Neoliberalism could not sustain the shock and awe of its initial offensive against working people, the Third World and, eventually, against the Soviet Union and East European socialism. As the wide gap between neoliberal ideas and reality continued widening, neoliberalism was forced to morph in response from its original Thatcher-Reagan form into ‘globalisation’ in the 1990s, US ‘Empire’ in the 2000s, and ‘austerity’ in the 2010s.
When the West danced on the grave of the Soviet Union, the US State Department’s in-house philosopher, Francis Fukuyama, announced that History had ended. Humanity had reached its goal: liberal democracy and capitalism. It could go no further. A stunned world expected unipolarity and hoped for a peace dividend. History itself had other ideas.
