Hulliung writes in the context of the debate over Francis Fukuyama’s article "The End of History" and Samuel Huntington’s "Clash of Civilizations." He criticizes Fukuyama for gratuitous self-congratulation and assuming that only constitutional regimes can be socially and economically progressive. This perspective continues that of John Stuart Mill and before him the observation of Montesquieu that "protestant, tolerant, and constitutional countries, such as Holland and England, were economically powerful whereas Catholic, intolerant and authoritarian Portugal, Spain and Italy were economically in decline." (315). He calls this "the Whig interpretation of history." It disregards the rise of modern Russian, Germany and Japan as representatives of "modernization from above," and assumes that the fall of reprehensible regimes assures that none will rise again. He also seems to call it a Whig interpretation to believe that liberal democracies will be stable regimes. Daniel Bell had earlier [approximately 1950] written about the demise of ideology as the fall of revolutionary ideologies and the triumph of non-revolutionary ideologies, which he confined to the industrialized democracies. Hulliung accuses Fukuyama of employing the same argument, but extended to the whole world. In addition, two other authors in 1929 and 1947 had promoted essentially the same thesis. Because American and Western Europe "went up in ideological flames in the late 1960s" Fukuyama’s thesis similarly reflects a brief illusion. Hulliung seems to define "Whig interpretation" as a belief that liberalism is the future of all nations.

          In contrast, Hulliung criticizes Huntington for using the excesses of the most extreme version of multiculturalism to rationalize growing reaction against immigration. He treats cultures as fixed and inflexible rather than socially conditioned. He takes the most extreme representations of non-Western civilizations according to their claims rather than their activity. For example, Saddam Hussein only turned to religion when about to lose a war against a coalition of Western and Islamic powers. Because Serbia initiated its battles by fighting Croatia and Slovenia instead of attacking the Moslem Albanians, Hulliung takes Jeane Kirkpatrick’s observation that this was a war for territorial aggrandizement rather than a war for religion. He notes that the major conflicts of the last century have been fought within rather than between civilizations.

          His treatment of Islamic fundamentalism is cursory and shallow: "Islamic fundamentalism, perhaps the most remarkable new factor in world politics, is historically of recent origins and may well be more indicative of Muslim fears about the future than of certainty about the divine right of their tradition" (318). He applies an economic deterministic model [he derives from Voltaire] in believing that because people set their religions aside when they enter the marketplace to strike mutually beneficial bargains, that greater market participation could reduce the significance of religious motivations. Similarly, he quotes Herder to propose that with the greater understanding of other cultures derived from learning other languages, the prospects for cooperation increase and potential for conflict would decline.