Rana Dasgupta wiping Globalisation's bum

Edit- Rana has clarified that his essay wasn't about India or China- which retain structural features of the old, pre Globalisation, Nation State in a robust fashion. Bearing this in mind, some of the criticisms that follow misfire.

Rana Dasgupta, writing in the Guardian, claims that the Nation State is dying because Globalisation has made it obsolete.

How does he explain Trump and Brexit and the weakening of the European Union and of NATO and so forth?
He blames something called 'populism'. Apparently it is a disease that afflicts Nation States on their deathbeds.

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 circumstance. National political authority is in decline, and, since we do not know any other sort, it feels like the end of the world. This is why a strange brand of apocalyptic nationalism is so widely in vogue. But 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

I suppose an European, just woken from a two year long coma, might still feel that the Nation State had waned while what had waxed was the pooled sovereignty represented by the E.U.

Britain, however, will not be part of Europe. The Nation State, for most Guardian readers, has revived with a vengeance.

Europe, of course, is a small part of the world and is of diminishing importance. India and China have experienced no 'waning of the Nation State'. On the contrary, they look more cohesive than ever before. Why? Globalisation has strengthened their Economies and altered their horizons.

Failed or failing States, by contrast, have not benefited- nor been greatly harmed- from Globalisation. Why? The causes of their failure were endogenous.

Rana takes a different view, He thinks India and China are weaker now then they were before Globalisation. What is his evidence? He says that India is now experiencing 'ethno-religious purification' whereas it was in the Forties and Fifties and mid-Sixties that there was appreciable Muslim emigration to Pakistan. Nothing of the sort now obtains precisely because India is unlikely to suffer a military defeat at the hands of an Islamic foe.

Rana also thinks 'magnification of presidential power and abandonment of civil rights' is worse under Xi than Mao. Why?

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).

Is any of this true about India? Where is the exhaustion? True, Manmohan Singh did look exhausted. Modi does not.
Do the Chinese people feel hopeless? There is no evidence of it. What is remarkable is that 'old ways'- i.e. Party control of the Economy- has been reasserted in a highly effective manner. In India too, old fashioned Hindu Nationalism of the Mrs. Gandhi or Mahatma Gandhi sort is proving surprisingly seductive.
The truth is that countries which had a tradition of 'energetic authoritarian 'solutions'' have stayed faithful to that tradition. India does not have any such a tradition but it can rally behind a good leader like Modi.

Rana, however, believes that-

'All countries are today embedded in the same system, which subjects them all to the same pressures: and it is these that are squeezing and warping national political life everywhere.'

Thus, South Sudan and Venezuela are currently subject to the same pressures as the United States and Norway. That is why their trajectories are so similar.

What world is Rana living in?

 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 circumstance.

 Syria is a nation state whose power has waned and no doubt this has had calamitous consequences. Iraq too has suffered. But 'countervailing 21st century forces'- like ISIS- don't really pose any threat to countries like India or China which are cohesive in terms of ethnicity or culture. Rana might not like to admit that India is a Hindu country or that China is ethnically homogeneous. Nor that Globalisation have enabled both to become far more economically and militarily powerful than they could have managed under autarkic regimes.

There was a time when a fake cosmopolitanism- like Rana's- had a certain cachet. Obama was the first American President who had grown up outside the continental United States. While he was in office, Europe deluded itself that it could play a role in a 'rules based' International order. Unfortunately, Europe's initiatives backfired and it now itself looks shaky.

Globalisation based on free trade was bound to run out of steam because Economic theory has moved forward. It is now clear that Tiebout sorting is the way to go- i.e. different fiscal regimes determined on the basis of subsidiarity. Protectionism doesn't matter because Tiebout models are global price takers. Thus, there is no point repeating the arguments of the Nineteen Thirties with respect to Trade just as there was no point repeating Keynesian arguments in the face of the sub-prime crash.

National political authority- even where sovereignty has been pooled- has increased because of the terrorist threat,  increased anxiety over immigration, as well as a panic regarding foreign powers misusing Social Media. However there have been similar fluctuations in the past. There is no real secular trend here.

National political authority is in decline, and, since we do not know any other sort, it feels like the end of the world.

What?! Who in Britain or India or America or Australia or anywhere at all feels that the Government isn't powerful enough and that this spells the end of the world?

This is why a strange brand of apocalyptic nationalism is so widely in vogue.

Where? Modi isn't very different from Vajpayee. Xi has been around for a long time, as has Putin. So have Erdogan and Netanyahu. Nothing very much has changed. Even Trump's election isn't so surprising. The fact is, Obama was an 'outsider' candidate as well. Both Trump and Obama beat Hillary- who just didn't know when to quit.

But 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.

America is the most powerful nation in the world. Economic theory predicts that it can grab more of the gains of trade in the short run through selective Protection. It tends to do so no matter what the President says.
Americans don't believe that America is in an 'advanced state of political and moral decay'. Nor do Indians or anybody else. That is why smart Indians want to emigrate to the States. Rana may think Indians should be running away from America. But then he isn't really smart, is he?

 Why is this happening? In brief, 20th-century political structures are drowning in a 21st-century ocean of deregulated finance, autonomous technology, religious militancy and great-power rivalry.

Deregulated finance? After 2008? Under which rock has Rana been living?
What about 'autonomous technology'? Does this guy really think robots are designing other robots on some remote island ruled by Dr. No? Does he not understand that Government money still drives fundamental research?

Rana speaks of 'religious militancy'. Where is it? There is none in Europe- if you exclude some fringe Islamists. What about America? Again, there has been no big change. Indeed, 'religious militancy' has declined even amongst Islamic States- witness Saudi Arabia's volte face.

What of 'great power rivalry'? Does Rana really not know how much that has declined since the fall of the Berlin Wall?

Meanwhile, the suppressed consequences of 20th-century recklessness in the once-colonised world are erupting, cracking nations into fragments and forcing populations into post-national solidarities: roving tribal militias, ethnic and religious sub-states and super-states.

Codswallop! Colonialism ended long ago. There were no 'suppressed consequences'. On the contrary, pogroms and ethnic cleansing happened very quickly- as in the case of the Partition of the subcontinent- but then things settled down to an even keel.
The countries currently worst affected by 'roving tribal militias' etc. either had no experience or minimal experience of Colonialism. Why? Because they were too difficult or unprofitable to colonise. But, that is also the reason they are failed or failing States.

Finally, the old superpowers’ demolition of old ideas of international society – ideas of the “society of nations” that were essential to the way the new world order was envisioned after 1918 – has turned the nation-state system into a lawless gangland; and this is now producing a nihilistic backlash from the ones who have been most terrorised and despoiled.

Wow! Does Rana really not know about the Second World War? Does he think some wonderful 'society of nations' came into being in 1918?

Where is this 'nihilistic backlash from the ones who have been most terrorised and despoiled'? Rana may well be Bengali. He may have relatives who were 'terrorised and despoiled' and ethnically cleansed. What backlash, nihilistic, or otherwise, have they been capable of? The sad truth is, only the weak get 'terrorised and despoiled'. When they try to fight back they are massacred. Ask the Rohingyas.

What is the matter with Rana? He's well educated and old enough to know better. I see from Wikipedia that he is only eight years younger than me. Why is he writing such ignorant shite?

The result? For increasing numbers of people, our nations and the system of which they are a part now appear unable to offer a plausible, viable future.

Quite true. Increasing numbers of people will always realise that sooner or later they are going to die. To suggest otherwise is implausible. There will be a future, but they won't be viable in it.

This is particularly the case as they watch financial elites – and their wealth – increasingly escaping national allegiances altogether.

So what? For America, this has been perfectly legal since 1975. Britain lifted all exchange controls soon after. Everybody could see that War time mercantilism was silly.
The truth is that people are now more comfortable with the notion that the very very rich should allocate capital. This is because we no longer think of the Capitalist as just some guy in a Top Hat. Now, the billionaire is a charismatic figure- an Elon Musk inventing cool new stuff, or a Bill Gates who will rescue billions from hunger and sickness- whereas the politician is a drab, incompetent and corrupt nonentity.

Today’s failure of national political authority, after all, derives in large part from the loss of control over money flows.

Rubbish! Syriza imposed Exchange Controls and reasserted control over money flows. True, the Greeks are having to suffer but it serves them right for electing a party for whom Rana could be a speech-writer.

At the most obvious level, money is being transferred out of national space altogether, into a booming “offshore” zone.

So what? Is Rana a Mercantilist? Does he think a country gets richer by stockpiling gold or currency? Or is he saying that ordinary people have got this idea into their heads and so they have lost faith in their Governments?
But, if this is so, the fault lies with people like Rana who write nonsense.

