Dasgupta - The demise of the nation state

Rana Dasgupta's recent article in The Guardian (Dasgupta, 2018) predicts the continued decline of the nation state and proposes new ways of relating globally are underway. While the decline of the nation state may frighten those from historically strong western nations, the reality of the world in which we live is that a new international order will emerge that includes:

• Global financial regulation - building systems to track transitional money flows, to transfer a portion of them into public channels, and seriously address global redistribution.
• Global flexible democracy - national governments themselves will be subjected to a superior tier of authority.
• New conceptions of citizenship - deregulating human movement will match the deregulation of capital: it is unjust to preserve the freedom to move capital out of a place and simultaneously forbid people from following.

Key quotes from Dasgupta's essay that substantiate the need for, and reality of, these changes:

• The most momentous development of our era, precisely, is the waning of the nation state: its inability to withstand countervailing 21st-century forces, and its calamitous loss of influence over human circumstances.
• ...the current appeal of machismo as political style, the wall-building and xenophobia, the mythology and race theory, the fantastical promises of national restoration - these are not cures, but symptoms of what is slowly revealing itself to all: nation states everywhere are in an advanced state of political and moral decay from which they cannot individually extricate themselves.
• Today's failure of national political authority, after all, derives in large part from the loss of control over money flows. At the most obvious level, money is being transferred out of national space altogether, into a booming 'offshore' zone.
• The destruction of state authority over capital has of course been the explicit objective of the financial revolution that defines our present era.

If Dasgupta is correct, the opportunities and mandate for leadership and citizenship will be inescapable. Those who will benefit most in the world-wide and connected community, and will create mutual benefit for all, will be those who understand leadership and citizenship in very different ways.