The last Big Mac and the end of the end of history

Geopolitics trumps globalisation as the west scrambles for security and resilience

In January 1990 McDonald’s opened its first hamburger restaurant in Moscow. The queues stretched around the block as Muscovites waited patiently for a taste of American fast food. Less than a year earlier a young political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, had published in a small American journal what was soon to be seen a seminal essay. The End of History, he called it.

I don’t know whether Fukuyama enjoys a Big Mac; and I don’t suppose that the National Interest is the best-read journal under McDonald’s Golden Arches. For all that, these two events told the same big story. Communism was crumbling. The west’s victory in the cold war would signal an end to the great clashes of political ideology that had scarred the 20th century. Henceforth, global affairs would be described by open economies instead of fortified borders.

So the world swapped politics for economics. If the west had demonstrated the superiority of its political system, the argument ran, this was because the market economy had made its citizens infinitely richer than those toiling under the state-direction of the Soviet bloc. Deng Xiaoping's pre-emptive opening of the Chinese economy told the same story.   

So governments got out of the way. Bankers got a free hand and politicians had fun spending the “peace dividend”. The march of democracy eastwards and southwards, they assured themselves, would go hand in hand with the triumph of liberal market economics. Nationalism, so 19th century, would be banished.

Muscovites have eaten their last Big Mac. The flight of western business from Russia in the wake of Vladimir Putin’s brutal war against Ukraine has seen McDonald’s close its 850-odd Russian restaurants. Look further afield and liberal democracy is threatened by other authoritarian “strongmen”, globalisation is in retreat, and politicians are scrambling to reclaim control over the marketplace. 

The watchwords of the 1990s were “open”, “liberal” and “global”. The demand now from chancelleries and foreign ministries is for security, resilience and national independence. The flip-side to those just-in-time supply chains crossing and criss-crossing international frontiers was vulnerability. Even Germany has been obliged to wake up to the hard truth that there is more to foreign policy than buying cheap Russian gas to fuel production of manufactures exports to China. 

Charting this journey from innocence to experience will keep historians busy for decades. Some of the mistakes and milestones speak for themselves. Post-cold war optimism tipped too easily into hubris. No-one paid attention to the geopolitical consequences when Russia fell into economic chaos. The rest, the end of history chorus chanted, all want to be like the west. As for bouts of economic turbulence, given time, markets would self-equilibrate.

America’s war in Iraq, intended as a demonstration of permanent hegemony,  demonstrated instead the limits of US power. An expectation that a rising China would slide into its allotted role in the western system showed scant regard for revisionist intentions in Beijing. Economic reliance on Russian gas blinded Europe, and above all Germany, to Putin’s great power worldview.

The biggest blows to global optimism were self-inflicted - and, fittingly perhaps, economic. The 2008 financial crash burst the bubble of laissez-faire economics and, with it, western claims to permanent geopolitical hegemony. It also handed dangerous ammunition to populist politicians stirring up voters against international elites. 

Blame the crash for Brexit, Donald Trump and rising nationalism across all the advanced democracies. The Covid pandemic demanded a global response. Instead, policymakers scurried to preserve perceived national advantage.

Now, a fundamental rebalancing of power between state and market is evident in the response to Putin’s war. Sanctions on trade and investment flows have been accompanied by the political and reputational pressure to which McDonald’s has succumbed. The west is being decoupled from the Russian economy. 

The reassessment reaches well beyond the west’s exposure to Russia. Marking the end of the Pax Americana, Moscow, with Beijing’s connivance, has torn up the rules of the post-cold war order. Updated national security strategies in western capitals are identifying an array of risks, from fragile supply chains for strategically vital products to unwanted export dependence on particular markets. 

Is it really sensible to rely on Taiwan to provide nearly 90 per cent of the world’s most advanced semiconductor chips given Xi Jinping’s China aggressive expansionism in the South China Sea? Even as they belatedly recognise the country’s reliance on Russian energy, German policymakers are reassessing the country’s economic vulnerability to a falling-out with Beijing. By some accounts 50 per cent of Volkswagen’s earnings come from its sales in China.

Business will have to get used to interference. Putin’s revanchism in Ukraine should not have been a surprise. Rather the signals were ignored. There must be a danger now that their past complacency will prompt governments to over-compensate. They cannot all be self-sufficient in energy, food and advanced technologies. There would be no winners from an indiscriminate roll-back of globalisation.

What should be self-evident, though, is that the rules of the game have changed. We have returned to a world of great power competition, and quite possibly, conflict. Open borders will take second place to national security. Resilience counts for more than convenience. Muscovites will have to be content with Russian-made hamburgers. Westerners will have to accept less choice and higher prices. And someone out there will have to write an essay on the end of the end of history.