its emergence was marked by the rise to power of Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States. While there was no attempt to revive the previous system of fixed exchange rates on a global scale, neoliberalism upheld a similar commitment to free trade as had the previous era. Similar to the era of classical economic liberalism, neoliberalism involved the disembedding of markets. At a policy level, some of the main changes involved pressure for governments to abolish their capital controls and to refrain from economic interventions. However, many of the institutions established in the previous era remained in place and free market ideology never became as influential as it had been during the peak years of classical liberalism. In a 1997 paper, Ruggie himself discussed how some of the protection gained for workers with the embedded liberal compromise still lived on, though he warned it was being eroded by the advance of market forces. In Britain and the United States, domestic free market reforms were pursued most aggressively from about 1980–1985. Yet from a global perspective, the peak years of neoliberal influence were the 1990s. After the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union, there was an acceleration of the pace at which countries throughout the world chose or were coerced into implementing free market reforms. In 1992, political scientist Francis Fukuyama suggested that free-market capitalism coupled with liberal democracy may be a stable end point in human social evolution in the End of History and the Last Man. Yet by 1999, various adverse economic events, most especially the 1997 Asian financial crisis and the harsh response by the International Monetary Fund had already caused free-market policies to be at least partially discredited in the eyes of developing world policy makers, especially in Asia and South America. Post-Washington Consensus: mixed liberalisms, 2009–present In the wake of the financial crisis of 2007–2008, several journalists, politicians and senior officials from global institutions such as the World Bank began saying that the Washington Consensus was over. As part of the 2008–2009 Keynesian resurgence, it briefly appeared that there might be a prospect of a return to embedded liberalism—there had been an upsurge in global collaboration by the world's policy makers, with several heads of state calling for a "New Bretton Woods". Yet by 2010, the short lived consensus for a return to Keynesian policy had fractured. Economic historian Robert