This is opposed to the belief that the same thing, in particular normative institutions or correlated ideologies, is natural or essential and thus exists universally.
Ingo Farin argues that Heidegger appropriated the concept from Wilhelm Dilthey and from Paul Yorck von Wartenburg[3] and further clarifies Heidegger's meaning: Francis Fukuyama, in The End of History and the Last Man, famously argued that the collapse of Soviet communism brought humanity to the "end of history" whereby the world's global dialectical machinations had been resolved with the triumph of liberal capitalism.
It is for these writings that he received a full-chapter denunciation from the physicist Alan Sokal (along with Jean Bricmont), due to his alleged misuse of physical concepts of linear time, space and stability.
In contrast to Fukuyama's argument, Baudrillard maintained that the "end of history", in terms of a teleological goal, had always been an illusion brought about by modernity's will towards progress, civilisation and rational unification.
And this was an illusion that to all intents and purposes vanished toward the end of the 20th century, brought about by the "speed" at which society moved, effectively "destabilising" the linear progression of history (it is these comments, specifically, that provoked Sokal's criticism).