Democracy Protests Bring Down Egypt's Mubarak

[rachael]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jasmine_Revolution

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932011_Middle_East_and_North_Africa_protests

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[kujo]

In the afterglow of the fall of the Berlin Wall, academics, historians, politicians and others proclaimed that liberal democracy--the ideological-foe of socialism and communism-- had prevailed. Francis Fukuyama, in an article and later a book called [u]The End of History and the Last Man[/u] argued that mankind had been evolving, collectively, towards this form of representative government, and the economic model it supports. And the victory of the U.S. over the Soviet Union signaled the "end of history," in that "history" is defined as this evolution. Thus, Fukuyama believed that there would be waves of democracy sweeping the world, ushering in an era of relative-tranquility.

Of course, this wasn't exactly what happened. Sure, there has been a a drastic decline in the number of authoritative and totalitarian governments worldwide. But it isn't as though conflict has ceased. Rather, it has become regionalized, rather than nationalized; there has been a precipitative increase in intra-state violence like we are seeing in the Middle East and North Africa.