By Rana Dasgup, London, 5 Apr 2018<\/p>\n
After decades of globalisation, our political system has become obsolete \u2013 and spasms of resurgent nationalism are a sign of its irreversible decline.<\/p>\n
hat is happening to national politics? Every day in the US, events further exceed the imaginations of absurdist novelists and comedians; politics in the UK still shows few signs of recovery after the \u201cnational nervous breakdown<\/a>\u201d of Brexit. France \u201cnarrowly escaped a heart attack<\/a>\u201d in last year\u2019s elections, but the country\u2019s leading daily feels this has done little to alter the \u201caccelerated decomposition<\/a>\u201d of the political system. In neighbouring Spain, El Pa\u00eds<\/a> goes so far as to say that \u201cthe rule of law, the democratic system and even the market economy are in doubt\u201d; in Italy, \u201cthe collapse of the establishment\u201d in the March elections has even brought talk of a \u201cbarbarian arrival<\/a>\u201d, as if Rome were falling once again. In Germany, meanwhile, neo-fascists are preparing to take up their role as official opposition<\/a>, introducing anxious volatility into the bastion of European stability.<\/p>\n But the convulsions in national politics are not confined to the west. Exhaustion, hopelessness, the dwindling effectiveness of old ways: these are the themes of politics all across the world. This is why energetic authoritarian \u201csolutions\u201d are currently so popular: distraction by war (Russia, Turkey); ethno-religious \u201cpurification\u201d (India, Hungary, Myanmar); the magnification of presidential powers and the corresponding abandonment of civil rights and the rule of law (China, Rwanda, Venezuela, Thailand, the Philippines and many more).<\/p>\n What is the relationship between these various upheavals? We tend to regard them as entirely separate \u2013 for, in political life, national solipsism is the rule. In each country, the tendency is to blame \u201cour\u201d history, \u201cour\u201d populists, \u201cour\u201d media, \u201cour\u201d institutions, \u201cour\u201d lousy politicians. And this is understandable, since the organs of modern political consciousness \u2013 public education and mass media \u2013 emerged in the 19th century from a globe-conquering ideology of unique national destinies. When we discuss \u201cpolitics\u201d, we refer to what goes on inside sovereign states; everything else is \u201cforeign affairs\u201d or \u201cinternational relations\u201d \u2013 even in this era of global financial and technological integration. We may buy the same products in every country of the world, we may all use Google and Facebook, but political life, curiously, is made of separate stuff and keeps the antique faith of borders.<\/p>\n Yes, there is awareness that similar varieties of populism are erupting in many countries. Several have noted the parallels in style and substance between leaders such as Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Viktor Orb\u00e1n and Recep Tayyip Erdo\u011fan. There is a sense that something is in the air \u2013 some coincidence of feeling between places. But this does not get close enough. For there is no coincidence. All countries are today embedded in the same system, which subjects them all to the same pressures: and it is these that are squeezing and warping national political life everywhere. And their effect is quite the opposite \u2013 despite the desperate flag-waving \u2013 of the oft-remarked \u201cresurgence of the nation state<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n The most momentous development of our era, precisely, is the waning of the nation state: its inability to withstand countervailing 21st-century forces, and its calamitous loss of influence over human circumstance. National political authority is in decline, and, since we do not know any other sort, it feels like the end of the world. This is why a strange brand of apocalyptic nationalism is so widely in vogue. But the current appeal of machismo as political style, the wall-building and xenophobia, the mythology and race theory, the fantastical promises of national restoration \u2013 these are not cures, but symptoms of what is slowly revealing itself to all: nation states everywhere are in an advanced state of political and moral decay from which they cannot individually extricate themselves.<\/p>\n Why is this happening? In brief, 20th-century political structures are drowning in a 21st-century ocean of deregulated finance, autonomous technology, religious militancy and great-power rivalry. Meanwhile, the suppressed consequences of 20th-century recklessness in the once-colonised world are erupting, cracking nations into fragments and forcing populations into post-national solidarities: roving tribal militias, ethnic and religious sub-states and super-states. Finally, the old superpowers\u2019 demolition of old ideas of international society \u2013 ideas of the \u201csociety of nations\u201d that were essential to the way the new world order was envisioned after 1918 \u2013 has turned the nation-state system into a lawless gangland; and this is now producing a nihilistic backlash from the ones who have been most terrorised and despoiled.<\/p>\n The result? For increasing numbers of people, our nations and the system of which they are a part now appear unable to offer a plausible, viable future. This is particularly the case as they watch financial elites \u2013 and their wealth \u2013 increasingly escaping national allegiances altogether. Today\u2019s failure of national political authority, after all, derives in large part from the loss of control over money flows. At the most obvious level, money is being transferred out of national space altogether, into a booming \u201coffshore\u201d zone. These fleeing trillions undermine national communities in real and symbolic ways. They are a cause of national decay, but they are also a result: for nation states have lost their moral aura, which is one of the reasons tax evasion has become an accepted fundament of 21st-century commerce.<\/p>\n More dramatically, great numbers of people are losing all semblance of a national home, and finding themselves pitched into a particular kind of contemporary hell. Seven years after the fall of Gaddafi\u2019s dictatorship, Libya is controlled by two rival governments<\/a>, each with its own parliament, and by several militia groups fighting to control oil wealth. But Libya is only one of many countries that appear whole only on maps. Since 1989, barely 5% of the world\u2019s wars have taken place between states: national breakdown, not foreign invasion, has caused the vast majority of the 9 million war deaths<\/a> in that time. And, as we know from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Syria, the ensuing vacuum can suck in firepower from all over the world, destroying conditions for life and spewing shell-shocked refugees in every direction. Nothing advertises the crisis of our nation-state system so well, in fact, as its 65 million refugees<\/a> \u2013 a \u201cnew normal\u201d far greater than the \u201cold emergency\u201d (in 1945) of 40 million. The unwillingness even to acknowledge this crisis, meanwhile, is appropriately captured by the contempt for refugees that now drives so much of politics in the rich world.<\/p>\n T<\/span><\/span>he crisis was not wholly inevitable. Since 1945, we have actively reduced our world political system to a dangerous mockery of what was designed by US president Woodrow Wilson and many others after the cataclysm of the first world war, and now we are facing the consequences. But we should not leap too quickly into renovation. This system has done far less to deliver human security and dignity than we imagine \u2013 in some ways, it has been a colossal failure \u2013 and there are good reasons why it is ageing so much more quickly than the empires it replaced.<\/p>\n Even if we wanted to restore what we once had, that moment is gone. The reason the nation state was able to deliver what achievements it did \u2013 and in some places they were spectacular \u2013 was that there was, for much of the 20th century, an authentic \u201cfit\u201d between politics, economy and information, all of which were organised at a national scale. National governments possessed actual powers to manage modern economic and ideological energies, and to turn them towards human \u2013 sometimes almost utopian \u2013 ends. But that era is over. After so many decades of globalisation, economics and information have successfully grown beyond the authority of national governments. Today, the distribution of planetary wealth and resources is largely uncontested by any political mechanism.<\/p>\n But to acknowledge this is to acknowledge the end of politics itself. And if we continue to think the administrative system we inherited from our ancestors allows for no innovation, we condemn ourselves to a long period of dwindling political and moral hope. Half a century has been spent building the global system on which we all now depend, and it is here to stay. Without political innovation, global capital and technology will rule us without any kind of democratic consultation, as naturally and indubitably as the rising oceans.<\/p>\n If we wish to rediscover a sense of political purpose in our era of global finance, big data, mass migration and ecological upheaval, we have to imagine political forms capable of operating at that same scale. The current political system must be supplemented with global financial regulations, certainly, and probably transnational political mechanisms, too. That is how we will complete this globalisation of ours, which today stands dangerously unfinished. Its economic and technological systems are dazzling indeed, but in order for it to serve the human community, it must be subordinated to an equally spectacular political infrastructure, which we have not even begun to conceive.<\/p>\n It will be objected, inevitably, that any alternative to the nation-state system is a utopian impossibility. But even the technological accomplishments of the last few decades seemed implausible before they arrived, and there are good reasons to be suspicious of those incumbent authorities who tell us that human beings are incapable of similar grandeur in the political realm. In fact, there have been many moments in history when politics was suddenly expanded to a new, previously inconceivable scale \u2013 including the creation of the nation state itself. And \u2013 as is becoming clearer every day \u2013 the real delusion is the belief that things can carry on as they are.<\/p>\n The first step will be ceasing to pretend that there is no alternative. So let us begin by considering the scale of the current crisis.<\/p>\n L<\/span><\/span>et us start with the west. Europe, of course, invented the nation state: the principle of territorial sovereignty was agreed at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The treaty made large-scale conquest difficult within the continent; instead, European nations expanded into the rest of the world. The dividends of colonial plunder were converted, back home, into strong states with powerful bureaucracies and democratic polities \u2013 the template for modern European life.<\/p>\n By the end of 19th century, European nations had acquired uniform attributes still familiar today \u2013 in particular, a set of fiercely enforced state monopolies (defence, taxation and law, among others), which gave governments substantial mastery of the national destiny. In return, a moral promise was made to all: the development, spiritual and material, of citizen and nation alike. Spectacular state-run projects in the fields of education, healthcare, welfare and culture arose to substantiate this promise.<\/p>\n The withdrawal of this moral promise over the past four decades has been a shattering metaphysical event in the west, and one that has left populations rummaging around for new things to believe in. For the promise was a major event in the evolution of the western psyche. It was part of a profound theological reorganisation: the French Revolution dethroned not only the monarch, but also God, whose superlative attributes \u2013 omniscience and omnipotence \u2013 were now absorbed into the institutions of the state itself. The state\u2019s power to develop, liberate and redeem mankind became the foundational secular faith.<\/p>\n During the period of decolonisation that followed the second world war, the European nation-state structure was exported everywhere. But westerners still felt its moral promise with an intensity peculiar to themselves \u2013 more so than ever, in fact, after the creation of the welfare state and decades of unprecedented postwar growth. Nostalgia for that golden age of the nation state continues to distort western political debate to this day, but it was built on an improbable coincidence of conditions that will never recur. Very significant was the structure of the postwar state itself, which possessed a historically unique level of control over the domestic economy. Capital could not flow unchecked across borders and foreign currency speculation was negligible compared to today. Governments, in other words, had substantial control over money flows, and if they spoke of changing things, it was because they actually could. The fact that capital was captive meant they Governments could impose historic rates of taxation, which, in an era of record economic growth, allowed them to channel unprecedented energies into national development. For a few decades, state power was monumental \u2013 almost divine, indeed \u2013 and it created the most secure and equal capitalist societies ever known. The destruction of state authority over capital has of course been the explicit objective of the financial revolution that defines our present era. As a result, states have been forced to shed social commitments in order to reinvent themselves as custodians of the market. This has drastically diminished national political authority in both real and symbolic ways. Barack Obama in 2013 called inequality \u201cthe defining challenge of our time\u201d, but US inequality has risen continually since 1980, without regard for his qualms or those of any other president.<\/p>\n The picture is the same all over the west: the wealth of the richest continues to skyrocket, while post-crisis austerity cripples the social-democratic welfare state. We can all see the growing fury at governments that refuse to fulfil their old moral promise \u2013 but it is most probable that they no longer can. Western governments possess nothing like their previous command over national economic life, and if they continue to promise fundamental change, it is now at the level of PR and wish fulfilment.<\/p>\n There is every reason to believe that the next stage of the techno-financial revolution will be even more disastrous for national political authority. This will arise as the natural continuation of existing technological processes, which promise new, algorithmic kinds of governance to further undermine the political variety. Big data companies (Google, Facebook etc) have already assumed many functions previously associated with the state, from cartography to surveillance. Now they are the primary gatekeepers of social reality: membership of these systems is a new, corporate, de-territorialised form of citizenship, antagonistic at every level to the national kind. And, as the growth of digital currencies shows, new technologies will emerge to replace the other fundamental functions of the nation state. The libertarian dream \u2013 whereby antique bureaucracies succumb to pristine hi-tech corporate systems, which then take over the management of all life and resources \u2013 is a more likely vision for the future than any fantasy of a return to social democracy.<\/p>\n Governments controlled by outside forces and possessing only partial influence over national affairs: this has always been so in the world\u2019s poorest countries. But in the west, it feels like a terrifying return to primitive vulnerability. The assault on political authority is not a merely \u201ceconomic\u201d or \u201ctechnological\u201d event. It is an epochal upheaval, which leaves western populations shattered and bereft. There are outbreaks of irrational rage, especially against immigrants, the appointed scapegoats for much deeper forms of national contamination. The idea of the western nation as a universal home collapses, and transnational tribal identities grow up as a refuge: white supremacists and radical Islamists alike take up arms against contamination and corruption.