FLASH
Shkruar nga Michael Hirsh
A series of warning books fail to grasp what's coming next
No one has done more than Donald Trump to emphasize the “primacy of nations” in today’s world, to quote his National Security Strategy. And the American president has many nationalist sympathizers in high positions who preach a strong, almost religious, devotion to the nation-state, including Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese leader Xi Jinping, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and right-wing parties around the world.
The problem, however, is that the nation-state is deeply flawed and no longer working for ordinary people around the world.
Torn apart by growing inequalities in education, opportunity, and income, plundered by powerful oligarchs who extract wealth and then flee, and corrupted at the institutional and constitutional levels, the nation-state is failing miserably as a guarantor of individual rights, freedom, and well-being, writes British-Indian author Rana Dasgupta in his new book After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order.
And since Trump and similar nationalists oppose globalism or any idea of international governance, the majority of people, the 99.75 percent of the world's population who live in nation-states, are left with little protection and little support to pursue their well-being.
Humanity today is "politically naked," concludes Dasgupta, a renowned essayist and novelist, in his well-argued and deeply researched book.
“The nation-state system does not fulfill even the simplest concepts of equality and justice,” he writes. “Since nation-states have monopolized our political life, this betrayal is existential: we have nothing else.” As a result, the “sense of progress” developed over many centuries has been “replaced by the anxiety of the lack of a future.”
This ominous sense of “no future” permeates a series of new books that document the disintegration of the international order and the very states that are supposed to uphold that order, but are instead weakening or failing.
For economist Eswar Prasad, the world is caught in a “fatal cycle,” the title of his book, where economic instability feeds political instability and populism, which in turn produce even more economic disorder, with no end in sight. In another book, The Coming Storm, Yale University historian Odd Arne Westad worries that we are sliding toward an unstable global order that resembles the rival kingdoms of Europe before World War I.
Another vision of the global crisis is presented in the book The Great Global Transformation, where economist Branko Milanovic writes about a new global order emerging from the rise of China. Its contours are not yet clear, but this order is expected to pit the US and China against each other. “China is simply unabsorbed into the current US-led system,” he concludes.
It is true that the sense of progress has all but disappeared in the West. In the US and Europe, progress is no longer claimed to be objective. On the contrary, the United States, as it approaches its 250th anniversary, resembles the last stages of the Roman Republic, a once-proud country with weakened institutions and deep divisions.
Meanwhile, the European Union is failing to realize the project of a stronger union, facing continued divisions and decision-making paralysis.
At this point, Dasgupta criticizes the very roots of the Western liberal order. He argues that international law and liberal ideas have often been developed to support private and colonial interests, including figures such as Hugo Grotius and John Locke.
According to him, Western liberalism was “too imperial, too one-sided, and too Christian” to function as a universal faith.
However, some nation-states continue to perform better, such as Japan, the Nordic countries, Canada, and Australia, which offer a higher quality of life and more social equality.
The most worrying problem remains the situation of large countries, especially the USA, where economic power is concentrated in a few technological companies with great influence and more limited social responsibility.
At the same time, recent conflicts and geopolitical tensions have accelerated the disintegration of the global system.
Although these authors present strong analyses of the problems, they offer few concrete solutions.
The future remains uncertain. The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence brings risks but also transformative opportunities for humanity.
In the end, it is clear that the world will not continue on the same path as after World War II. What will come next remains unknown, but change seems inevitable. /Adapted from ForeignPolicy /
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