Comment

Stan Grant
Sydney 2000 and the end of history

I recently watched a television special marking the 25th anniversary of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. I felt not merely transported in time but taken to an entirely other universe.

This was the final Olympics at the “end of history”. Australia, like the rest of the West, was still basking in the victory of the Cold War.

Liberal democracy was triumphant. The nations of the world were on a journey to the same destination: a McDonald’s on every corner, free trade, open borders.

George W. Bush was about to take office, but The West Wing’s Jed Bartlet was really in the White House.

Almost no one had heard of Osama bin Laden. China’s Communist Party, we were told, would either collapse or become democratic like us.

The first Apple iPhone was still seven years away. I thought I was cutting edge because I had a big chunky blue iMac G3.

The tech revolution was getting into swing. Neoliberalism promised us that the market would solve all questions of equity and fairness.

There was no such thing as society, just an economy. According to the same ideology, social justice was a myth.

John Howard was refusing to say “sorry”, but hundreds of thousands of people had marched for reconciliation, and Cathy Freeman was about to light the Olympic cauldron and win gold.

Midnight Oil took to the stage to sing to the world wearing “sorry” suits. It had been close to a decade since Yothu Yindi released “Treaty”.

It felt as if the nation was moving, and who would have seen then a “No” vote in a future referendum for an Indigenous constitutional voice?

One of the things that struck me watching the documentary was how “white” the crowd was. That is not Australia today.

Like our national face, however, the world was about to change.

At the end of history, history was about to come roaring back. Ahead of us lay forever wars, crooked bankers and Kim Kardashian.

The American political scientist Francis Fukuyama has taken some heat for gifting us the nifty “end of history” phrase. In fact, he had cribbed the idea from Hegel, who saw the forces of history as an engine of progress.

The human debris of war, revolution and economic upheaval would be the price we would pay for attaining the “absolute spirit”.

Some had seen this political nirvana as the culmination of communism. Fukuyama saw it as the final victory of democracy. According to Fukuyama, like wagon trains heading west, all nations were on a journey now to the same destination of liberal freedom.

We forget the sting in the tail, however. Fukuyama had taken from Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche. He saw not just an end of history but Nietzsche’s “Last Man”, a complacent figure who no longer knows what love or happiness is.

In the face of the world, the “Last Man” blinks.

In his original essay, Fukuyama saw worrying signs. The end of history, he warned, may well be “a very sad time”. We could swap imagination, idealism, courage and daring for economic calculation.

He foresaw a post-historical period “of neither art nor philosophy, just the perpetual caretaking of the museum of human history”.

Fast-forward and liberal democracy is not triumphant but exhausted. Authoritarianism makes its case for being a more viable form of government.

Open borders and markets have led to a blowback against immigration and free trade that is upending liberal visions of peaceful cosmopolitanism.

The political left globally is listless, censorious, out of ideas. The extremes of the right flirt with or fully embrace fascism.

More and more people are avoiding the news. We are pummelled by toxic public discourse. The young report record levels of mental illness. Artificial intelligence threatens human redundancy.

All of this played out to a loop of Taylor Swift. A very sad time, indeed.

Watching the Olympics special and pondering how we got here, I keep asking myself: Who asked for this? Did I want a world of skyrocketing house prices, angry protests, Uber Eats and Married at First Sight? Good God, no.

We do not dictate events; events dictate us.

A year after the Sydney Olympics closing ceremony, bin Laden masterminded the attacks of 9/11 on New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Al Qaeda hit the United States right at the heart of its power: money and military muscle.

America and the world has never recovered. The US launched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It toppled dictators. It unleashed chaos. The body count in Middle East wars continues to climb.

The US, drained of blood and treasure, has split asunder at home and its prestige abroad has plummeted. What went wrong?

Political scientist Joseph Nye said that after 1989 the US stopped paying attention. It was drunk on its Cold War triumph. It did not see the enemies at the gate. American leaders, Nye said, “became arrogant about our power, arguing that we did not need to heed other nations. We seemed both invincible and invulnerable.”

Jonathan Holslag, in his book World Politics Since 1989, writes: “The high tide of globalisation appeared to hold opportunities for all.”

This is not how it went. After the end of the Cold War, nationalism and authoritarianism began a new offence. Resentment was rising, along with disputes everywhere over territory. “From crisis to crisis,” Holslag says, “the Western world lost more of its power.”

By 2008, journalist and scholar Fareed Zakaria had coined the phrase “the post-American world”. It wasn’t just that the US was in decline, but the rest of the world was closing the gap. Especially China.

While the US fought endless wars and its financial system collapsed, China kept growing. It is the biggest engine of economic growth in the world. Whatever other disputes and crises bedevil our world, our futures rest on this big power rivalry.

Donald Trump seized on what he called “American carnage”. In a nation torn apart, he saw opportunity, and it has twice put him in the White House.

He seeks to make America great again by waging trade wars, blocking borders and doing deals, most notably the recent Gaza ceasefire. He is a politician of this age, of transactions not values.

He is a disrupter in a nation unsure of itself. It would be wrong to think he caused it; the US was reeling long before Trump. Since the 1960s it has grown more politically polarised.

The Democrats have gravitated to the elites and the Trump Republicans have sought to capture the resentful and abandoned heartland.

Just what a mess the US has been was portrayed by economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton in their book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism, the most scarifying and insightful book written about contemporary America.

It showed a society where the rich are obscenely rich and the poor die poorer and younger.

Case and Deaton tell of an America of broken families, drug dependency, increasing suicide, declining wages or no work at all.

To these people, they say, Washington politics “looks more like a racket”.

As for Australia? We are, as always, hostage to these events. We are buttressed by being remote and rich, but the fabric here is tearing, too. Recent immigration protests and the war in Gaza have revealed deep and potentially dangerous schisms.

It was a relief to go back to 2000, to cheer again for Cathy Freeman and to feel hopeful. We can’t stay there, however. That was the last gasp of the 20th century. Twentieth century answers are not enough for 21st century questions.

The world is gathering speed. So much faster now than then. Australia is due to host the Olympics again in Brisbane in 2032. There is a lot of history between now and then, if we get there.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 25, 2025 as "The winner is Sydney".

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