In 1992, Francis Fukuyama famously proclaimed that liberal democracy's triumph over its rivals signifies the end of history. Needless to say, the brief moment of liberal euphoria that followed the collapse of communism in the Soviet bloc soon gave way to a sober assessment of the difficulties of implementing liberal practices outside the Western world. Brutal ethnic warfare, crippling poverty, environmental degradation, and pervasive corruption, to name some of the more obvious troubles afflicting the developing world, pose serious obstacles to the successful establishment and consolidation of liberal democratic political arrangements. But these were seen as unfortunate (hopefully temporary) afflictions that might delay the end of history when liberal democracy has finally triumphed over its rivals. They were not meant to pose a challenge to the ideal of liberal democracy. It was widely assumed that liberal democracy is something that all rational individuals would want if they could get it.

The deeper challenge to liberal democracy has emerged from the East Asian region. In the 1990s, the debate revolved around the notion of “Asian values,” a term devised by several Asian officials and their supporters for the purpose of challenging Western-style civil and political freedoms. Asians, they claim, place special emphasis on family and social harmony, with the implication that those in the chaotic and crumbling societies of the West should think twice about intervening in Asia for the sake of promoting human rights and democracy. As Singapore's former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew put it, Asians have “little doubt that a society where the interests of society take precedence over that of the individual suits them better than the individualism of America.” Such claims attracted international attention primarily because East Asian leaders seemed to be presiding over what a United Nations human development report called “the most sustained and widespread development miracle of the twentieth century, perhaps all history.”