In the summer of 1989, just a few months before fragments of the Berlin Wall began appearing in German gift shops, and two years before perestroika and glasnost culminated in Boris Yeltsin, Francis Fukuyama looked upon the world and announced the end of history.

That’s not like saying summers are hot, so Fukuyama had to expound.

The fall of the Soviet Union, he wrote in his 1989 essay, signaled “the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.”

Contemplating any potential threats to that universalization, Fukuyama said fascism and communism were dead as “viable alternatives.”

As for the doctrine of radical Islam, it “has little appeal for non-Muslims, and it is hard to believe that the movement will take on any universal significance.”

A year ago last week, radical Islam took on universal significance. And the notion of the end of history, the “universalization of Western liberal democracy,” died.

Or did it? Did the terrorist attacks prove Fukuyama wrong? Did they alert the world that radical Islam poses an existential threat, or at least a “viable alternative,” to Western liberal democracy? Worse, was Sept. 11, 2001, the first day of a “clash of civilizations” anticipated by Samuel Huntington more than 10 years ago?

Those questions are now causing tremors for political scientists.

And beyond universities, think tanks and halls of government, the minds of ordinary citizens have been conscripted to consider the centrality of culture as a determinant of political behavior.

Prior to Sept. 11, that consideration, at least in America, was about as popular as a ballot box in Afghanistan.

The implosion of the Soviet Union, the United States’ mastery of the Gulf War and the general contentment nurtured by a decade of opulence–these and other realities invited the American psyche to rest on the feathery conviction that the world’s dangers had passed.

How, after all, could there be anything more terrifying than the Russian communists?

And with such a complete repulsion of democracy’s main menace, how could the rest of the world’s non-democracies fail to follow?

Four hijacked jets delivered the answer.

The answer is: culture.

The terrorist attacks dramatized what many Americans have sensed but not truly appreciated: That history, geography, religion and other factors have bred cultures that are hostile to democracy; indeed, cultures that want to destroy it.

Islam, properly understood and practiced, may have no intrinsic incompatibility with such democratic values as individual autonomy, pluralism, women’s rights, a rational rule of law and separation between church and state.

Yet what matters now for policymakers (and for people who live and work in big cities) is not the ideal, but the actual.

Ideally, everyone loves everyone else. In actuality (as the world saw on Sept. 11) some people rejoice when 110 floors of steel collapse on innocent Americans.

Do not, as many do, justify the response of radical Muslims with talk of U.S. “imperialism” or Israeli “occupation” or poverty or unemployment. If those are the true sources, or mitigating factors, of terrorism, why aren’t the poor of Mexico blowing up Americans in Tijuana?

Why haven’t Native Americans sent suicide bombers into American cities to avenge what might be called the 500-year Anglo-European occupation of North America? Ah, perhaps there is something different in the culture?

Recall that at bin Laden’s dinner party celebrating Sept. 11, he did not say, “We want jobs.” He said, “Allah Akbar.” That is, Allah is great.

Though a clash of civilizations may not be imminent, this is the world of Huntington, not Fukuyama.

However, even if Fukuyama’s theory prevails and democratically elected regimes become predominant in the Islamic world, do not get too excited.

Timothy Lomperis, chair of the political science department at Saint Louis University, said that even if true democratic regimes somehow developed in places such as Syria, Egypt, Algeria, Pakistan and the Sudan, “they will be burning American flags in anger rather than waving them in gratitude.”

And as for the popular thesis that democracies don’t fight each other, Lomperis noted that such optimism might be misplaced.

“It was,” said Lomperis, “a set of popular democratic passions in the United States that lusted for Canada, Mexico and Cuba and spurred American leaders into the War of 1812, the Mexican War of 1842, and the Spanish-American War of 1898.”

War between democracies is rare, but not unprecedented.

Political meteorology is rarely uplifting because much of humanity is often bad. The 21st century will not lighten that gloomy fact.

Whereas the last hundred years saw the rise and fall of competing ideologies, the next hundred years are likely to witness the rise of competing cultures.

It will be bloody. Be prepared.

Matt Emerson is a junior studying philosophy and political science.