After Nations explores ''a generalised state of crisis'' that afflicts the nation-state worldwide. In an effort to understand this crisis, Rana Dasgupta charts the development of the global nation state project from the Enlightenment to the present, its ongoing value unquestioned-to our detriment. In its modern, fully-fledged form, the nation-state system is a very recent innovation, and one that departs from the normal history of the world - which is a story of empires. What we are seeing is the rapid disintegration of a system on which we had come to depend too completely. After Nations offers a startling account of this exhilarating and terrible system. Its thesis will be disturbing to many, but we must quickly come to terms with it if we are to address the very grave challenges that now face us as a species: at their core, the political, economic, military and even environmental problems we face today are not the fault of inadequate policies or poor leadership. They are the consequence, rather, of our outdated political infrastructure - the nation-state system - which is not capable, even in theory, of protecting populations from twenty-first-century conditions. Five crises (''God'', ''Money'', ''Law'', ''War'' and ''Nature'') will combine inexorably to diminish the ability of this system to deliver minimally acceptable outcomes. The author''s aim, through a portrait of this time of crisis, is radically to re-imagine what the nation-state system can and should provide. His interrogation of what we might now ask of our neighbourhoods and cities, will here be writ large: After Nations asks what we want for our global future.

Autorentext

Rana Dasgupta was born in 1971, and grew up in Cambridge. He worked for a marketing consultancy in London and New York for a few years before moving to Delhi to write. His first novel, 'Tokyo Cancelled', a thirteen-part story cycle, was published in 2005 to widespread acclaim and has been translated into nine languages.

Dasgupta now lives permanently in Delhi, and writes for several periodicals, including the 'Guardian', 'New Statesman' and BBC radio.

Klappentext

From a prizewinning writer, this sweeping global history charts the rise of nation-states in order to explain their multiple failures today - and to lay out what we may expect in the future. For readers of Yuval Noah Harari, Thomas Piketty and Timothy Snyder.

The system of our nations is in convulsion. As American hegemony unwinds, anxious Western countries slide into xenophobia and debt. The liberal ideas and institutions which once made them great are losing their prestige; autocracies like China, Russia and the UAE, by contrast, are rising. Wars and imperial ventures re-emerge as viable solutions for national failures, and - so degraded has it become - few even bother to invoke "international law". For those most completely abandoned by nation-states, meanwhile, there is no future except through life-threatening migration. All in all, the global political order offers human beings ever fewer securities - and ever more threats.

Rana Dasgupta traces the nation-state's early formation, and its rise to world domination, to find out why things have turned out like this. Taking us from the fall of ancient empires, and the expansion of European concepts of money and law, right up to the emergence of 21st-century tech firms - a dangerous new form of competition for nation-states - and the restoration of China as global economic centre, Dasgupta shows that the new sternness of states is no aberration, but arises inevitably from their historical purpose. Through astute political and historical analysis, he posits that the time has come to imagine a re-design of the nation-state system -one that corresponds better to our globalized economy and reality.

Richly detailed, urgent, and told with remarkable clarity, After Nationsis an essential text for anyone looking to understand why we seem to be losing our political hold on the world, and how we might try to restore it.