Łukasz Pawłowski

In ‘The End of History and the Last Man’, Francis Fukuyama famously argued that the global spread of liberal democracy signalled the conclusion of humanity’s sociocultural evolution. In view of populism, inequality, Islamism and mass migration, how has Fukuyama’s thought developed in the intervening twenty-five years?

Just because something can’t work or doesn’t work, doesn’t mean people aren’t going to try it, says US journalist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anne Applebaum: just because it’s a bad idea to break up Europe doesn’t mean people won’t want to try that too.

In a frank discussion with Kultura Liberalna’s managing editor, the post-Yugoslav writer Dubravka Ugresic considers the state of European values a quarter of a century after the fall of the Berlin Wall. A lack of serious public forums, says Ugresic, has resulted in a lack of democratic thought.

The European integration project urgently needs reconstructing from the bottom up, argues Wolfgang Streeck. This means taking into account the crucial importance of nations and nation-states as the principal sites of democratic self-government.

In societies with colonial histories and that are traditionally open to the world, there is widespread tolerance of diversity at a fundamental level. So says Aleksander Smolar; who is afraid that, for Poland, the smallest step towards adaptation will be a dramatic struggle.

For many European countries even to start thinking about Russia as a threat, 20 years after the Cold War ended, requires a paradigm shift. So says Anne Applebaum, as she sees political leaders who made their careers in conditions of European peace flounder in the current military crisis.

Adrian Wooldridge’s recent book, co-authored with John Micklethwait, characterizes the global race to reinvent the state as “The Fourth Revolution”. Big corporations come and go, transnational institutions like the EU still alienate people. But the state will continue to adapt to the needs of today’s world.

Treat economists like any religious minority, says Tomas Sedlacek. Grant them the right to say whatever they believe and the right to gather. But always be sceptical of the stories they tell. Just take the invisible hand of the market: it’s plain wishful thinking, like a prayer.

Film director Agnieszka Holland considers the anti-gender campaign of the Roman Catholic Church in Poland a political attempt to cover up the Church’s own problems; and contends that being a white, heterosexual, conservative Catholic Pole cannot be the only respectable way of living.