These fleeing trillions undermine national communities in real and symbolic ways.

Garbage! They make no difference whatsoever. Suppose some crazy guy comes to India or England and sells stuff in order to accumulate billions of Rupees or Pounds. He then loads them onto a ship and sails away chortling gleefully.
Has this man impoverished either India or England? Nope. He has enriched the Exchequer through what is called seignorage. In effect he has paid a 100% tax.

No doubt, Rana will say that this nutter has symbolically denuded and raped the community. Our pure and chaste Rupees or Pounds are being mercilessly fingered by that plutocrat! Hai! Hai! Hamari izzat loot gayi!'- we have suffered a fate worse than death! That bastard has fucked us in the ass and then absconded! To restore our honour, he must return to these shores and marry us properly.

They are a cause of national decay, but they are also a result: for nation states have lost their moral aura, which is one of the reasons tax evasion has become an accepted fundament of 21st-century commerce.

Yes! Our fundament has been violated by that dirty plutocrat who is fingering our virginal Rupees! There was no tax evasion in the twentieth century because the fundaments of Tax Planners retained their cherry. See how naughty this 21st century is being? I tell you, it is all due to the y2k bug! It completely corrupted the world wide web and so 21st century's morals were debauched and it started doing tax evasion. I said in 1999 that we should skip the 21st century altogether. 21 is a dangerous age. Let us jump immediately to the 69th century!

More dramatically, great numbers of people are losing all semblance of a national home, and finding themselves pitched into a particular kind of contemporary hell.

Great numbers? Not at all. The number of displaced people, as a proportion of the global population, was much higher in the nineteen forties than it is today.

Seven years after the fall of Gaddafi’s dictatorship, Libya is controlled by two rival governments, each with its own parliament, and by several militia groups fighting to control oil wealth. But Libya is only one of many countries that appear whole only on maps. Since 1989, barely 5% of the world’s wars have taken place between states: national breakdown, not foreign invasion, has caused the vast majority of the 9 million war deaths in that time.

Only 9 million? From 1915 to 1945, over a 100 million war deaths occurred. The world population was very much lower then.

And, as we know from the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Syria, the ensuing vacuum can suck in firepower from all over the world, destroying conditions for life and spewing shell-shocked refugees in every direction.

Thankfully we've just bombed Syria- so that's our good deed for the week.

Nothing advertises the crisis of our nation-state system so well, in fact, as its 65 million refugees – a “new normal” far greater than the “old emergency” (in 1945) of 40 million.

But the world population has tripled since then. Thus, the percentage is much smaller.

The unwillingness even to acknowledge this crisis, meanwhile, is appropriately captured by the contempt for refugees that now drives so much of politics in the rich world.

The crisis has been acknowledged and steps have been taken to deter entry of people who might claim refugee asylum. However such policies existed in the Sixties and Seventies and Eighties and so on. True, in the Nineties things loosened up. But there has been a substantial backlash. Why? Rich countries want to stay rich. Poor countries don't want to get poorer. Thus has it always been.

Rana thinks otherwise. He believes that Woodrow Wilson was the Messiah.

 The crisis was not wholly inevitable. Since 1945, we have actively reduced our world political system to a dangerous mockery of what was designed by US president Woodrow Wilson and many others after the cataclysm of the first world war, and now we are facing the consequences.

WTF? Does Rana not understand that the 'world political system' (which, was deeply racist and gave Syria to France and Palestine to England) designed by Wilson et al FAILED COMPLETELY? That's why there was Second World War. The Allies needed to occupy Germany and disarm it completely. As happened to France in 1815 and 1870, the Allies should not have left till reparations had been paid. Talking worthless shite helped no one.

But we should not leap too quickly into renovation. This system has done far less to deliver human security and dignity than we imagine – in some ways, it has been a colossal failure – and there are good reasons why it is ageing so much more quickly than the empires it replaced.

Is this man utterly mad? He says that the UN was worse than the League of Nations. It wasn't. The League was utterly shite. The UN is shite but it isn't based on some wholly spurious notion of 'collective security'. It is just a talking shop is all. Nuclear weapons is what keeps the Balance of Terror.

Rana believes the U.N 'is ageing more quickly than the empires it replaced'. Does he really believe that the British and the French and the Portuguese and the Dutch handed over their empires to the UN? Why did the 'young' UN hand over mandated territories to 'aged' Empires to run?

Rana believes we once had a 'Society of Nations' but we can't restore it because that naughty 21st century is up to its tricks again.

Even if we wanted to restore what we once had, that moment is gone. The reason the nation state was able to deliver what achievements it did – and in some places they were spectacular – was that there was, for much of the 20th century, an authentic “fit” between politics, economy and information, all of which were organised at a national scale.

Fuck off! There was no such fit. Developing nations had to import technology- which is a type of information- while Developed countries engaged in intra-industry trade in the same commodity.
It was not the case that Indian agronomists could increase yields by just hybridising Indian seeds. No. They had to get help from Mexico and other such far flung places.

Rana may think there was an authentic fit between Capitalist or Communist regimes and their own polities. Rana is mistaken. The Communist regimes, more often than not, took orders from the Kremlin; while the Capitalist ones bent the knee to Washington.

France and Germany and Italy discovered quite quickly that they would have to pool economic sovereignty precisely because there was no good fit between polities and economies.

National governments possessed actual powers to manage modern economic and ideological energies, and to turn them towards human – sometimes almost utopian – ends.

Some post war governments were able to borrow money from the US so as to redirect their economies from guns to butter. The nature of the workforce, too, had changed because of conscription, high female workforce participation etc. Furthermore, military R & D created 'low lying fruit' for a new O.R savvy technocratic managerial class. However,  post-war 'affluence' was something of a mirage and was associated with enormous hidden rents and a lot of allocative inefficiency. To avoid stagflation and endemic Labour unrest, countries had to free up financial markets. If they hadn't, a Latin American fate would have overtaken us.

But that era is over. After so many decades of globalisation, economics and information have successfully grown beyond the authority of national governments.

Really? So you are predicting Xi will fall. Do hold your breath.

Today, the distribution of planetary wealth and resources is largely uncontested by any political mechanism.

The Communist Party of China is a political mechanism. It is actively contesting the current distribution of planetary wealth and resources- not by writing shite books but by building transport and distribution networks.

 But to acknowledge this is to acknowledge the end of politics itself.

It is also to acknowledge that your book is worthless shite.

And if we continue to think the administrative system we inherited from our ancestors allows for no innovation, we condemn ourselves to a long period of dwindling political and moral hope.

Rana, you and your readers have shit for brains. Condemn yourselves to whatever you like. Nobody cares because you are stupid and ignorant.  Why not just follow the example of David Icke?

Half a century has been spent building the global system on which we all now depend, and it is here to stay.

Worthless shite. The global system arose out of a military alliance which prevailed over Germany in two world wars. Some European countries, lacking nuclear weapons, depended, not upon the global system, but their super-power ally. Nobody else did.

Without political innovation, global capital and technology will rule us without any kind of democratic consultation, as naturally and indubitably as the rising oceans.

Oho! The oceans are going to rule us are they? How will they do so? Will mermaids 'honey trap' our senior politicians? No doubt, 'global capital' will be represented by an actual octopus. Technology, I suppose, will be represented by an electric eel.

Rana Dasgupta must be Bengali. No doubt, he will be rewarded with plenty of hilsa fish.

If we wish to rediscover a sense of political purpose in our era of global finance, big data, mass migration and ecological upheaval, we have to imagine political forms capable of operating at that same scale.

Yes! We must imagine a giant octopus with its tentacles on every lever of global finance and big data and so on.

The current political system must be supplemented with global financial regulations, certainly, and probably transnational political mechanisms, too.

Urm... this sort of thing already exists. The problem is the rising oceans will 'naturally and indubitably' drown us all, so let's get back to imagining that giant octopus and jerking off to tentacle porn.

That is how we will complete this globalisation of ours, which today stands dangerously unfinished.

Okay. Easily done. We could just all sign up to whatever Washington requires of us.

Its economic and technological systems are dazzling indeed, but in order for it to serve the human community, it must be subordinated to an equally spectacular political infrastructure, which we have not even begun to conceive.

People conceived of a World Parliament a long time ago. Do you have a better idea? Does it involve mermaids? OMG! The Sci Fi Chanel has a new series, called Siren, which promises to do for Mermaids what 'Bitten' did for werewolves. Rana is ahead of the curve on this one. He more truly incarnates the zeitgeist. Must be those Bengali genes of his.

 It will be objected, inevitably, that any alternative to the nation-state system is a utopian impossibility.