<\/p>\n The stakes could not be higher. So it is easy to see why western governments are so desperate to prove what everyone doubts: that they are still in control. It is not merely Donald Trump\u2019s personality that causes him to act like a sociopathic CEO. The era of globalisation has seen consistent attempts by US presidents to enhance the authority of the executive, but they are never enough. Trump\u2019s office can never have the level of mastery over American life that Kennedy\u2019s did, so he is obliged to fake it. He cannot make America great again, but he does have Twitter, through which he can establish a lone-gun personality cult \u2013 blaming women, leftists and brown people for the state\u2019s impotence. He cannot heal America\u2019s social divisions, but he still controls the security apparatus, which can be deployed to help him look \u201ctough\u201d \u2013 declaring war on crime, deporting foreigners, hardening borders. He cannot put more money into the hands of the poor who voted for him, but he can hand out mythological currency instead; even his poorest voters, after all, possess one significant asset \u2013 US citizenship \u2013 whose value he can \u201ctalk up\u201d, as he previously talked up casinos and hotels. Like Putin or Orb\u00e1n, Trump imbues citizenship with new martial power, and makes a big show of withholding it from people who want it: what is scarcer, obviously, is more precious. Citizens who have nothing are persuaded that they have a lot.<\/p>\n These strategies are ugly, but they cannot simply be blamed on a few bad actors. The predicament is this: political authority is running on empty, and leaders are unable to deliver meaningful material change. Instead, they must arouse and deploy powerful feelings: hatred of foreigners and internal enemies, for instance, or the euphoria of meaningless military exploits (Putin\u2019s annexation of Crimea raised the hugely popular prospect of general Tsarist revival).<\/p>\n But let us not imagine that these strategies will quickly break down under their own deceptions as moderation magically comes back into fashion. As Putin\u2019s Russia has shown, chauvinism is more effective than we like to believe. Partly because citizens are desperate for the cover-up to succeed: deep down, they know to be scared of what will happen if the power of the state is revealed to be a hoax.<\/p>\n I<\/span><\/span>n the world\u2019s poorest countries, the picture is very different. Almost all those nations emerged in the 20th century from the Eurasian empires. It has become de rigueur to despise empires, but they have been the \u201cnormal\u201d mode of governance for much of history. The Ottoman empire, which lasted from 1300 until 1922, delivered levels of tranquillity and cultural achievement that seem incredible from the perspective of today\u2019s fractured Middle East. The modern nation of Syria looks unlikely to last more than a century without breaking apart, and it hardly provides security or stability for its citizens.<\/p>\n Empires were not democratic, but were built to be inclusive of all those who came under their rule. It is not the same with nations, which are founded on the fundamental distinction between who is in and who is out \u2013 and therefore harbour a tendency toward ethnic purification. This makes them much more unstable than empires, for that tendency can always be stoked by nativist demagogues.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, in the previous century it was decided with amazing alacrity that empires belonged to the past, and the future to nation states. And yet this revolutionary transformation has done almost nothing to close the economic gap between the colonised and the colonising. In the meantime, it has subjected many postcolonial populations to a bitter cocktail of authoritarianism, ethnic cleansing, war, corruption and ecological devastation.<\/p>\n If there are so few formerly colonised countries that are now peaceful, affluent and democratic, it is not, as the west often pretends, because \u201cbad leaders\u201d somehow ruined otherwise perfectly functional nations. In the breakneck pace of decolonisation, nations were thrown together in months; often their alarmed populations fell immediately into violent conflict to control the new state apparatus, and the power and wealth that came with it. Many infant states were held together only by strongmen who entrusted the system to their own tribes or clans, maintained power by stoking sectarian rivalries and turned ethnic or religious differences into super-charged axes of political terror.<\/p>\n The list is not a short one. Consider men such as Ne Win (Burma), Hiss\u00e8ne Habr\u00e9 (Chad), Hosni Mubarak (Egypt), Mengistu Haile Mariam (Ethiopia), Ahmed S\u00e9kou Tour\u00e9 (Guinea), Muhammad Suharto (Indonesia), the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein (Iraq), Muammar Gaddafi (Libya), Moussa Traor\u00e9 (Mali), General Zia-ul-Haq (Pakistan), Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines), the Kings of Saudi Arabia, Siaka Stevens (Sierra Leone), Mohamed Siad Barre (Somalia), Jaafar Nimeiri (Sudan), Hafez al-Assad (Syria), Idi Amin (Uganda), Mobutu Sese Seko (Zaire) or Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe).<\/p>\n