The end of history (again.....)

Part of the problem with the ever expanding Sunday newspapers is that I rarely get through them (if at all) until the middle of the week. The only exception to this rule is Michael Winner's restaurant reviews in the Sunday Times 'Review' (Winner's Dinners), which I read with the same feeling of self-loathing with which I watch 'The Apprentice'...

Anyway, ploughing through the Sunday Times this week I saw this interview with Neocon fellow traveller Frances Fukuyama. Fukuyama was the academic in the late 1980's/early 90's who claimed, to widespread acclaim, that humanity had reached the end point of history with liberal democracy as "final form of human government". Of course such claims had been made regularly before - "Yes sire, feudalism is the absolute apogee of human government. The peasants with the torches and pitchforks? Oh I wouldn't worry about them..." - but that didn't stop his "The End of History" selling by the proverbial bucket-load.

Anyway, thought this interview - one of a number to coincide with the launch of his new book "After the Neocons" - was interesting for a number of reasons including:

• Fukuyama is no longer a supporter of the war in Iraq - "wrong in theory and in practice" - which is a bit of a volte face for a man who wrote to Clinton in 1998 urging Saddam Hussein's overthrow, and who in 2001 "wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal noting that the fall of Saddam was 'justly celebrated' ".

• He is terribly disappointed by Bush's record on foreign policy, which too be fair is a bit like being terribly disappointed that you really haven't won £50,000 in a Readers Digest prize-draw which you never actually entered - if your hopes were really that high you probably weren't starting with a full shovel.

• He's actually a Marxist, "in the sense that I believe in a general process of economic and social modernisation", which from a lay-man's perspective seems a bit like saying "in the sense that I'm actually not really"

Also some pretty fascinating stuff in there about the rise of the Neocons and their roots in the US Trotskyist movement - and about the some of the raging debates in fashionable US academic circles. which gave me , and I am sure anyone who has any experience of left politics, a certain sense of deja vu ("You're a Leninist", "No, you're a Leninist", "No you are" ad infinitum, etc etc ).

Anyway if anyone does bother to read the book (and I know I will at some stage when I'm stuck in the WH Smiths at Newcastle station and its a choice between that and '15 steps to managing in a highly effective and not at all patronising manner" or the latest Andy McNabb). then please feel free to post a review in the comments section. Go on Steve you know you want to!