By Liu Yu

In the academic study of contemporary politics, Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man is among the most praised and the most criticized texts. Like the song My Heart Will Go On from the film Titanic, everyone has an opinion about it.

Fukuyama's book represents the global optimism that accompanied the end of Cold War. His thesis is that the system of democracy and freedom represents the highest and final stage of political civilization and that all other systems will ultimately evolve towards it.

But subsequent developments have shown that other systems will not be easily killed off: the overthrow of the old systems in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe brought neither prosperity nor strength; the democratization of Latin American lacks substance; the rise of fundamentalism and nationalism has shown the persistence of cultural differences - which may explain the Iraqi refusal to accept democracy and freedom from the US, instead paying them back with suicide bombs. Fukuyama has become a target of criticism: history, it seems, so far from approaching its end, is at the center of a whirlpool.

In my view, we need to be patient. The direction of historical development only becomes apparent over long periods. So we are hardly in the best position to judge Fukuyama's thesis, less than 20 years after its publication.

The Iranian people overthrew the Pahlavi Dynasty in 1979. But they created a theocracy, not a democracy. In 1997, the reformist Seyyed Mohammad Khatami initiated a brief "Tehran spring" after he was elected president. But the green shoots were frozen in an icy conservative blast. Following the election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005, freedom of press and assembly were curtailed. In April, an American journalist was sentenced to eight years imprisonment simply for doing her job. Historical development in Iran seemed to be moving in the opposite direction from Fukuyama's predictions.

But on June 15, 2009, nearly a million people staged a rally in Teheran to protest injustice and non-transparency in the presidential elections, shouting slogans like "Where is my vote?" It was simply unbelievable that millions of hand-written-votes could have been counted immediately after polling stations closed, or that Ahmadinejad had dominated in all voting districts. The outcome was unprecedented and riddled with inconsistencies. Neither an independent election committee nor neutral third-party observers were involved in the election. The lack of transparency alone has fatally undermined the credibility of the result, even if it turns out that Ahmadinejad did, in fact, win the election.

The massive rallies did not appear out of nowhere. The rise of the reformists, the trend of opinion against fundamentalism, and even the release of the American journalist, all showed the forces of democracy and freedom are moving forward in Iran, even if they are taking a roundabout route. The younger generation, who account for 60 percent of the population, are the backbone of the movement, and the group that most worries ruling conservatives.

It is not foreign agents but the ruling conservatives themselves who triggered the turmoil. Their repressive politics and economic incompetence have turned the Iranian people into the "last men". In the last years of the Shah, between 1971 and 1979, there were only around 100 political prisoners in Iran. But following the Islamic Revolution, the new Iranian government arrested over 7,900 political prisoners in the years 1981-1985 alone. More recently, the populist economic policy adopted by Ahmadinejad has exacerbated inflation and unemployment. In a word, the "last men" have become the "first men". Young people's dreams of a better life and their adept use of the Internet have combined to make a social opening-up irresistible.

After the outbreak of the Iraq war, Fukuyama was criticized as a blind optimist and his book was seen as justifying a US foreign policy of exporting freedom and democracy by force. Fukuyama defended himself by saying that, while freedom and democracy will indeed be end of history, they cannot be imposed by force of arms. As a structuralist, he believes that political systems are rooted in, and depend on, social structures. In a sense then, Fukuyama's views are not wrong, but may have been expressed too early. And while the current protests in Iran may turn out to be a flash in the pan, they have definitely shaken the rule of conservatives.

The author is a lecturer at the University of Cambridge

(Nanfang Weekly, translated by Li Shen, June 23, 2009)