Nope. Everybody knows that Hitler would have been quite happy to replace the nation-state system. There was actually some economic sense to this- hence the EU's attempt to replace the nation-state system.
It has always been clear that universal acceptance of a global hegemon would render nation-states little more than folkloric trinkets.

But even the technological accomplishments of the last few decades seemed implausible before they arrived, and there are good reasons to be suspicious of those incumbent authorities who tell us that human beings are incapable of similar grandeur in the political realm. In fact, there have been many moments in history when politics was suddenly expanded to a new, previously inconceivable scale – including the creation of the nation state itself. And – as is becoming clearer every day – the real delusion is the belief that things can carry on as they are.

So what is your spectacular idea? Oh. You don't really have one do you? You are just a tease. Watch out! Them mermaids will get you unless the great octopus gets you first. So it's a toss up between titty wanks (mermaids being fishy from the waist down) and tentacle porn. Actually, I can kind of see where Rana is coming from. He has a ready-made Social Media constituency and could become the Che Guevara of its chatrooms.

The first step will be ceasing to pretend that there is no alternative. So let us begin by considering the scale of the current crisis.

It is small by historical standards.

Let us start with the west. Europe, of course, invented the nation state:

Nonsense! Egypt is the nation state with the longest continuous existence in history. China, I suppose, comes next. Hindu India, for most Hindus is a Nation State with a very long pedigree indeed. Japan has been wholly cohesive and autonomous for more than a thousand years.

Why does Dasgupta think Europe 'invented the nation state'? When did it do so? Name one 'nation state' in Europe. England? It is part of a United Kingdom. France? It has overseas territories. Belgium? It has two nations within its borders as does Holland from which it split. Spain? If it is a Nation State what's all this fuss about extraditing Puigdemont to face treason charges?  Germany and Italy did have strong Nationalist movements but the former was an Empire which excluded German speaking Austria and the latter was a Kingdom where, in 1861, only 2.5 % of the population spoke the national language and about 13% could understand it properly.

The fact is, even Talleyrand's notion of a France within its natural borders did not correspond to what 'Nationality' required.

the principle of territorial sovereignty was agreed at the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The treaty made large-scale conquest difficult within the continent; instead, European nations expanded into the rest of the world.

Really? How come Fredrick the Great and Napoleon and Hitler and Stalin were able to gobble up so much territory? Where did Poland disappear to? What happened to Kingdoms like Hanover and Saxony and so forth?
Spain and Portugal had expanded overseas long before. Why? They had developed their navies. The Western European littoral featured cod fishermen who ventured far into the Atlantic. This is what gave Western Europe the edge and turned some of its Nations into great maritime Imperial powers. The Peace of Westphalia was wholly irrelevant. England wasn't even represented there and it went on to become the biggest Empire of all time. However it wasn't till a hundred years later that it started to expand in India. By then, only a fool would have given any credence to the notion of 'territorial sovereignty' as being a holy cow in Europe.

The dividends of colonial plunder were converted, back home, into strong states with powerful bureaucracies and democratic polities – the template for modern European life.

Germany had no dividends of colonial plunder. It thrashed the French who did have some such dividends in 1870. Portugal's 'colonial plunder' did it no good at all. Spain similarly languished. Britain did get rich off 'colonial plunder' but as the greatest naval power in the world it would have gotten rich anyway. The problem with plunder is that it has diminishing returns. That's why the British went in for Trade and Industry. Still, its working people only began to do well after it  got shot of its Colonies.

The template for modern European life was not created by countries with overseas Empires. Rather, trade and industry flourished as States ceased to project strength and bureaucracies stopped being powerful and became humble and useful to the public.

By the end of 19th century, European nations had acquired uniform attributes still familiar today – in particular, a set of fiercely enforced state monopolies (defence, taxation and law, among others), which gave governments substantial mastery of the national destiny.

WTF? Most of Central and South East Europe was under the Hapsburgs. Much of East Europe was under the Tzar. These two multi-ethnic Empires had 'fiercely enforced state monopolies'. Ireland was not then a Nation. It had to struggle very hard to become one.

Dasgupta does not understand that all States- Imperial, Soviet, National, Consociational or whatever- assert and seek to enforce a monopoly of military, legal and fiscal power. This was true of ancient China and Maurya India and Imperial Rome and so forth.

Perhaps Dasgupta believes that 'uniform attributes' means a universal legal code. But Britain still lacks any such thing. Scotland has a separate Law and Educational system.

 When, in History, has any collective type of destiny not depended on who governs that collective and how they do it? Does Dasgupta believe 'nations' just spontaneously appear and co-ordinate individual actions without any Judges and Generals and Tax officials and Ministers? No such thing has ever happened in Indian history. Why should Europe have been different?

In return, a moral promise was made to all: the development, spiritual and material, of citizen and nation alike.

Nonsense! A promise can only be made by a person. No person has ever said anything so foolish. Dasgupta may mean 'an implicit contract was offered.' But where was this done? Which State says it will develop spiritually? The Vatican? Nope. That is bad theology. What about Gandhian India? Is 'spiritual development' a Directive Principle in the Constitution? Nope. Cow protection features but Spirituality does not. America promised 'the pursuit of happiness' to non-slaves. But happiness need not involve 'spiritual development'.

A Nation is a collection of citizens just as a theatre audience is a collection of ticket holding members of the public. It is not possible to thrill the theatre audience without also thrilling the ticket holding members of the public. If a Nation advances materially, then its citizens too are wealthier. It is a different matter that their present consumption may be curtailed and so a portion of aggregate Saving is 'forced'

Spectacular state-run projects in the fields of education, healthcare, welfare and culture arose to substantiate this promise.

Nonsense! British 'state-run projects in the fields of education, healthcare etc' were shabby not spectacular. Perhaps Dasgupta means 'after 1945, European States invested in things like a National Health Service, Government schools offering quality education etc'.
Some European countries certainly did so. Why? Because the kept high tax rates associated with the War years and used the money to finance things which tax-payers wanted and which the Government could more cheaply provide. This in turn was a function of War related increases in 'State Capacity'- i.e. the Government could use skilled people, who had originally come into the Public Sector to boost military performance, to do Peace time Reconstruction work which would raise productivity and living standards through the working of a specific Tiebout model.

In the Thirties, Europe had a miserable aspect. After the War, States had the resources and manpower to do 'catch up' growth which directly impacted on living standards thus creating an 'affluent society'.

But this had nothing to do with the Peace of Westphalia or territorial integrity or 'colonial plunder'. Rather it had to do with Hitler's madness and America's willingness to ensure Europe stopped trying to set fire to the world.

The withdrawal of this moral promise over the past four decades has been a shattering metaphysical event in the west, and one that has left populations rummaging around for new things to believe in.

Really? What happened in the mid Seventies is that Governments realised that voters did not care about Unemployment. They did care about inflation.
This did not mean that the Welfare state was abolished. All that happened, in the Nineties, was that the social minimum was made incentive compatible. No moral promise was broken. Mechanism design was improved in line with voter's demands and expectations.

For the promise was a major event in the evolution of the western psyche. It was part of a profound theological reorganisation: the French Revolution dethroned not only the monarch, but also God, whose superlative attributes – omniscience and omnipotence – were now absorbed into the institutions of the state itself. The state’s power to develop, liberate and redeem mankind became the foundational secular faith.

How long did that last? Two years? Three? Does Rana not know that the Bourbons were restored and that the Catholic Church continued to play a big part in French Society?

During the period of decolonisation that followed the second world war, the European nation-state structure was exported everywhere.

Nonsense! There is not a single country of which this could be said. Rana may think the 'European nation-state structure' features lots of Princes with the right to diplomatic passports etc. This is not the case. Yet India had such a state-structure till the late Sixties. Decolonisation was about handing power over to whoever had legitimacy. Often this was a King. Sometimes it was a General. It was never the case that the newly independent country had to follow an European template. For a start, no such thing existed.

But westerners still felt its moral promise with an intensity peculiar to themselves – more so than ever, in fact, after the creation of the welfare state and decades of unprecedented postwar growth.

Rubbish! Westerners did stuff they found pleasurable or useful. Feeling up a person they were sexually attracted to did involve 'an intensity peculiar to themselves'. If the person being felt up refused to put out, Westerners did very bitterly feel that a moral promise had been broken.

Westerners, like Easterners, get upset when something they have paid for is with held from them. This involves no 'moral promise' at all. We are speaking of breach of contract. People were forced to pay for Social Insurance and this created a corresponding entitlement.

Nostalgia for that golden age of the nation state continues to distort western political debate to this day, but it was built on an improbable coincidence of conditions that will never recur.

Which golden age? Does Rana mean Britain in the Fifties and Sixties? Is he out of his fucking mind? Does he really think any of us want to go back to that dreary period? Back then, the vast majority of working class kids had no shot at Higher Education. Now anyone can get a Degree.

