For anyone with half an interest in current affairs, this holiday season is sorely needed—a chance to take stock, reflect and perhaps sink a stiff drink, after 12 tumultuous months. In 2016 both Brexit and President Donald Trump have moved from the realm of the unthinkable to being imminent realities. Prime Ministers in London and Rome have tumbled, and—on the strength of Chris Bickerton’s magisterial survey on p46—many more European dominoes could soon fall.
A generation ago, amid the Soviet collapse, Francis Fukuyama wrote about the “end of history,” the seemingly unstoppable march of US-style liberal democracy. Well today, history is having its revenge. The broken economics exposed in 2008 has finally spilled over into the electoral realm, and created chaos in its wake. As Fukuyama himself writes on p30, the “democratic” half of liberal democracy is rejecting the “liberal” half. That rift at the heart of a system which, not so long ago, was seen as all-conquering is something several articles in this issue explore. Fukuyama suggests that the consequences could in time prove to be as momentous as those of the crumbling of Communism.