Certainty in the Coming Community‪.‬

The last part of the twentieth century saw an array of theses proclaiming sweeping changes in the way we understood our world, several of which proclaimed--concurrent with the end of the cold war, the fall of the Berlin wall and the apparent retreat of communism--that we had reached the 'end of history'. This, of course, was not to be read as meaning an end of things happening (a common mistaken reading of Francis Fukuyama's claims in The End of History and the Last Man), but rather that the apparent loss of anything to systematically challenge the western liberal democratic political system suggested that all would come to accept this system simply as the 'solution that other people will necessarily adopt when they cease to be 'irrational" (Mouffe, 2000: 65). This is, in other words, the western tradition's assumption of the liberal democratic having become 'coextensive with the political' (Derrida, 2005: 28). Certainly the system would be open to pragmatic adjustments of the kind Richard Rorty calls for--adjustments aimed at making liberal democratic practices work more effectively--but these would not question the underlying status of the system itself. After all, the assumption would be that, as Rorty describes it, the liberal democratic system simply is 'the greatest thing ever invented, and the source of all good things' (Rorty, 2006: 53-54). The events of and succeeding from 9/11, despite clearly demonstrating that liberal democracy is not beyond challenge (physically and ideologically), did little to rock this view. If anything they reiterated the western view that the civilised is (only) the liberal democratic. Think, for example, of then U.S. President George W. Bush's Address to the Nation where he made a clear distinction between 'us' (civilized) and 'them' (barbaric), describing the attacks as 'evil, despicable acts of terror' (Bush, 2001), further contending that, as Chomsky puts it, other nations must either 'join us or face destruction' (Chomsky, 2001: 75). This division was further entrenched by one of the rationales for the War on Terror being the western introduction of and support for liberal democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq. Nonetheless, these events did mark some changes in perspective. In particular they highlighted the ongoing tension in western liberal democracy between the maximising of liberty and equality, and raised the question of how democracy can continue if it needs to--for reasons of 'homeland security'--restrict its operation as a democracy. They highlighted, in other words, both the need for, and logical incoherence of, protectivist strategies--strategies to protect democracy against its own openness, strategies that were instigated and maintained by democratic governments on the back of issues of homeland security and public anxiety. Such strategies of course included new anti-terrorism (and refugee) laws, restrictions on individual rights, greater powers given to federal agencies, etc.