Very significant was the structure of the postwar state itself, which possessed a historically unique level of control over the domestic economy. Capital could not flow unchecked across borders and foreign currency speculation was negligible compared to today. Governments, in other words, had substantial control over money flows, and if they spoke of changing things, it was because they actually could.

Yes, but that depressed living standards and created allocative inefficiency. It couldn't contain either inflation or unemployment but simply wrecked the social fabric. That's why nobody shed a tear for Exchange Controls when Mrs. Thatcher took an axe to them.

The fact that capital was captive meant they Governments could impose historic rates of taxation, which, in an era of record economic growth, allowed them to channel unprecedented energies into national development.

Sheer nonsense! Development would have been faster if taxes had been much lower because highly inefficient perks and working practices would have been eliminated.

For a few decades, state power was monumental – almost divine, indeed – and it created the most secure and equal capitalist societies ever known.

Rana was born in England in 1971. He grew up in Thatcher's England. No doubt, gullible child hat he was, he believed that things had been great under Wilson. They hadn't. Everything in the Public Sector- the Schools, the Hospitals, the Universities- was shitty. The private sector, more often than not, was shittier yet. Still, at least one could kick a Paki's head in to let off steam. In that sense it was a golden age. There were only three channels on TV but you could watch the Black and White Minstrel show. Happy times!

The destruction of state authority over capital has of course been the explicit objective of the financial revolution that defines our present era.

The State was having to subsidise Industry in the Seventies. So it cut benefits to the unemployed and the sick and so forth. But this wasn't enough. It had to restore Industry to profitability so as to have some money coming in. The only way to make Industry profitable was to leave it alone. This was true for the Financial Sector as well. A shackled Financial Sector would not have been able to raise the funds industry needed for modernization.
Thus the State sponsored the financial revolution so as to avoid going bankrupt. The alternative would have been a Venezuela type disaster.

As a result, states have been forced to shed social commitments in order to reinvent themselves as custodians of the market.

Social commitments? Does Rana mean Social Insurance? But that isn't a huge problem. It turns out that weaker sections of Society can't do much if their entitlements are reduced because....urm... they are weak.

This has drastically diminished national political authority in both real and symbolic ways.

Sheer nonsense! States can fuck over the weak to their heart's content. Hitler and Stalin and so forth had plenty of 'national political authority'.

Barack Obama in 2013 called inequality “the defining challenge of our time”, but US inequality has risen continually since 1980, without regard for his qualms or those of any other president.

And a billionaire was elected. So it seems national political authority has not diminished in either real or symbolic ways just coz weaker sections of Society are getting kicked in their goolies.

BTW whatever happened to Obama? He has disappeared as thoroughly as Dubya. What about 'Organising for Action'? It was supposed to be the Tea Party of the bleeding hearts. Where has it been hiding?

The picture is the same all over the west: the wealth of the richest continues to skyrocket, while post-crisis austerity cripples the social-democratic welfare state.

And that's just the way we like it coz we suspect that them nasty refugees will get all the benefits while silly old muggins keeps working and paying for those moochers.

We can all see the growing fury at governments that refuse to fulfil their old moral promise – but it is most probable that they no longer can.

When did Rana write this shite? Why is he publishing it in April of 2018? We can all see that whatever fury was growing has completely spent itself because the one thing we can all agree- even Paul Ryan- is we don't want no more furriners.

Western governments possess nothing like their previous command over national economic life, and if they continue to promise fundamental change, it is now at the level of PR and wish fulfilment.

Throwing out furriners is a fundamental change. So is taking back national sovereignty and resiling from treaties which dilute it.

There is every reason to believe that the next stage of the techno-financial revolution will be even more disastrous for national political authority.

Name one reason. It is bound to be hilariously wrong.

This will arise as the natural continuation of existing technological processes, which promise new, algorithmic kinds of governance to further undermine the political variety.

Political governance is either rule based, in which case it can be described by an algorithm, or else it is arbitrary and, if it violates 'due process', prima facie illegal.

Big data companies (Google, Facebook etc) have already assumed many functions previously associated with the state, from cartography to surveillance.

Cartography has never been the monopoly of the State. Anyone can draw a map. Maps maintained for official purposes have not been supplanted in any way by Big Data companies.

Surveillance is not a lawful function of the State, nor may it be lawfully carried out by any corporation. The UK Court of Appeal made this clear in January of this year.

Now they are the primary gatekeepers of social reality: membership of these systems is a new, corporate, de-territorialised form of citizenship, antagonistic at every level to the national kind.

Really? I thought Google and Facebook were money making enterprises. It turns out they are 'primary gatekeepers of social reality'. Thus, they needn't bother with ad revenue. They can just change our 'Social Reality' so that we believe that our heads will fall off unless we hand over all our assets to Mark Zuckerberg.

For my part, I'd like to know about this new form of citizenship Rana has discovered. Where does one get a passport proving this citizenship? Since it is 'de-territorialised' I won't have to pay for a visa to visit my ancestral homeland. That would be cool.

And, as the growth of digital currencies shows, new technologies will emerge to replace the other fundamental functions of the nation state.

WTF? Does this idiot think digital currencies are legal tender and that they can be used to pay one's taxes? Okay, the guy went to Balliol, but he can't possibly be this ignorant.

The libertarian dream – whereby antique bureaucracies succumb to pristine hi-tech corporate systems, which then take over the management of all life and resources – is a more likely vision for the future than any fantasy of a return to social democracy.

Because hi-tech corporate systems have armies which can defeat those of mere Nation States- like the U.S or Russia.

 Governments controlled by outside forces and possessing only partial influence over national affairs: this has always been so in the world’s poorest countries.

Really? India has long been one of the world's poorest countries. Its government- even the communist one in West Bengal- has never been 'controlled by outside forces'. It has as much influence over national affairs as it wants to have.

But in the west, it feels like a terrifying return to primitive vulnerability.

No it doesn't. Eastern European countries were in the position Rana describes- as was West Germany to a lesser extent- till quite recently. Greece and Spain and Portugal were in a similar position in the Sixties- which is not that long ago  and this still has hysteresis effects. However, precisely because we are speaking of the West- nothing primitive was involved.

The assault on political authority is not a merely “economic” or “technological” event. It is an epochal upheaval, which leaves western populations shattered and bereft.

Where are these shattered and bereft western populations? Why haven't I seen them?

 No doubt, succumbing to feelings of 'primitive vulnerability', they smeared mud over their naked and trembling bodies and climbed up into trees so as to remain invisible to these sinister 'outside forces' Rana  talks about.

There are outbreaks of irrational rage, especially against immigrants, the appointed scapegoats for much deeper forms of national contamination.

My dear Rana, surely your parents told you that Paki bashing was all the rage in the Sixties and early Seventies?

The idea of the western nation as a universal home collapses,

WTF! Which western nation has ever seen itself as 'a universal home'? Britain? It imposed curbs on Commonwealth immigration before I was born. America? Obama deported more people than any other President. Germany? Merkel quickly resiled from her promise of an open door.

Rana Sahib, there is no country in the world which wants to be swamped by immigrants- not even India as the Rohingyas have discovered.

and transnational tribal identities grow up as a refuge: white supremacists and radical Islamists alike take up arms against contamination and corruption.

They don't do that in Western countries because such Nation States have well trained Armies who kill the fuckers- if Muslim- or recruit them-if White.

The stakes could not be higher. So it is easy to see why western governments are so desperate to prove what everyone doubts: that they are still in control.

Rana doubts western governments are in control of their own countries. This means if a Western Government says 'we will deport illegal immigrants', they won't actually be able to do it. Thus, the Refugee crisis has a simple solution. Everybody should make their way Westward because western Governments have lost control and so western armies can't oppose the ingress of people from more densely populated areas.

I suggest that Western countries are in fact in control of their countries. They are not desperate to prove anything to Rana because he has shit for brains and zero political influence.

It is not merely Donald Trump’s personality that causes him to act like a sociopathic CEO.

The guy has been a CEO for many many years. He is also a sociopath. But his being a sociopathic CEO does not cause him to act like one for a reason only the subtle mind of Rana- who must be Bengali- has discovered.

The era of globalisation has seen consistent attempts by US presidents to enhance the authority of the executive, but they are never enough.

Very true! Abraham Lincoln consistently attempted to reduce the authority of the executive because the ear of globalisation had not yet commenced.

The biggest military build up, as well as the most consistent attempt by a US President to enhance the authority of the executive, occurred under FDR in  the age of isolationism, not Globalisation.

Trump’s office can never have the level of mastery over American life that Kennedy’s did, so he is obliged to fake it.

