Nation-states are past their democratic peak, says Rana Dasgupta

You began as a novelist, switched to reported nonfiction, and your new book is a world historical analysis of the nation-state. What prompted this transition?

All of my work is in some ways about forms of community that are not the nation. In my first book, Tokyo Cancelled, a lot of travellers were stuck together in an airport, and they started telling stories. The idea of being in an airport is that they’re not in any national space, particularly. It was my attempt to create an image of what a global culture – of storytelling, of cosmopolitanism – might look like. So, some of my intellectual concerns have remained constant. But as a writer, you’re constantly looking for new ways to tell the story you want to tell. And as I’ve gotten older, or as the world has become more strange, I’ve felt the need to speak to the reader directly, rather than to invent stories about this.

You’ve lived in four different countries – India, the U.S., the U.K., and France. Did this experience impact how you approached this project?

It did. As I was moving around between these countries, it was interesting how similar the conversations were in all of them. The old school liberals were panicking that the state was falling apart, that it was being overtaken by barbarians, values were collapsing, institutions were collapsing, and news media were collapsing. Each of these countries seemed to think it was their own private problem, especially Britain, because Brexit was such a shock to people. But I felt that it’s not a national problem. Maybe it’s not that Britain has done something or France has done something but that we are at a particular moment in the life cycle of the nation-state where it is changing into something new.

In each of these countries, we’re confronting a different style of politics, a different set of motivations for politicians. What could be linking these different countries? What would it mean if we looked at the nation-state system as a single object rather than a bunch of discrete nations? What if the nation-state system is something with its own agendas independently of what national electorates want? This book was my attempt to answer these questions.

You argue in the book that after the Enlightenment, the nation-state became the new god, a ‘mortal God’ displacing the immortal ‘old’ gods of religion. There began a secular ‘worship’ of the nation-state. Does the rise of religious rightwing forces everywhere suggest that the ‘old gods’ are back to challenge the ‘new gods’?

Yes. It’s so critical to realise that history is not over. When we look back at history and at all the struggles people have had with God and Empire and state, we’re still in that story. Religion has always been dynamic. It’s always adapted to new circumstances. Empires invented gods that looked like them. Kings needed gods that looked like kings. So you often have the removal of female gods, which helped the establishment of male monarchy. You have the removal of multiple gods in favour of monotheism, which has been very useful to empires. We shouldn’t imagine that this process is finished.

So yes, there was this period where European philosophers went through an intricate process of taking elements of Christianity and reorganising them for the state. They had problems – Catholics and Protestants were killing each other, and states were getting ripped apart by religious war. So they said, let’s push God out of politics and create an all-powerful state that has power over both Catholics and Protestants. And that state looks exactly like the God we pushed away – it is all-powerful, all-knowing, and it is all good. The state now takes over the loyalties that God used to have. In the modern period, it didn’t matter if you believed in a divine God or not, but you had to believe in the state. You could not disown the law of the state or pretend that you were outside it. The state had total power over you from birth till death, and it could even deliver death. So for a very long time, all over the world, to a great extent, the state was the dominant cosmic creature in most people’s lives.

Today, communism and liberalism, the two grand state religions of the modern period, have either collapsed or are on the verge of it. The old religions are rushing in to fill the vacuum. Many around the world feel the state is no longer enough on its own. It’s too corrupt, too weak, and unable to solve human problems. We need to put God back in the centre of things – and that’s actually become a slogan for many politicians. Viktor Orban in Hungary has made it clear that liberalism has failed and we need Christianity again. Even Donald Trump has said similar things even though he’s not a particularly religious guy.

Does India fit this analytical framework?

India does not fit some of these things because female gods are still alive and well in India. But there has been a masculinisation of Hinduism in the last few decades. Clearly, religion has come back to the centre of Indian political life. The secular ideas that were around in the 1950s and ’60s have been actively dismissed, not just because people are very religious but because there’s a radically new idea of the state – that it should be a celestial kind of object, not just a terrestrial thing. It must draw its authority from elsewhere. It’s a natural impulse, because after all, the state makes enormous claims. Its law is everything.

Unless there are extremely awe-inspiring human beings operating in the state who can demonstrate their power, for instance, by delivering incredible material improvements or incredible infrastructure, people start feeling that these are ordinary humans and the state is not really achieving very much, they are not getting much out of it. In such a scenario, it’s natural to try and claim divine inspiration. We’re not immune to these things that have happened in the past. We can see all over the world how God is becoming more and more useful as a political tool.

The nation-state is in crisis, but nationalisms are doing very well, no matter where you look. How do we understand this contradiction?

If we say the nation-state is in crisis, we should be a little clear what we mean, because nation- states, at a structural level, are the political apparatus of the capitalist system. So they’re not going anywhere because the capitalist system is not going anywhere. But they are ceasing to deliver some of the services and the political goods that they used to in the past. Most of the rich countries have got over their democratic peak. They’re past the moment at which the alignment of the interests of the state and the interests of the population was at its greatest. Those interests are now diverging. And so we see conflicts between populations and states that are much more intense than even 10 years ago.

Are we witnessing a scenario similar to the high colonial period where the state’s primary functions have receded to maintaining law and order, which boils down to protecting property rights and working for global capital, while abandoning domestic populations?

Yes, this is one of the key arguments of the book. The high industrial period of the West was an exception. People in the West look back on their own late 20th century as the golden age of their respective nations, and as the normal condition of nations. They see what’s happening in the 2020s as an aberration. To me, this is a problem of thinking in short terms. If you only ever think back to the 1960s, then within this short time frame, it looks like states today are being absurdly self-destructive. But if you look back on a 200-year time frame, you see that the second-half of the 20th century is completely unlike the rest of that period.

So, at the beginning of that period, 18th century Britain is not a failed state. It is an incredibly successful state, but it’s not a democracy. In fact, it gives very few rights to its own population. Most people in Britain cannot vote – no woman can vote and most men cannot vote. Poor men can be kidnapped by the state and sent over to die of malaria, manning Caribbean plantations and guarding slaves. So, the British state is an incredibly violent engine for most human beings that come in contact with it. But it’s accumulating enormous power and profit for the small elites that run the country.

The commercial aristocracy of Britain is immensely dynamic, world-changing, and wealthy in the 18th century. But because there are these two economies – the slow-growing domestic economy and the very rapidly growing imperial economy, most of the population doesn’t have any stake in the second economy, and, therefore, they cannot be given the vote. Democracy obviously is not going to work for the East India Company. So this is a state that is very successful in certain ways though it is undemocratic and despotic. But over time it gives way to something else. The reason it gives way to something else is industrialisation, where suddenly the working classes become the key strategic asset of Britain.

In the 19th century and in the early 20th century, Western countries realised that their working classes, their ex-agrarian population, is their key asset. And if those people are weak or underfed or undereducated, it’s a problem for nation-states. So they suddenly invest hugely in their populations. They invest in their education, in their health care, to create a predictable, productive working class. They realise it’s in their own best interest to give democratic rights to those people so that the capitalist, industrial system stays efficient and can respond quickly to political frustrations and resentments.

Now, in the 21st century, the West is going through the opposite process, where it has moved most of its production outside its own borders. With AI and the sort of new trends in technology to automate labour, the Western profit system no longer really depends on the population at large. Most of the population is not strategic labour anymore. It is just peripheral labour doing various kinds of jobs. So increasingly, this is a problem for the democratic system as well.

Silicon Valley and Washington are playing games with the capitalist system at large, and they’re imperial games in which ordinary Americans don’t have any stake. They’re not going to profit from those things. So they are frustrated by some of these imperial ventures, and would like to get the government to focus more on their problems. So, we’re seeing a divergence of interests, and that expresses itself as a gradual corruption of the political system and all the information and news systems by which people participated in democracy.

We increasingly find a sort of didacticism of the state, where it teaches the population to lower its expectations, telling them that your American citizenship has given you false ideas of your own importance. We are now going to teach you that when we shoot an American citizen, not only that we can do this, but also we will not regret it. We will use these incidents as a lesson in cruelty so that you, the American people, realise that we are only warehousing you, we don’t really need you, and we are in the process of completely redrawing this political map. 

You speak of China as a prototype of post-national governance, as a civilisational operating system. But China is also driving the extraction of natural resources on a scale and at a pace we have never seen before. So, is China a model for the future or is it more like a warning for the future?

China is unique. It’s not like every rising power will be China, because China has the ‘software’ from learned political evolution over long periods of time to run transnational systems like it does today. There’s only room for one China in the world. The risks that America thinks lie in China are not necessarily the risks, let’s say, of Germany in the 1930s. America is constantly obsessed with the Second World War as the sort of myth of origin. Everything is World War III, everything is Hitler again. Just as when Britain was declining, there was this bad Germany. Now America’s declining, so there is going to be this warlike China. No. The real risks of China are political and ecological devastation.

I’ve spent a lot of time in Africa the last few months. China has completely infiltrated many of the nation-states there to the extent that they’re no longer sovereign powers. I was in Ghana recently. The Ghanaian police force is significantly enthralled to China because China has given them a lot of money, equipment and training. It’s difficult for the Ghanaian police force to arrest Chinese nationals who are doing a lot of the illegal gold mining in the country. So, if you have a state that cannot actually administer its own laws in its own territories, or control its own natural resources, it is not really sovereign in many ways.

China is pulling out timber, mineral resources, fish from the ocean in ways that are completely devastating the African reality, changing even their diet – because a lot of these coastal communities have to turn to bush meat and jungle fodder and even monkeys – which creates new pathways for epidemics. It is a very devastating extractive force. And that is where we should be locating the threat from China, not what’s happening in the South China Sea, where China is doing what all great powers do, and what America and Russia have done. Those are not really the deep threats. The deep threats are the breakdown of ecological systems, and we’ve seen ecological breakdown as a consistent feature of Chinese history because it is such an extractive power. Another danger is the collapse of the political protections that many people in poorer countries have had until recently, so we might face political catastrophes and migration on a massive scale.

What do you make of Trump’s Greenland obsession? Peter Thiel, one of Trump’s tech tycoon backers, wants to build an ‘internet-native’, ‘post-nation’ libertarian settlement in Greenland. A post-nation city untrammelled by the baggage of the nation-state and government regulations. Are such settlements one form of the post-nation future?

There is this fantasy in Silicon Valley of living ‘outside’. A lot of these people go on about the evils of government, how all states are essentially communist states because they take taxes from you. But the potential audience for their vision of the post-nation-state is very small. These are not states that can manage large populations. They’re not states that that can administer agrarian systems. They’re states that can cater to people who are able to fund, essentially, their own kind of high walls, military protection, and that can extract revenues from other places. They’re not going to be big profit centres in themselves because there’s hardly any population.

So this idea of Peter Thiel and lots of other people like him, these libertarians who dream of a privatised, sort of medieval system of fiefdoms, where everybody’s got their own little corporate state – it’s a very poor vision compared to the Enlightenment vision. In some ways, the Enlightenment vision was a universal vision for all humanity. This is a vision for a few people, the CEO class, the CEO citizens.

But it is still a vision of the ideal techno-feudal state, isn’t it? Maybe the ‘regular’ nation-states would turn into service providers for these techno-feudal cities?

That’s right. In some ways, many of them are living that kind of life already. They’ve exported their finance to certain offshore places, their kids might be at school in one place, their property might be in another place, they have a nuclear bunker in another place. So, yes, Greenland, as a kind of non-state territory that is enormous arouses all kinds of fantasies in them. Yes, it’s possible to imagine an offshore financial centre that is administering corporate interests elsewhere, whether they’re industrial or virtual. A sort of Monaco or Singapore on steroids. But the whole point of that is exclusion – most people cannot be in them. For 99% of humanity, it’s still the nation-states that will discipline, enclose, warehouse, employ, and feed, in some ways. The main issue remains. We still are in a nation-state system.

The other big thing about Greenland is that – and this is another argument in the book – not only China but also other countries, including the UAE and Russia have overtaken the U.S. in their flexibility and nimbleness at extracting minerals from war zones. The UAE is famously active in the Sudanese Civil War, playing out the politics of that war for its maximum mineral advantage. A lot of the gold extracted from Ghana is going to the UAE, too. The UAE has figured out how to ally with various African forces to monopolise a lot of the mineral flows. American corporations can’t do that. They’re bound by all kinds of laws and procedures that make it impossible for them. They just don’t have that knowledge or intelligence.

America is getting outflanked by other powers that are very good at entering these different realities and figuring out how to navigate them. I think this is one of the reasons that Greenland, the pure imperial possession of Greenland, seems like a good option to Donald Trump, since they’ve lost the battle in many parts of Africa. Greenland is a territory that maybe they could just take. I see it as a manoeuvre of imperial catch-up, putting America back on an even keel with some of these other countries when it comes to things like rare earth minerals.

Some would argue that human beings are wired for a tribal identity. We all want to belong to some kind of a tribe, be it nation or caste or religion or something else that carries an emotional charge. Do you agree? And if so, what sort of a collective identitarian core could a post-nation system offer?

It’s probably true that human beings will always recognise some people as belonging to them and some people as being foreign in some ways. But I think these tribal identities are much more flexible than we think. The nation-state itself was a very improbable kind of community in many places when it emerged, and in many places today, it’s still not been possible to form a state out of all these disparate tribes of various sorts. But several states have done it very successfully.

If you take France, only 20% of the people spoke French when the French state was created. But people today feel very French. India is also, by and large, a very successful project in that sense. It’s an achievement of political imagination, of propaganda. So it is possible to change the scale at which we think we’re part of a community. Sometimes that community can be very large and sometimes it can be very small and sometimes we can be linked to people far away. In our period, I don’t think nation-states are disappearing. They are becoming much more turbulent, and we are discovering new kinds of shared interests with other people.

We may not know those people, but we realise that there are other people who are also seeking to, let’s say, protect themselves from state violence. A lot of people today in Iran and in Minnesota would both be thinking, ‘OK, how can we protect ourselves from state violence?’ But it might also be the farmers of the world. It might be everybody who is essentially unable to sell their work for a state currency – those people could be in the United States, they could be in Congo.

In a world that’s pretty gloomy, where possibilities seem to be diminishing, the one expanding area of our experience is technology. Technology gives us ways of imagining communities, imagining networks, imagining even economies and legal systems that could not have been imagined when the nation-state was imagined, because these are non-territorial systems, and they allow us to think of community in extraordinary ways.

At the end of my book, I lay out some of the possibilities for how these technologies might help us. But these are things that experts in law and finance and technology have to think about. It’s possible to imagine truly remarkable things that, maybe don’t destroy what exists but complement and support what exists so that if systems collapse, there’s somewhere else for us to land.