“Politics is dead,” says French writer Anne Ernault in The Years, describing the attitude of most people at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall. “A new world order has emerged. The end of history is approaching, democracy will rule the world. We were firmly convinced that the world was heading in a new direction.”
As novelist Edmund White has said, her book is a “collective autobiography” of the second half of the 20th century told from the dual perspectives of the individual and the world. Anne Erno’s unusual blend of historical fact and fictionalized autobiography wonderfully captures the strangeness of the 1990s and the hope that the “death of politics” could usher in an age of democracy and prosperity.
Thirty years later, the era of post-politics has given way to a general cynicism of citizens towards politics and a cynicism of politicians towards democracy. We live in an age of pervasive politics that permeates every aspect of our lives, from work to sex, but in which it is still difficult to achieve genuine social change. As political philosopher Anton Jaeger puts it in his forthcoming book Hyperpolitics, it is an age of “extreme politicization without political consequences.”
The term “end of history” was coined by American foreign policy analyst Francis Fukuyama in his famous 1989 essay. “We may be witnessing,” Fukuyama wrote, “the end of humanity’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the ultimate form of human rule.” With the end of the Cold War, “worldwide ideological conflict, which required boldness, courage, imagination, and idealism… will replace the endless solving of technical problems… and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demand.”
Political scientist Samuel Huntington's diagnosis was quite different. After the end of the Cold War, he argued, the world would be defined not by the end of history but by a "clash of civilizations," primarily Western, Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, Slavic Orthodox, Latin American, and African. According to Huntington, the source of future conflicts would be "the cultural fault lines between these civilizations."
Today, with liberal universalism bogged down and identity politics the currency of social exchange, the prevailing view is that Huntington was right and Fukuyama was wrong. But the story is not so simple. Despite his mistaken assumptions, Fukuyama understood that the Cold War was not just a geopolitical conflict between the West and the Soviet Union but also a fundamental ideological conflict between two social and economic systems. When capitalism is left “standing alone,” as economist Branko Milanović put it, not only the conflict between capitalism and communism will end, Fukuyama believed, but all other ideological conflicts will too.
Huntington was right to argue that the waning ideological conflict would be replaced by identity politics. Yet the end of history and the clash of civilizations are not just opposing worldviews after the Cold War but also complementary responses to the confusion caused by the fall of the Berlin Wall. In a world where ideological allegiances and class solidarity had weakened, people were asking less “what values and institutions do we want to establish” and more “who are we?” In other words, values and institutions were defined less by political and ideological categories and more by history, heritage, and identity. This seems to have reinforced Huntington’s thesis.
The resurgence of political activism in the following decade led some to declare “the end of the end of history.” But while the second decade of the 21st century was “the decade of protest,” it nevertheless saw, as Jaeger noted, “a continued erosion of membership in unions, political parties, and churches.” Whatever had ended, there was no sign of the beginning of something else.
Twenty-five years ago, American sociologist Robert Putnam famously observed that Americans were increasingly “bowling alone”—that is, going to the bowling alley as individuals rather than in a group. Putnam saw this as a sign of a broader decline in “social capital” and a decline in interaction between people, from lower rates of volunteering to the extinction of neighborhoods.
Jaeger borrows Patman’s metaphor to suggest that we are now even protesting alone. With the decline of collective organizing and collective action, oppositional politics is becoming increasingly individualistic and ephemeral: “citizens come to a one-day protest to which influencers invite them with a monosyllabic tweet.” We are thus reduced to a form of politics that involves “low cost, low duration, and often low value” and is driven at least as much by boredom as by a vision of a new world.
We are trapped in a world where everything can be politicized, but where political action does not bring about meaningful change. That is why, as we enter 2026, we seem to be driven only by anger or powerlessness. Democracy fails without collectively organized politics.
The narrator in Ani Erno's novel takes us through a story about the past “returning… collective memory to individual memory.” If we want to write a story about the future, we will have to restore the connection between the individual and the social.
(Translated by Slavica Miletic)
Bonus video:
