Economic Development and Ideas from Bush to Clinton to Bush

In 1989, two years before the collapse of the Soviet Union, Francis Fukuyama wrote an article entitled "The End of History," in which he detailed the decline in appeal of the Soviet Union's socialist economy. And he wrote of the decline of collectivism in China. He wrote of China's Communist Party in 1978 deciding to decollectivize agriculture, reducing the role of the state in agriculture "to that of a tax collector." China had been taking what Mao derisively called the "capitalist road," and China began collaborating with international capitalism in trade and accepting investments within its borders -- a major shift in the Communist Party's view of the world.

Fukuyama wrote that "ideological grounds for major conflict between nations" were passing away. Fukuyama had in mind the ideology of Karl Marx, which embodied a history of struggle between economic classes culminating in a classless society -- an end of history of sorts. Fukuyama saw a different end of this kind of history described by Marx. Fukuyama saw the historical ideological struggle ending in the triumph of economic liberalism, in other words, the triumph of capitalism -- welfare states being essentially capitalist.

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Post Soviet Union to Clinton and Bush