In one of the most influential articles of the past 40 years the American writer Francis Fukuyama coined a term that came to define the post-Cold War world: the ‘End of History’. This world, he suggested, would be dominated by the West, organized around the United States and shaped by liberal values. Nor, he implied, was there anywhere else for once recalcitrant powers to go other than the West.
Indeed, as the end of the Cold War gave way to the so-called unipolar moment, the working assumption was that countries like China would over time become what Robert Zoellick, the US State Department official, termed in 2005 a ‘responsible stakeholder’, the implication being that they would not just become members of the global economy – China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001 – but status quo powers as well.