New-age geopolitics

The nation-state is very much alive, only challenged and reinforced by the digital age

- RISHI RAJ

HISTORY IS FULL of sweeping declarations—moments when thinkers and pundits have confidently pronounced the end of one grand force or another. Be it the 'End of History', famously proposed by Francis Fukuyama after the fall of the Soviet Union, or the 'End of Geography', floated with the rise of a hyper-connected digital world, such claims tend to overlook a central truth that history, geography and the structures they produce rarely die; they just evolve. The grand revolutions of the past, be it industrial, technological, or ideological, have consistently altered the course of human affairs, but none have obliterated the foundations on which societies are built. And it is precisely this hubristic assumption that GeoTechnoGraphy seeks to demolish with analytical clarity.

Fukuyama's 1992 thesis, that liberal democracy was the final form of human government, was lauded in a world giddy from the collapse of communism and the global spread of capitalism. But critics like Eric Hobsbawm, the great Marxist historian, were quick to dismantle the triumph embedded in Fukuyama's worldview. Hobsbawm saw Fukuyama's ideas as historically naive and ideologically premature. He argued that assuming the end of ideological conflict was not only empirically flawed, given the ongoing struggles over inequality, nationalism, and resource distribution, but also dangerous, as it encouraged political complacency in the West. Hobsbawm warned that capitalism without the counterbalance of socialism or state control would deepen inequalities and destabilise democracies, an insight that seems increasingly prescient today.