The unmaking of the nation state

After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order

by Rana Dasgupta

Published by Penguin

496 pages ₹999

 The central argument in Rana Dasgupta’s After Nations is that the most familiar contemporary political form, the nation state, is a historical contingency that emerged from an extended period of violent contestation among European countries in the medieval period. The Westphalian construct envisaged each state enjoying a monopoly of coercive power within its own clearly defined territorial limits. But this relative peace in Europe was bought with the transference of violence to the European periphery, to the colonies. The industrial revolution rode on the backs of cruel exploitation of non-European populations. Liberalism at its birth was racially bound. Mr Dasgupta demonstrates with sharp insight how these origins continue to dominate our world despite the formal equality of nations. Beneath the thin veneer of the liberal world order, the older hierarchies continue to dominate. A multiplicity of historical streams shaped our contemporary landscape of nation states. 

The book uses an analytical framework of four categories or “immortal” ideas through which particular states bound citizens to something larger than themselves:Theology in medieval France, property and capital in England, law in the United States, and the control of nature, in particular water, in China. Each force built the modern state, which has adapted and endured since its contingent beginnings. It is Mr Dasgupta’s view that the order based on nation states is now fragmenting. 

One of the most perceptive chapters in the book relates to international law. This did not evolve from a disinterested search for universal principles but to serve commercial expedience. The 16th century Dutch lawyer, Hugo Grotius who is celebrated as its founder, wrote chiefly to justify the Dutch East India Company's depredations at sea. Mr Dasgupta locates its 19th century elaboration in the work of Scottish jurist James Lorimer, whose 1883 tripartite division of humanity into “civilised”, “barbarian”, and “savage” categories formally graded sovereign rights by race — a hierarchy the author reads as the deep structure beneath the 20th century’s ostensibly universal legal order. Liberalism, in this sense, was never the impartial doctrine it claimed to be. The Wealth of Nations and the American Declaration of Independence, published four months apart in 1776, mark for Mr Dasgupta the same ideological event: The liberation of capital and property from monarchical restraint, dressed in the language of individual freedom. Post-1989, he argues, this reinterpretation completed itself — liberty came to mean the freedom of capital rather than of citizens, and citizenship itself became a purchasable class asset, from golden visas to offshore entities. 

Mr Dasgupta’s striking contemporary claim is that tech mega-corporations are the first genuinely new geopolitical actors since the nation-state itself — cross-border, unaccountable to any electorate, and structurally analogous to the East India Company’s private exercise of sovereign power. Against this he sets China, organised not around religion, capital, or law but around the management of nature: A hydraulic civilisation whose rivers determined imperial legitimacy (the loss of the “Mandate of Heaven” was, historically, a verdict on water management), and whose claim to tianxia — universal moral authority — sits uneasily with the Westphalian nation state. This “hydraulic empire” thesis derives from Karl Wittfogel’s 1957 Oriental Despotism, which linked the appearance of centralised states in China, Mesopotamia, and Mexico to large-scale irrigation projects on their rivers. Mr Dasgupta’s reading of China may fall neatly into his analytical construct but flattens a much more turbulent and complex historical reality. 

 India does not merit its own civilisational identity and its contribution to the international order. It appears in these pages chiefly as an object of British exploitation, including the deindustrialisation of its textile economy, rather than as a political actor with its own juridical and constitutional inheritance.  The RSS and Hindutva surface only as one symptom of a global theocratic backlash to globalisation. India did inherit the colonial institutional and legal apparatus that Mr Dasgupta indicts. But he fails to consider how this legacy was layered toward universal suffrage, land reform and affirmative action at home and unusual activism externally through the Non-Aligned Movement and through the multilateral institutions and processes which provided, for a time, the scaffolding of the post-Second World War international order. Russia fares still worse: A country that has worked actively to dismantle it, is missing in a book substantially about that order’s unmaking. 

Artificial intelligence figures as a driver of geopolitical shifts but more in instances of unaccountable private capital rather than as a force reorganising great-power competition itself. Compute, chips, and the infrastructure race now shaping US-China rivalry — arguably as consequential to the nation-state’s authority as any of Mr Dasgupta’s four historical forces — go largely unaddressed. 

The conclusion, some 30 pages after 400 of diagnosis, is correspondingly modest. Mr Dasgupta rejects both world government and the libertarian “network state”, calling instead for citizenship, law, money, and religion reimagined at planetary rather than national scale, grounded in ecological responsibility and what he calls conviviality. Its shape remains vague and amorphous, as it must. After Nations is at its best diagnosing how the current order was built to serve narrow interests dressed as universal principle; it is considerably less certain in imagining what could actually replace it. 

Despite these limitations, the book is magisterial in scope and full of penetrating insights. Its treatment of the evolution of international law whose expedient origins persist in carefully constructed universalist pretensions is its greatest strength and bears careful reading.

The reviewer is a former foreign secretary