![]() ![]() ![]() For another, every year that passes has made the failures of market-based neoliberalism – which has degraded public institutions and infrastructures, stretched wealth inequality to a breaking point, and ravaged the environment – become more evident.īut while “the end of history” flopped as a sociopolitical theory/prediction, it remains useful as a way of theorizing a vibe, an aesthetic, an outlook that informed the cultural output of the nineties and early 2000s. For one thing, the “west” has not remained comfortably ensconced at the top: Russia and China, two non-democratic powers, continue to threaten North American and European democratic regimes. But the book and its ideas have aged poorly ever since, to say the least. ![]() At the end of history, according to Fukuyama, there would still be events and struggles, but ones that nations could confront together there would be no more ideological struggles between political entities, because liberal democracy had already won.Įven at the time, Fukuyama’s theory wasn’t terribly well-received, especially by those who didn’t agree with Fukuyama’s characterization of liberal democracy as the best and most evolved version of government. The theory put forth in that essay, and later a book of the same name, has been so thoroughly refuted, debunked, and dunked on that it feels almost silly to repeat it, but here it is, more or less: Fukuyama predicted that as the Cold War came to an end, European-style democracy, liberalism and capitalism would become world’s the ascendant, unchallenged norm, the universal endpoint of mankind’s political evolution. In the summer of 1989, less than a year before Toto’s Eurovision victory, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama published an essay called “The End of History?” in the foreign policy magazine The National Interest. The comments under the YouTube video of this performance exemplify the gulf between then and now: one commenter writes, “Quante belle speranze per la nostra Italia ed Europa, e invece….ci stiamo sgretolando…” (“How many beautiful hopes for our Italy and Europe, and instead … we are crumbling …”) Another simply writes, “Italy has National debt in billion euros: 2,431.08.” In one performance of “Insieme” from 1992, Toto performs the song in front of an audience of attractive teenagers who wave flashlights in time to the music, and stand up and cheer at the climax of the song. (Delors, former president of the European Commission, spearheaded the European single market.)įrom today’s vantage point – after years of financial crises, Euroscepticism, and the reascension of the nationalist right in many parts of Europe – watching someone wax so unironically poetic about the European Union is disarming, if not downright comical. It might also be that Norway is cursed.) In his live commentary for the UK, Sir Terry Wogan quipped, “This is more of a Jacques Delors competition than I’ve imagined,” as a cartoon mascot called Eurocat knocks down a cartoon wall. Italy wasn’t the only country to send a topical entry that year: Austria’s “Keine Mauern Mehr” proclaimed “No Walls Anymore” in German, English, and Serbo-Croatian, and Ketil Stokkan of Norway finished dead last with the song “Brandenburger Tor.” (Why did Norway fail where Italy succeeded, even though the songs were so thematically similar? It might be, as Chris Zammarelli suggests, that “Brandenburger Tor” is about the recent past, while “Insieme” looks to the future. And then, in English, the tagline: Unite, unite, Europe!Ĭlearly, in 1990, a kind of pan-European optimism was in the air. We are united under the same flag, the same ideals. Insieme’s lyrics are almost propaganda-like in their devotion. It was a surprise winner at Eurovision 1990, beating out predicted favorites like Ireland’s “Somewhere in Europe” and the UK’s “Give a Little Love Back to the World.” (After the 2020 podcast investigating the rumors, Scorpions frontman Klaus Meine publicly denied the claim.) And just like “Wind of Change,” “Insieme” is undeniably effective. Musically and lyrically, “Insieme” reminds me of another 1990 song about the end of the Cold War, “ Wind of Change” by The Scorpions, which was so effective in its message of European unity and reconciliation that it became the subject of persistent rumors that it was written by the C.I.A. He jabs his pointer finger at the audience like an infomercial salesman when he sings “per voi” – for you – and clasps his hands together to drive home the meaning of the word “insieme”: together. Cutugno, a hirsute middle-aged fellow with a prominent brow, delivers the song with an almost grave intensity. In typical power ballad fashion, it starts subdued and sparse and builds to a triumphant finish of power chords. ![]() “Insieme” is a soaring paean to a politically and ideologically united Europe. ![]()
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