States of flux

The nation state is history’s most effective and efficient form of society. So why is it collapsing?

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Donald Trump sometimes tweets about “the G2”, meaning the US and China. It's a way to taunt the other members of the G7, the informal alliance between the major industrialised capitalist economies of the late 20th century, the US, UK, France, Germany, Italy, Canada and Japan. In recent decades, all of those nations have diminished in relative status, wealth, military power and state capacity except the US, whose only remote peer is the still-rising superpower ruled from Beijing.

Everyone wants to know how and why the balance of power has shifted, and what it all means. There are many theories. Rana Dasgupta is a rising star of the global intelligentsia: educated in Oxford, France and the US, he's published essays and novels and won prestigious awards. After Nations is his contribution to the ever-growing what-the-hell-is-going-on? genre, attempting to situate our historic moment into a grand unified theory of everything, beginning with how the state came into being and what comes after it.

He begins with the observation, “You almost certainly live in a nation state. Like 99.75% of our species. This is recent. In 1900, only about 25% of the world’s population lived in a recognisably ‘national’ state, of which there were no more than 50.” Most of human history has seen a diversity of political organisations, “sometimes overlapping and symbiotic, sometimes divided and incommensurable”. Tribes, kinship groups, city states, principalities, sultanates, colonies, suzerains, tributaries and protectorates were the norm, most of them in vassalage to an external empire. Why do we regard the state as the be-all and end-all of politics?