Have Western liberal democracies effectively responded to challenges to their power? In your answer, refer to at least one internal and one external challenge.

Introduction
In 1989 political scientist Francis Fukuyama declared “the end of history.”[1] Despite his language, Fukuyama was not an apocalyptic religious fundamentalist awaiting the rapture, but rather, he saw with the collapse of the Soviet Union the ultimate and final triumph of liberal democracy. Fukuyama draws on Marxist and Hegelian interpretations of the narrative of history as one of progress, in this case with its apex at the liberal democracy best represented by the United States of America. The triumphalism of this context may seem naïve in a post-9/11 world, but it should be seen in its original context of the decades long cold war between the US (and its allies) and the Soviet Union. These two sides came to represent an ideological conflict rather than a purely physical one, between liberal capitalist democracy and authoritarian communism, between free enterprise and central planning. Liberal democracy emerged victorious economically, politically and, Fukuyama would argue, philosophically. However, Fukuyama would be hard pressed to defend his near-eschatological optimism today, and Marxist critic Terry Eagleton has said that “the End of History is at an end.”[2] Rather than the comparatively monolithic opposition it experienced in the 20th Century, today the political dominance of liberal democracy is threatened by a wide variety of challenges, both internal and external, and, in the words of geographer John Agnew, the world has gone “from bipolar to multipolar.”[3]
This essay will address the question of how well liberal democratic societies have addressed these challenges, looking in particular at the Islamic world, the global financial crisis (and particularly the crisis of legitimacy