Opinion | From Hong Kong to Canada, ‘do as I tell you’ governments risk trapping us in Covid Groundhog Day
- Instead of blanket travel bans, and mask, quarantine and vaccine mandates, a focused protection approach better serves our societies and well-being
- It is high time political leaders, in both democratic and authoritarian societies, listened to their people
Just before the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, Francis Fukuyama pronounced humanity to have reached “the end of history”, with Western liberal democracy triumphant as “the final form of human government”.
In the years since, leading scholars such as the late Thomas Franck, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Georg Nolte (now a judge of the International Court of Justice) argued that there was an emerging right in international law to democratic governance, that liberal internationalism was universally applicable to states, and that states which did not subscribe to liberal democracy should have their membership in international organisations revoked.
Opinions of non-Western scholars were frequently dismissed or denigrated as subversive, dangerous, biased, apologist, distorted, irrational or uninformed, while those of their Western counterparts were “universally” lauded as sound, objective and authentic.
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