Following the defeat of fascism in World War II and the collapse of Soviet communism in the late 1980’s, Fukuyama and others posited the ‘End of History’ thesis, by which was meant that ideas of freedom and liberal democracy had won the day. How wrong they were! During the long years of the ‘Cold War’ and of the ‘Pax Americana’ in Europe and East Asia, cultural changes were gradually taking place in sheltered countries whose cultural elites in media, academia and politics, began to lose touch with the realities of the world. Deep resentments, born from both envy and free-rider guilt, were taking hold in many minds and, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, anti-Americanism raised its ugly head even in official policies of various West-European countries. Freed from the fear instilled by an immediate external threat, Europeans came to believe in illusory ‘soft power’ and that freedom could be ‘free’.
