FRANCIS Fukuyama's sense of timing was unfortunate when he floated the idea of the end of history.

At a time of ferment that was to lead to the crumbling of the Berlin Wall, months after Tiananmen Square - just before Iraq first invaded Kuwait - Fukuyama's sense of history would be bogged in the mire of the banal.

As the controversial American political philosopher was to lament in hindsight, many people were confused by his use of the word "history", understanding him to mean history in a conventional sense.

Writing in the conservative American journal The National Interest in 1989, Fukuyama intended The End of History? to argue that liberal democracy might constitute the "end point of mankind's ideological evolution" and the "final form of human government".

Fukuyama was then deputy director of the US State Department's policy planning staff. He expanded that thesis into the highly controversial book The End of History and the Last Man (Penguin 1992).
Now the professor of international political economy at John Hopkins University has had a rethink. President George Bush and the invasion of Iraq had a big hand in his public mea culpa, as evident in Fukuyama's most recent book, America at the Crossroads: Democracy, Power and the Neoconservative Legacy (2006).

But the damage has been done. Many caught up in Fukuyama's original thesis - those who agreed with him, and those dismissive of him - missed his very public intellectual corrective.

There is pause for thought there for the March 8 election and what the results might mean for Malaysia. For that matter, the Thai elections in December, and the Pakistani elections last month.

Looked at together, there is excitement at the prospects for "democracy" as it's perceived in Australia. As the Monash Asia Institute (MAI) posed in a seminar at the Melbourne university, "Political earthquakes: The re-emergence of democracy in Asia?"

On the international radar, Malaysia is mere blip in Australia. Strategically, the US alliance is paramount even if the nostalgic ties to Britain refuse to go away.

Malaysia seen through the entirety of the bilateral relationship is a good news story, distinguished by shared colonial heritage and the number of Malaysians who have studied in Australia, beginning with the Colombo Plan of the 1950s.

Canberra has been silent. If government has a view, it has kept it to itself.

Unlike the prescriptive foreign policy of the previous administration, the Labor government of Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has taken a more hands-off stance in the affairs of many of Australia's neighbours.

As Melbourne University political historian Michael Leigh tells the New Sunday Times, it would have been provocative and counter-productive to the bilateral relationship if Rudd had done any more than sent a congratulatory note to Datuk Seri Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, or Foreign Minister Stephen Smith to his Malaysian counterpart.

As for the media, the election results represented an "earthquake in Southeast Asian politics", as The Australian put it in a commentary - one with implications for the region.

Leigh himself entertained optimism on the beginning of the end to ethnic politics in Malaysia, in a commentary in The Age.

Leigh is one of few "Malaysianists" in Australian academia, even if he cannot escape Australian interest in Indonesia as an "Indonesianist".

Now director of Melbourne University's Aceh Research Training Institute, Leigh is a former director of the university's Asia Institute, and founding director of the Institute of East Asian Studies at Universiti Malaysia Sarawak.

Sharing Leigh's optimism is a commentary in The Australian Financial Review. "A surprise election outcome may end official ethnic discrimination and remedy (Malaysia's) political malaise," it said.

Might it?

As put to the MAI seminar, for all Australian analyses of the domestic politics in Malaysia, Thailand and Pakistan, do the respective election results impose any obligation on earlier developed democracies such as Australia?

As an abstract concept of governance, democracy is a slippery notion, essentially contestable. As British wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously said, "democracy is the worst conceivable form of government ... except for all the alternatives".

George Bush and his cohorts further trashed the concept, in their conduct of international affairs. Discussion at the MAI seminar preferred an alternative in the civil society that found expression in Malaysia.

One worry - certainly as far as Canberra was concerned - was that government might view developments in Asia through the prism of concepts as they are understood in the West.

Pakistan was used as illustration, where the "success" of democratic elections was seen as validation of secular democracy devoid of Islamic Pakistani particularities.

And so too with Malaysia and Thailand: one size (of democracy) fits all.

Such a disposition blinds thinking at a global dimension, of governance in a world confronted by global poverty and environmental concerns obliging a response of the rule of law in the world"s councils.

Nascent democracies - or civil society, the term increasingly preferred - are watching. What examples are the earlier developed democracies setting?

The question might be turned around - political earthquakes: The re-emergence of democracy in the world?

Or to paraphrase a chastened Fukuyama: democracy at the crossroads.