referred to the democratic recession already, and since then, you can look at any date you like, there's been an extraordinary reversal on many measures. And in the very recently, one of the analyses, VDEM, very well-known one, has done the thing, done 2025 for America, and they say this is the steepest decline in one year of any major democracy. And given the role of America, that's pretty significant. So what happened? I mean, your account says people get bored, basically. They get frustrated. It's all not exciting enough. And so, and they start getting really angry about little things. They're not being regarded enough. And so, cumulatively, they get hostile to various kinds of elites, people, the populist politicians arrive, arise to capitalize on that frustration. That's a talent. And this has really nothing to do with rising inequality, deindustrialization, maybe mass media. It's just something that has to happen.

Is it really as bad as that?

Do we actually have to say, which is not an unreasonable position, but most of history, I mean, post agrarian society, history, human society has been extremely hierarchical and predatory. And that's what we seem to generate. And democracy, liberal democracy is just sort of a freak transitory development. And it may be the end of history in a theoretical sense, in the sense that there isn't anything better, but surely it's not the history we're going to actually end up living in. Is that what you really think?

Francis Fukuyama (5:32)

Well, I think that there have been critiques of liberal societies right from the beginning, of course, that have a lot of power to them.