Kennedy did not have any level of 'mastery over American life'- that's not how Democracy works. Trump isn't faking anything. He genuinely is this crass.

He cannot make America great again, but he does have Twitter, through which he can establish a lone-gun personality cult – blaming women, leftists and brown people for the state’s impotence.

Trump achieved his aim. He cut taxes. That's great for him because he is a very rich man. He has made America great again for people like him- but that's how democracy works. True, he seems to have lost interest in cutting taxes further and is now pivoting to focus on Protectionism. Why? It might get him re-elected.

He cannot heal America’s social divisions, but he still controls the security apparatus, which can be deployed to help him look “tough” – declaring war on crime, deporting foreigners, hardening borders.

So Trump should have declared peace on crime and imported ruthless gangs from Honduras. Good to know.

He cannot put more money into the hands of the poor who voted for him, but he can hand out mythological currency instead; even his poorest voters, after all, possess one significant asset – US citizenship – whose value he can “talk up”, as he previously talked up casinos and hotels.

So poor people who voted for him weren't irrational. They got something out of it.

Like Putin or Orbán, Trump imbues citizenship with new martial power, and makes a big show of withholding it from people who want it: what is scarcer, obviously, is more precious. Citizens who have nothing are persuaded that they have a lot.

So, according to Rana, Trump has single-handedly reversed the 'real and symbolic' depreciation of national political authority which occurred under Obama. How? Just by Twittering stuff everybody agrees is a good thing- keeping out Muslims and Mexicans and so forth. That's all it took.

So much for the West, what has Rana to say about the Global South?

In the world’s poorest countries, the picture is very different. Almost all those nations emerged in the 20th century from the Eurasian empires.

Nonsense! The world's poorest countries were not colonised because they were too poor to afford a colonial administration. It is a different matter that, precisely because of their poverty, they could be depicted as within this or that 'sphere of influence'.

It has become de rigueur to despise empires, but they have been the “normal” mode of governance for much of history. The Ottoman empire, which lasted from 1300 until 1922, delivered levels of tranquillity and cultural achievement that seem incredible from the perspective of today’s fractured Middle East.

Really? What 'cultural achievement' did the Middle East produce during that period? Nothing. Demographically and Economically, the region declined.

The modern nation of Syria looks unlikely to last more than a century without breaking apart, and it hardly provides security or stability for its citizens.

Syria is one of the most ancient nations in the world. It is also located in a geopolitically very sensitive area. That is why it is the scene of a proxy war.

Rana may believe that Ba'athist Syria and Iraq provided 'security and stability' for citizens. It did this by killing or torturing them. Yet, those silly people were not grateful and dreamed of something better. Thanks to outside meddling, they didn't get it.

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Empires were not democratic, but were built to be inclusive of all those who came under their rule.

Very true! That is why, under the British Raj, Prime Ministers had names like Gladstonejee and Dinesh Israeli.

It is not the same with nations, which are founded on the fundamental distinction between who is in and who is out – and therefore harbour a tendency toward ethnic purification.

Quite correct! That is why the indigenous Tasmanians are flourishing! Indigenous peoples were never moved off their land to make way for white settlers.

This makes them much more unstable than empires, for that tendency can always be stoked by nativist demagogues.

Yes! Nativist demagogues like Mahatma Gandhi are the ones to blame for everything!

Rana does not seem to understand that Empires grow till they clash with each other. Such clashes cause wars. The defeated Empire quickly unravels. That is why, in 1918, the attempt was made to replace Empires with 'collective security'. That attempt failed. What succeeded was a balance of terror between well-armed Nation States which played the 'bourgeois strategy'- i.e. defend, even at irrational cost, what is your own.

Nevertheless, in the previous century it was decided with amazing alacrity that empires belonged to the past, and the future to nation states.

Rana lives in a fantasy world where War decides nothing, Economics has no role to play. People 'with amazing alacrity' decide something foolish and lo! it comes to pass.

What was actually decided, in 1945, was that the two Super-powers, representing different Economic ideologies, would carve up the world. Both the US and the USSR had a theory of Nationality, which, however, was merely a smokescreen for a total ideological polarisation.

And yet this revolutionary transformation has done almost nothing to close the economic gap between the colonised and the colonising.

If the 'colonised' were stupid and corrupt, they remained poor. If they weren't, then- like Singapore-they became richer than their former masters.

Economic gaps are caused by economic factors- not some imaginary decision Rana thinks was made with 'amazing alacrity'.

Economic theory says, ceteris paribus, Nation States will exist because of Tiebout sorting. Only if there is some geopolitical or 'resource curse' type factor will it be worthwhile to prevent that Nation State coming into existence. In the case of the Kurds, we all know what geopolitical and 'resource curse' factors militating against their forming their own Nation State. If those factors disappear, the outcome is likely to be different.

In the meantime, it has subjected many postcolonial populations to a bitter cocktail of authoritarianism, ethnic cleansing, war, corruption and ecological devastation.

Some postcolonial leaders subjected their populations to bitter cocktails. Some did not. It is not the case that some imaginary and irrational decision made long ago had anything to do with whether a given postcolonial leader wrought woe or weal.

If there are so few formerly colonised countries that are now peaceful, affluent and democratic, it is not, as the west often pretends, because “bad leaders” somehow ruined otherwise perfectly functional nations.

Oh! In that case, postcolonial societies should simply have accepted the dynastic rule of their first leaders. If 'bad leaders' don't lead to bad outcomes why get rid of them?

In the breakneck pace of decolonisation, nations were thrown together in months; often their alarmed populations fell immediately into violent conflict to control the new state apparatus, and the power and wealth that came with it.

So what? Good leadership would have settled the matter quite quickly. Only bad leadership could turn the thing into a negative sum game that festered on and on.

Many infant states were held together only by strongmen who entrusted the system to their own tribes or clans, maintained power by stoking sectarian rivalries and turned ethnic or religious differences into super-charged axes of political terror.

So what? Saudi Arabia was created by a strongman. It is still very rich.

The list is not a short one. Consider men such as Ne Win (Burma)

But Ne Win came to power long after the Brits left! He did not entrust anything to his own clan- he was of Chinese descent. Sectarian problems had been stoked by his predecessor who declared Burma a Buddhist country.

Hissène Habré (Chad)

Habre was not a strongman. He was the stooge of France & the US who propped him up against Gaddaffi (whom they later toppled, thus destroying Libya). Habre did not hold anything together. He ran away with a big pile of loot.

Hosni Mubarak (Egypt),

 WTF? Mubarak was a handsome Air Force ace. He wasn't a strongman holding the State together. He was put in after Sadat's assassination precisely because he didn't have a strong base within the army. Mubarak's mistake was to try to bypass the military in favour of his own family. He paid for that mistake but the Army is back in power. Since the time of Nasser, it is what holds Egypt together.

Mengistu Haile Mariam (Ethiopia),

overthrew the Emperor who had held Ethiopia together.  It was not an infant state at all. It was founded over two thousand years ago.

Ahmed Sékou Touré (Guinea)

Okay, but he turned into a rabid Marxist.

, Muhammad Suharto (Indonesia)

who only came to power after Sukarno fucked up big time.

, the Shah of Iran

not a strongman at all. The CIA put him back on the throne. Later the West pulled the rug from under that 'Light of the Aryans'.

, Saddam Hussein (Iraq)

Again, Saddam was not a strong man holding an infant state together. Iraq had long been fully independent when he took power.

, Muammar Gaddafi (Libya)

who overthrew a Monarchy. Again, no 'infant state' was involved.

, Moussa Traoré (Mali),

like Suharto, this guy was a military man who took power because his predecessor's stupid Leftist policies were destroying the country.

General Zia-ul-Haq (Pakistan),

OMG! Is Rana completely mad? Pakistan had already had two military dictators and was by no means an infant when Zia and his mates decided to string up Bhutto before he could string them up. Zia took an ample revenge upon India for its part in the Bangladesh war- something Benazir approved of.

Ferdinand Marcos (Philippines), the Kings of Saudi Arabia, Siaka Stevens (Sierra Leone), Mohamed Siad Barre (Somalia), Jaafar Nimeiri (Sudan), Hafez al-Assad (Syria), Idi Amin (Uganda), Mobutu Sese Seko (Zaire) or Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe).

Did you notice that among a bunch of 'bad leaders', Rana suddenly included the 'Kings of Saudi Arabia'? His whole shtick is about how it was suddenly decided that Empires had to go and so, willy nilly, infant nation states were created which 'strongmen' held together. Yet, Ibn Saud created his Kingdom by his own military prowess. It prospered greatly. It doesn't fit Rana's thesis at all. The fact is, Marcos did not become a dictator in an 'infant country'. The year was 1972.
Barre, Nimeiri, Assad, Amin and Mobutu were not strongmen holding infant countries together. They came to power through coups and counter-coups.
Mugabe better fits the bill. But he took power not from an Empire but a pre-existing Nation State.

