AFTER NATIONS

A provocative thought experiment in what might succeed the nation-state.

As novelist and essayist Dasgupta writes, the default mode of social organization in the world today is the nation-state, which governs “99.75 percent of our species.” It has not always been so: In 1900, most people lived in empires, colonies, principalities, and the like. Yet, in the post–World War II order, and under the influence of the U.S., most exceptions to the nation-state—among which Dasgupta numbers duchies, caliphates, dependencies, and protectorates—gave way to this default mode of governance, which “produced an astonishing expansion of equality, democracy and material security.” Against those who saw the nation-state as a Platonic ideal that would bring about a vaunted “end of history,” though, processes and practices emerged that challenge the nation-state, from the de facto rule of megacorporations to globalism at various scales. Dasgupta digs deep into history to examine this evolution, with contributing factors that, significantly, include the breakaway of European Protestant states during the Reformation and the development of the “Westphalian” system, which granted rulers “sovereign power within their territories, free from outside interference.” In the end, Dasgupta writes, these developments weakened transnational entities such as the Holy Roman Empire in favor of national states—national all too often signaling ethnostates. Dasgupta suggests that the collapse of communism led to nation-states controlled by private interests, with liberty interpreted to mean “freedom of capital” and governments increasingly trending toward class systems in which citizenship was the key currency of the realm—and with much political energy devoted to rooting out noncitizens. Challenges to the nation-state are also coming from China, Dasgupta notes, intent on “introducing a coherent global order whose organizing principles were incommensurate with America’s own,” an order all too likely to prove victorious.

A novel, sobering approach to geopolitics that invites rethinking how the world is ruled.