The Guardian: Demise of the Nation State

Nation states are losing influence, contends Rana Dasgupta for the Guardian, and the political systems are obsolete for confronting modern challenges that are either focused and local or global in nature. Systems based on borders struggle to deal with complex companies, technologies, immense wealth and social movements that no longer respect borders. “Exhaustion, hopelessness, the dwindling effectiveness of old ways: these are the themes of politics all across the world,” he writes. “This is why energetic authoritarian ‘solutions’ are currently so popular: distraction by war (Russia, Turkey); ethno-religious “purification” (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).” Fierce nationalism, power grabs and extreme policies are last-ditch attempts to revive relevance, but populist and authoritarian methods do not satisfy for long by masking difficulties, fueling fragmentation while failing to achieve global approval or solutions. Political innovation operating at broad scale, regional or global, perhaps societies of nations, is required to overcome moral decay, inequality and international lawlessness. Dasgupta calls for global financial regulation and tax innovation, global flexible democracy, and new conceptions of citizenship. For globalization to serve all, he writes, “it must be subordinated to an equally spectacular political infrastructure, which we have not even begun to conceive.” – YaleGlobal