Such countries were generally condemned to remain what one influential commentator has called “quasi-states”. Formally equivalent to the older nations with which they now shared the stage, they were in reality very different entities, and they could not be expected to deliver comparable benefits to their citizen.

Does Rana really believe that White people thought that Republics run by Black people would be 'equivalent' to their own nations? Why? Everyone could see the condition of Haiti and Liberia and Sierra Leone- not to mention the banana republics of Central America. Nobody thought 'now the jigaboos are in charge, this country is gonna turn into Sweden'.

Empires featured plenty of 'quasi-states'- Protectorates and the like- within their dominions. Places too poor and lawless to be run properly were never run properly. Nothing changed nor did anybody expect anything to change if these places got a UN vote.

Those dictators could never have held such incoherent states together without tremendous reinforcement from outside, which was what sealed the lid on the pressure cooker.

Rana is talking about the Cold War system of clientage. But everyone knew it was simply eye-wash comparable to Idi Amin's proclamation of himself as the King of Scotland.

The post-imperial ethos was hospitable to dictators, of course: with the UN’s moral rejection of foreign rule came a universal imperative to respect national sovereignty, no matter what horrors went on behind its closed doors.

The UN's moral rejection of foreign rule was so strong that it voted against the Indian occupation of Portuguese Goa. The USSR cast its veto on the Indian side.
Rana doesn't seem to understand that the UN granted colonial powers- including Italy- mandates over territory which, in Italy's case, it had lost in battle, or, in other cases, which it had never conquered in the first place.
It is not the case that the UN was solely concerned with respecting national sovereignty. Its condemnation of Apartheid in South Africa is a case in point.

But the cold war vastly expanded the resources available to brutal regimes for defending themselves against revolution and secession. The two superpowers funded the escalation of post-colonial conflicts to stupefying levels of fatality: at least 15 million died in the proxy wars of that period, in theatres as dispersed as Afghanistan, Korea, El Salvador, Angola and Sudan. And what the superpowers wanted out of all this destruction was a network of firmly installed clients able to defeat all internal rivals.

So, Imperialism was still the problem even if called itself 'Ideological Struggle'.

There was nothing stable about this cold war “stability”, but its devastation was contained within the borders of its proxy states.

Nonsense! Vietnam was not contained- it spilled over into Laos and Cambodia.

The breakup of the superpower system, however, has led to the implosion of state authority across large groups of economically and politically impoverished countries – and the resulting eruptions are not contained at all. Destroyed political cultures have given rise to startling “post-national” forces such as Islamic State, which are cutting through national borders and transmitting chaos, potentially, into every corner of the world.

Fake news. Islamic State is running amok in places no one cares about. It isn't a threat to us provided we follow Trump or Orban type policies.

Over the past 20 years, the slow, post-cold-war rot in Africa and the Middle East has been exuberantly exploited by these kinds of forces – whose position, since there are more countries set to go the way of Yemen, South Sudan, Syria and Somalia, is flush with opportunity.

So what? The West merely has to get tough on migrants and there is no blow-back though, no doubt, we do need to keep doing some drone and missile strikes to show we care deeply about fundamental human rights.

Their adherents have lost the enchantment for the old slogans of nation-building. Their political technology is charismatic religion, and the future they seek is inspired by the ancient golden empires that existed before the invention of nations. Militant religious groups in Africa and the Middle East are less engaged in the old project of seizing the state apparatus; instead, they cut holes and tunnels in state authority, and so assemble transnational networks of tax collection, trade routes and military supply lines.

So what? Fracking fucked up ISIS's finances. Focusing on technological innovations is the way forward. Ignore silly people who want to chop each others heads off for whatever reason. In any case, 'transnational networks' for things like drugs and people smuggling will always exist.

Rana thinks the West has a commitment to Nation States because...urm...Westerners think all Nation States, whether or not run by jiggaboos or sand niggers or whatever, are 'equivalent' to Sweden or Canada. This is a fantasy.

The West has no commitment to anything save itself. The same is true about the South, the North, the East and the Sideways.

Rana thinks- 

 There is no superpower great enough, any more, to contain the effects of exploding “quasi-states”. Barbed wire and harder borders will certainly not suffice to keep such human disasters at bay.

He is completely and utterly wrong. Shooting people in large enough numbers- or just ensuring they starve to death- is highly efficacious. Even guns aren't necessary. Throughout history, Nations have practiced a 'bourgeois strategy' which consists of bashing in the skulls of interlopers. Of course, if the interlopers free one from the oppression of a tyrant or a rapacious tax farmer, then the interloper may be welcomed. However, in that case the Nation State has already failed.

Let us turn to the nature of the nation-state system itself.

Why bother? Only the nature of the State matters. Either it is failing or it isn't. This does not depend upon some system having to do with the legal fiction of the nation-state. It depends on purely material economic and military factors.

The international order as we know it is not so old. The nation state became the universal template for human political organisation only after the first world war, when a new principle – “national self-determination,”, as US President Woodrow Wilson named it – buried the many other blueprints under debate.

This is nonsense. Not a single nation state, with a map unaltered to our own times, was created by this principle of 'national self-determination'.  Indeed, it was violated ab ovo when the Allies tried to give Smyrna to the Greeks.

Since Rana was a Visiting Fellow at Princeton, he likes praising a big fat Racist who was Princeton's President before he became America's.

What he does not say is that in Europe the word Nation has a specific meaning. Empires had been created by cobbling together Kingdoms which had 'National' characteristics. The Medieval Church had used the term 'Nation' to mean linguistic groups and certain Kingdoms identified with a particular group either claimed to represent that Nation or competed to make good that claim.

Now, the territorial claims of the 'Allied' Nations were only partly based on demographics. Old territorial claims arising out of Kingdoms subsumed under an Imperial dynasty too were made with the result that, then as now, substantial irredentist problems remained.

Wilson may indeed have been a doddering old fool. However the diplomats who redrew borders (and botched the job so badly that a Second War was assured) were using the principle of 'national self-determination to press a maximalist agenda based on questionable medieval claims.

Thus the League of Nations, which America never joined, was a farce from the get go. Nobody was fooled- except, poor old Rana.

Today, after a century of lugubrious “international relations”, the only aspect of this principle we still remember is the one most familiar to us: national independence. But Wilson’s original programme, informed by a loose international coalition including such diverse visionaries as Andrew Carnegie and Leonard Woolf (husband of Virginia), aimed for something far more ambitious: a comprehensive intra-state democracy designed to ensure global cooperation, peace and justice.

 But they failed completely. The thing was absurd. BTW how is 'national independence' different from 'national self determination'?

How were human beings to live securely in their new nations, after all, if nations themselves were not subject to any law?

The same way Switzerland managed to hold its own- though occasionally succumbing to Civil War- viz. by killing invaders.  Apparently all those yodelling Swiss dudes have an automatic rifle in their broom closet and will arm themselves with it and go slaughter any invading or occupying power.

The new order of nations only made sense if these were integrated into a “society of nations”: a formal global society with its own universal institutions, empowered to police the violence that individual states would not regulate on their own: the violence they perpetrated themselves, whether against other states or their own citizens.

There is no 'formal global society'. There are superpowers which sometimes agree to fuck up small and weak countries which cross some line or the other. Everyone knows this.

The cold war definitively buried this “society”,

It never existed. How could it be buried?

and we have lived ever since with a drastically degraded version of what was intended.

Intended by whom? America? Nope. It never joined the League. Clemencau? Lloyd George? Those guys gave Smyrna to the Greeks. But they couldn't stop Turkey chasing the Greeks out. Clearly their intentions were not good and, in any case,  they lacked the power to achieve them.

During that period, both superpowers actively destroyed any constraints on international action, maintaining a level of international lawlessness worthy of the “scramble for Africa”.

Fuck is wrong with Rana? Does he really not know that Hitler and Tojo and Mussolini had demonstrated very  thoroughly that there no constraints on international actions other than the usual economic and military ones?

Without such constraints, their disproportionate power produced exactly what one would expect: gangsterism.

Because Hitler was an angel, not a gangster at all.

The end of the cold war did nothing to change American behaviour: the US is today dependent on lawlessness in international society, and on the perpetual warfare-against-the-weak that is its consequence.

Really? America is totally dependent on lawlessness? Why?
America is strong. Singapore is weak. Why is America not waging warfare upon Singapore? After all, Singapore has a higher per capita income than America. It would be a valuable acquisition.
Why hasn't Trump turned the place into a giant Casino?

