In his now famous 1989 essay, The End of History, Francis Fukuyama argued that the spread of Western liberal democracy represented an end of history in the Hegelian sense that the progression of history towards an ultimate goal had, in fact, been reached with the fall of communism.
My impressions from several sessions with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao and Russian Federation Prime Minister Vladimir Putin at Davos are that if Fukuyama was ever correct, history has resumed. While Western leaders argued over who was to blame for the financial crisis devouring world markets, these former communist leaders harbored no doubt - it was US style capitalism and a naively unregulated financial system.
Premier Wen gave measured and impressive performances, calmly answering even sensitive questions such as Sino-US rifts over exchange rate policy, and generally avoiding "we told you so" gloating. Prime Minister Putin on the other hand was less restrained, to the point where it seemed quite evident that this was personal payback time for the perceived humbling of the great Russian state after the fall of communism.
While Mr. Putin's public rebuke of the well-intentioned Mike Dell has received a huge amount of media attention, I thought the more remarkable performance was when Mr. Putin responded to a question about the incident the following day. Towards the end of a long description of Russia's recognized scientific prowess, he got on to the subject of technology export controls imposed by certain western governments. Mr. Putin said that these were outdated and ineffective because (i) it is in the nature of the scientific process to publish and share findings at international conferences and (ii) in any case, even during the Cold War, the Russian intelligence services were able to obtain all the technology they wanted. It is perhaps not surprising that this former siloviki holds his intelligence services in high regard, but it struck me as unusually forthright.
What is clear from both Premier Wen and Prime Minister Putin's few days in the Graubunden Mountains, is that history is anything but dead and we are in for a more multilateral world over the coming years.