After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order, Rana Dasgupta, William Collins, £30

In 1945 we had much to be pleased about. Backed by America, writes Rana Dasgupta, the postwar era ‘produced an astonishing expansion of equality, democracy and material security’. This was seen as ‘a condition so stable and permanent that political philosophers could close their books: there was no next chapter’. We had attained an ‘ecstatic end-state when the travails of history would finally cease’.

How wrong we all were. Wars and bloodlettings have continued unabated. Autocracies still control billions of people, whether in Putin’s impoverished Russia or Xi Jinping’s rapidly enriching China. Even America is crumbling into an inept, comedy autocracy, while the stupendously wealthy bankers and tech gods are quietly seizing power.

Our belief, however, remains strong. We still think we live, in Leibniz’s words, ‘in the best of all possible worlds’. Conflicts, complaints and angry rhetoric persist, but, we ask ourselves, what are the alternatives? And, anyway, such disagreements are evidence of the stability of democratic statehood.

Read this book and your delusions will falter. It is an essential, eye-opening account. Dasgupta’s research and intense storytelling are hard work but worth it. His subject is the nation state, a term which requires definition. ‘The nation-state’, he writes, ‘is not natural or immutable; it is a modern administrative form which arose from the competition between European states… it is embedded in other, larger systems, the most important of which is the capitalist system.’ The key point here is that there is nothing conclusive or inevitable about nation states. Certainly, they have been very successful but, thanks to this book, we can now see that they are in trouble and may be disappearing. But, surprisingly, After Nations comes to a happy hopeful ending. I shall come back to that.

Dasgupta is a liberal. He argues that liberalism in the 18th century saved European states from a descent into religious violence and this, in turn, gave the nation state the moral prestige it had since enjoyed. ‘Without liberal constraints on states’ monopolies over violence, the way is opened to significantly higher levels of war and internal persecution… But now core liberal notions – equality, democracy, progress – are falling victim, also, to economic reality.’

What, then, must we do? The answer, if there is one, is here.

Four sections of this book are devoted to key states – France, Britain, America and China – but these are simply starting points for essays on the different forms of statehood and why, now, they are failing, a process that started in the 1970s with the rise of Silicon Valley and the ‘supremacy of capital after its decades of subjection to “national capitalism”’.

These are the crucial insights into the future. The tech gods are now fighting to free themselves of national restraints. Meta, TikTok and the rest say they will try to suppress posts damaging to the young, but this, to them, is a sideshow, a relic of nation-state morality, which, they must know is rapidly losing its grip. With JP Morgan Chase’s assets of $4 trillion, it is now clear that money is already out of state control. Meanwhile, familiar ways of lives are now vanishing. ‘In a couple of decades, the proportion of the UK and US workforces employed in manufacturing fell from over 30 per cent to less than 10; remaining factory workers were largely stripped of the securities and benefits that had been common during the previous era.’ Such numbers are not abstractions; they are signs of fundamental changes to the fabric of the world and, that, in turn, is likely to signal the end of the nation states in which we live.

Where, then, is Dasgupta’s happy, hopeful ending? It lies in technology: ‘It is possible to imagine a natural extension of current processes, where new technologies are directed towards the creation of a political infrastructure which complements what already exists.’ This, he writes, involves ‘a vast project of political design’. The limitless global scope of technology will take us beyond the ambitions of the good state to ‘something faster, more scalable and more ecologically efficient’.

Thus AI and Web3, far from being de-humanising threats, become the basis of a new world order in which Dasgupta sees a new freedom emerging from the restrictions of the declining nation state. Such technological changes are coming anyway, so perhaps they must be the solution.

Perhaps he is right, I don’t know. But it is clear, if his formidable analysis of the decline of state power is correct, that something new will emerge. I wouldn’t trust JP Morgan Chase on this project, but should we trust Meta or TikTok? We simply do not know, but it is our ignorance which makes this book so important.