Just as illegitimate government within a nation cannot persist for long without opposition,

A government which no one opposes is de facto legitimate. Illegitimate regimes collapse unless they crush opposition. It is not the case that Hitler's rule in France would have collapsed if there had been no French Resistance. Rana is just being stupid.

the illegitimate international order we have lived with for so many decades is quickly exhausting the assent it once enjoyed.

Just as cats can't persist for long without turning into dogs, so too does the dog which used to be a cat quickly exhaust the mouse it once enjoyed.

In many areas of the world today, there is no remaining illusion that this system can offer a viable future.

Nowhere in the world does anybody have any illusion about the U.N. It is obviously shite.

All that remains is exit. Some are staking everything on a western passport, which, since the supreme value of western life is still enshrined in the system, is the one guarantee of meaningful constitutional protection.

Unfortunately, Rana is wrong. Citizenship can be revoked if obtained by 'dishonest conduct'. Obviously, that's a movable feast right there.  Constitutions can be changed. Even if they aren't, in practice people can be beaten or killed till they run away. It is foolish to believe otherwise.

But such passports are difficult to get. That leaves the other kind of exit, which is to take up arms against the state system itself.

Which involves getting shot immediately unless the State isn't very good at putting down gangsterism in which case the gangsters are probably already renting out your rectum or otherwise fucking you over.

The appeal of Isis for its converts was its claim to erase from the Middle East the catastrophe of the post-imperial century.

Crap! The appeal was dollars and sex-slaves and the chance to chop off heads. Not to mention plenty of Virgins in Paradise if a drone attack gets you.

It will be remembered that the group’s most triumphant publicity was associated with its penetration of the Iraq-Syria border.

No it won't. Chopping off heads is what people remember.

This was presented as a victory over the 1916 treaties by which the British and French divided the Ottoman Empire amongst themselves – Isis’s PR arm issued the Twitter hashtag #SykesPicotOver – and inaugurated a century of Mesopotamian bombing. It arose from an entirely justifiable rejection of a system that obstinately designated – during the course of a century and more – Arabs as “savages” to whom no dignity or protection would be extended.

Of course! I recall Dag Hammerskjold spitting on the King of Jordan and calling him a fucking sand nigger cannibal.  He immediately apologised to His Royal Highness but explained that 'the system' had designated Arabs as 'savages' during the course of a century and more. As Secretary General of the U.N Hammeskjold was obliged to micturate mightily upon the Monarch because the 'system' required it.

The era of national self-determination has turned out to be an era of international lawlessness, which has crippled the legitimacy of the nation state system.

France and Germany are nation states. Has their legitimacy been crippled? No. Both are doing fine. Germany is not guilty of any international lawlessness nor is it the victim of it.

Rana thinks legitimacy can be crippled by lawlessness. This is not the case. If my parents were legally married to each other when I was born, then I am the legitimate offspring of my father. This does not change even if it is shown that lawlessness prevailed at the time of my birth.

And, while revolutionary groups attempt to destroy the system “from below”, assertive regional powers are destroying it “from above” – by infringing national borders in their own backyards. Russia’s escapade in Ukraine demonstrates that there are now few consequences to neo-imperial bagatelles, and China’s route to usurping the 22nd-richest country in the world – Taiwan – lies open.

Ukraine has split up on the language question. Get over it. China has always claimed Taiwan. I suppose, sooner or later, there will be a Hong Kong type solution there. So what? This isn't neo-imperialism- it is good old national self determination.

The true extent of our insecurity will be revealed as the relative power of the US further declines, and it can no longer do anything to control the chaos it helped create.

The true extent of our insecurity is zero, provided we can bomb the bad guys to bits and are prepared to do so. Horrible stuff happening in faraway places need not affect us at all. We just need to ditch the Human Rights convention and strip any domestic troublemakers of their citizenship and Gitmo their asses.

The three elements of the crisis described here will only worsen.

But, Ranaji, all three have gotten better over the last year.

First, the existential breakdown of rich countries during the assault on national political power by global forces.

That has been completely reversed. There are no global forces which can't be put in prison or made to cough up massive fines after having been dragged over the coals by a Senate or other Parliamentary committee.

Second, the volatility of the poorest countries and regions, now that the departure of cold war-era strongmen has revealed their true fragility.

Poor countries will remain shitholes unless they stop being poor. Fragility doesn't matter.

And third, the illegitimacy of an “international order” that has never aspired to any kind of “society of nations” governed by the rule of law.

There is no 'international order'. There is trade and there is diplomacy and there are military alliances and interventions. There is no 'system' or 'order' or 'structure' over and above them.

Since they are all rooted in transnational forces whose scale eludes the reach of any one nation’s politics, they are largely immune to well-meaning political reform within nations (though the coming years will also see many examples of such reform). So we are obliged to re-examine its ageing political foundations if we do not wish to see our global system pushed to ever more extreme forms of collapse.

Rana may feel he is obliged to do this foolish thing but the result is more foolish yet.

 This is not a small endeavour: it will take the better part of this century.

So, Rana is saying we must do something which will take at least fifty years in order to prevent an immediate and more extreme type of collapse. Most of us will be dead or very feeble in fifty years time. The younger generation would have been coping with the collapse from the time of their birth and will be in no mood to listen to our laboriously conducted 're-examination' of some shite Rana made up.

We do not know yet where it will lead. All we can lay out now is a set of directions.

WTF? Suppose a guy comes up to  you and says 'Hi! I'm an expert guide. I want to give you a set of directions'. You reply 'where to?' The guide says 'I dunno. I was just asked to lay out a set of directions. I wasn't told where those directions were supposed to lead one to. Anyway, enough chit chat. Do you want my set of directions- yes or no?'
Rana's answer would be 'yes'. But Rana is fucked in the head.

From the standpoint of our present, they will seem impossible, because we have not known any other way.

Yes! My set of directions to Rana runs as follows 'levitate upwards till the illegitimate cat turns into a dog due to lack of opposition. Then go sideways in a widdershins manner with respect to primitive vulnerability until primitive vulnerability reaches a saddle point. Then go tachyonically backwards till Woodrow Wilson shits in your mouth.'

From Rana's present standpoint, my instructions will seem impossible to follow. But this is because Rana knows no other way.

But that is how radical novelty always begins.

Yes dear. After Woodrow Wilson has shat in your mouth turn left and proceed for twenty paces in a collateral direction.

The first is clear: global financial regulation. Today’s great engines of wealth creation are distributed in such a way as to elude national taxation systems (94% of Apple’s cash reserves are held offshore; this $250bn is greater than the combined foreign reserves of the British government and the Bank of England), which is diminishing all nation states, materially and symbolically.

Nonsense! If Apple repatriates its reserves, the dollar goes up pricing Americans out of jobs. If it spends its reserves in some other country, it may trigger inflation or an asset bubble there. If it sits on its pot of money, takeovers are deterred (probably a good thing) and, as Anwar Shaikh has pointed out, it can acquire new technology more cheaply- thus reducing rents. Nobody is 'materially or symbolically' diminished by a purely rational act whose revelation principle is transparent for mechanism design. If something changes, Governments can change the laws. It is not the case that America is powerless in this respect. Nor is a united Europe. China has already shown it can get the plutocrats to pipe small and play ball. The events of the last couple of years have shown that, like the ISIS threat, this particular paranoid dog won't hunt.

There is no reason to heed those interested parties who tell us global financial regulation is impossible: it is technologically trivial compared to the astonishing systems those same parties have already built.

Exactly! That's why powerful nation states can and have tamed this particular beast when it suits them.

The history of the nation state is one of perennial tax innovation, and the next such innovation is transnational: we must build systems to track transnational money flows, and to transfer a portion of them into public channels.

America has it already. Europe and even Britain aren't far behind. The big question is whether the bigger danger isn't in taxation rather than permitting the top tech-entrepreneurs to take a hegemonic role. Compliance costs are lower for the former and what's more, everyone knows they have 'skin in the game' and thus are more immune to rent-seeking interessement.

Without this, our political infrastructure will continue to become more and more superfluous to actual material life.

Some parts of our political infrastructure are superfluous and are being pruned back. Which ones? Those concerned with Rana type gobshittery and paranoid ideation based on stupid obvious lies.

In the process we must also think more seriously about global redistribution: not aid, which is exceptional, but the systematic transfer of wealth from rich to poor for the improved security of all, as happens in national societies.

Did Rana 'think seriously' before writing this garbage? Could he make more foolish arguments if he thought even more seriously?

What is Rana actually saying here? Is it not- 'give to the poor. If you don't a horrible crisis will come and bite off your head and slurp up your spine.'

