In his article in The Guardian, Rana Dasgupta claims that nation states will not survive - and it would be best if we got over that rather quickly. However, there are a couple of developments that are going to take more or less the rest of this century, until humanity will have arrived at new concepts that fit the modern situation.
This is the beginning of Dasgupta's text:
Read on here:
Rana Dasgupta, "The demise of the nation state", The Guardian (5 Apr 2018)
What do you think? Is he right? Or will nation states still exist in the next century, too? What factors will matter most for how things will develop?
Share your opinion here or at the mebis forum.
This is the beginning of Dasgupta's text:
What is happening to national politics? Every day in the US, events further exceed the imaginations of absurdist novelists and comedians; politics in the UK still shows few signs of recovery after the “national nervous breakdown” of Brexit. France “narrowly escaped a heart attack” in last year’s elections, but the country’s leading daily feels this has done little to alter the “accelerated decomposition” of the political system. In neighbouring Spain, El País goes so far as to say that “the rule of law, the democratic system and even the market economy are in doubt”; in Italy, “the collapse of the establishment” in the March elections has even brought talk of a “barbarian arrival”, as if Rome were falling once again. In Germany, meanwhile, neo-fascists are preparing to take up their role as official opposition, introducing anxious volatility into the bastion of European stability.
But the convulsions in national politics are not confined to the west. Exhaustion, hopelessness, the dwindling effectiveness of old ways: these are the themes of politics all across the world. 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).
What is the relationship between these various upheavals?
Read on here:
Rana Dasgupta, "The demise of the nation state", The Guardian (5 Apr 2018)
What do you think? Is he right? Or will nation states still exist in the next century, too? What factors will matter most for how things will develop?
Share your opinion here or at the mebis forum.