The problem here is that Rana isn't poor. If he were genuinely smart he'd have a lot of money by now and could lead by example. But, he isn't smart. He is stupid. So any argument he makes will be counter-productive. Readers will think 'Rana is an idiot. If he says 'do x', x is the last thing we should do.'

Second: global flexible democracy. As new local and transnational political currents become more powerful, the nation state’s rigid monopoly on political life is becoming increasingly unviable.

Either the nation state has a rigid monopoly, in which case there are no local and transnational currents, or it doesn't. In the first case, Rana is saying 'if a cat is a dog then murli Manohar Joshi'. In the second case, he is just telling a stupid lie

Nations must be nested in a stack of other stable, democratic structures – some smaller, some larger than they – so that turmoil at the national level does not lead to total breakdown.

Turmoil is turmoil. It does not lead to total breakdown which may occur even if there is no turmoil. Nesting does not increase stability. It creates a transmission mechanism for catastrophic failure. This may be a good thing in some electrical applications. It is a bad thing in the Social Sciences.
We do not 'nest' the Judiciary in the Executive or the Legislature. We strive to keep them separate and protocol bound. It may be a good thing if a wrongly wired Amp shuts down so as to avoid harm to the speakers. It is a bad thing if a small perturbation in one social sphere leads to a massive system wide chaotic oscillation.

Suppose some mysterious new illness appears in our city. What should we do? Quarantine the afflicted or nest them in diverse communities?

The EU is the major experiment in this direction, and it is significant that the continent that invented the nation state was also the first to move beyond it.

The United States was the first nation state based on pooling sovereignty. The EU was a self conscious attempt to create a United States of Europe on the American model.

The EU has failed in many of its functions, principally because it has not established a truly democratic ethos.

The EU succeeded in important functions for the same reason. True, it fell down on securing its borders but it is now remedying that.

But free movement has hugely democratised economic opportunity within the EU.

No it hasn't. People move from places where they have a vote to places where they don't. This is not 'democratised economic opportunity' anymore than the relatively free movement of labour from poor countries to the Gulf represented some great socio-economic enfranchisement.

Unlike America where even if professional certification is not standardised, still everybody speaks the same language, free movement within Europe does not have the same 'democratic' potential because of language and cultural barriers.

And insofar as it may become a “Europe of regions” – comprising Catalonia and Scotland, not only Spain and the UK – it can help stabilise national political upheaval.

Recent events have shown the reverse to be the case.

We need more such experiments in continental and global politics.

Why? How do we know the number of such experiments is not already optimal? Rana won't tell us.

National governments themselves need to be subjected to a superior tier of authority:

Like the Pope's? That didn't end well, as I recall.

they have proved to be the most dangerous forces in the nation-state era, waging endless wars against other nations while oppressing, killing and otherwise failing their own populations.

So Rana thinks nation-states are bad. Sadly, ever since the pounding of ISIS, there's nobody around who wants to create a global Empire. So Rana must cry himself to sleep once again after shaking his fist at a picture of Mahatma Gandhi and wailing- 'why were you so mean to Empires? Now they have gone, nation states are doing all sorts of dirty and disgusting things. Won't somebody please think of the children?!

Oppressed national minorities must be given a legal mechanism to appeal over the heads of their own governments – this was always part of Wilson’s vision and its loss has been terrible for humanity.

Very true. Wilson specifically granted African Americans (an oppressed national minority at that time) the right to appeal over the heads of the American Executive, Legislature and Judiciary, to ...urm... dunno... the League of Good Mutants so they might strike down Jim Crow laws.

Third, and finally: we need to find new conceptions of citizenship.

Why? There are plenty of old conceptions in the closet which you haven't even tried on! What is wrong with you? Every time you go on line, you end up buying a new conception of citizenship. Still, always you are just lounging around in your chaddi, I say! Chee, chee- at least find ones without skidmarks.

Citizenship is itself the primordial kind of injustice in the world.

So lets not have a new conception of something ab ovo evil.

It functions as an extreme form of inherited property and, like other systems in which inherited privilege is overwhelmingly determinant, it arouses little allegiance in those who inherit nothing.

Okay. So lets get rid of citizenship by birth. People will only get citizenship after completing National Service and it will remain conditional on their good behaviour.

Many countries have made efforts, through welfare and education policy, to neutralise the consequences of accidental advantages such as birth.

No country has done any such thing. All that has happened is that a social minimum has been implemented as part of a wider Social Insurance scheme.

But “accidental advantages” rule at the global level: 97% of citizenship is inherited, which means that the essential horizons of life on this planet are already determined at birth.

Rana thinks everybody in a rich country is rich and everybody in a poor country is poor. Yet he was raised in England and now lives in New Delhi. Why can't he believe in the evidence of his own eyes?

Moreover, some poor countries- Singapore for example- have become richer than their former Colonial masters. Clearly birth determines nothing by itself.

If you are born Finnish, your legal protections and economic expectations are of such a different order to those of a Somalian or Syrian that even mutual understanding is difficult.

If you were born Finnish in 1920, you would have good reason to envy the Somali or the Syrian. Mutual understanding, however, is always easy- except for Rana, because he is as stupid as shit.

Your mobility – as a Finn – is also very different.

Which is why you find Finnish cab drivers, not Somali or Syrian cab drivers wherever you go.

But in a world system – rather than a system of nations – there can be no justification for such radical divergences in mobility.

Why not? Tiebout sorting is a perfectly valid justification. Some people have higher mobility costs than others. If external economies or benefits are involved, 'radical divergences' in this matter should exist. That's why the Left favours Regional policy over permitting the depopulation of areas of industrial decline.

Deregulating human movement is an essential corollary of the deregulation of capital: it is unjust to preserve the freedom to move capital out of a place and simultaneously forbid people from following

Why is it unjust? What principle of justice is offended against? Horizontal equity? Nope- like is not being compared to like. Vertical equity? Nope. The cost of mobility is higher for Labour than for Capital. Thus vertical equity dictates moving capital to where the people are rather than the other way round.

Furthermore, the most vulnerable people have the worst information asymmetry. This means their mobility is inherently riskier and less rewarding.

Contemporary technological systems offer models for rethinking citizenship so it can be de-linked from territory, and its advantages can be more fairly distributed.

This was the case even before computers became mainstream. An American citizen living in the UK or Singapore or wherever still had to file his Federal tax returns. Furthermore, in certain jurisdictions, he could even claim extra-territorial privileges. Thus has it always been. Technology hasn't changed anything here.

The rights and opportunities accruing to western citizenship could be claimed far away, for instance, without anyone having to travel to the west to do so.

So what? Overseas French citizens have always enjoyed this privilege. To some extent, almost every influential expat population enjoys some essentially extra-territorial privilege in Developing countries. Pakistan's Musharraf was prepared to crack down on his Islamists once they attacked some Chinese hookers. Why? China is Pakistan's all-weather Ally. Anyone who messes with Chinese people in Pakistan will get an ISI boot up the arse.

We could participate in political processes far away that nonetheless affect us: if democracy is supposed to give voters some control over their own conditions, for instance, should a US election not involve most people on earth?

 No. If the majority of voters in US elections aren't American they will vote for whoever promises that some attractive young American should come and wipe their bums every morning.

What would American political discourse look like, if it had to satisfy voters in Iraq or Afghanistan?

Hillary would have said- 'I will personally train every American virgin we send out to very sensually wipe your bums you darling little ragheads.' Trump would have replied, 'Fake news! I'm awesome at wiping bums. Show me your biggest bum. I'll get in there- I got small hands. Sad.'

On the eve of its centenary, our nation-state system is already in a crisis from which it does not currently possess the capacity to extricate itself.

Rana's 'nation-state system' is on the eve of its centenary. That system did not recognise India- the country of Rana's ancestors- as a nation state. Still, it is Rana's favourite system. Why? Is he trying to outdo Niradh Chaudhri in hatred and contempt for his own people?

The charitable answer might have to do with this mysterious crisis he talks about. What is it? Probably something to do with wiping bums.

It is time to think how that capacity might be built.

Yes, Rana! Wipe your own bum by all means. That way you'll build relevant capacity.

We do not yet know what it will look like.

It will look like a shitty bum.

But we have learned a lot from the economic and technological phases of globalisation, and we now possess the basic concepts for the next phase: building the politics of our integrated world system.

Which will involve wiping a lot of bums in Somalia and Saurashtra and other such places.

We are confronted, of course, by an enterprise of political imagination as significant as that which produced the great visions of the 18th century – and, with them, the French and American Republics. But we are now in a position to begin.

Rana, sweetie, I don't know how to break this to you, but what is confronting us is not an enterprise of political imagination. It is a shitty bum. Be a dear and wipe it already.