Imagine a world free of nations
Can we imagine a more peaceful world of dialogue between peoples, freed from the narrow identities of nations and globalisation?
Some people observe a clash of values in distressed democracies between nationalist populists and globalist elites. A British journalist, David Goodhart, described the divide as Somewheres versus Anywheres. The popular alternative media channel, The Duran, recently redefined global politics as a clash between Globalists and Sovereigntists.
The thinking of this outlook goes like this. The nationalist populists resentfully imagine themselves locked out of their country, displaced by immigrants from their former colonies. They imagine dark pacts, signed in digital currency at Davos, to impose “World Government” on their native nations. On the other hand, the globalist elites, our twenty-first century meritocratic aristocracy, fear the populists are summoning the darkness in which democracy will die. But the elites feel the fear and do the thing anyway. They administer euthanasia involuntarily to their democratic subjects.
Neither party listens to the other much. They both prefer to spread memes and misinformation. It is easier than the real tasks of government. They both limit their dialogue to the weak retelling of the same old stories of the world that appear in international relations. They see only a world of nations, or a Manichean struggle between democracies and autocracies. The populists believe the nation is their alienated home. The elites admit, in private, the nation state is the fortress of their power.
To seek a better way of conducting real diplomacy in this changing world, to promote peaceful dialogue between peoples, we need to seek better stories of the history of the world than are told in all this sound and fury. We must look beyond the stale ideas of international relations that dictate our global “common sense,” and are made up of trite ideas about national interests, realism, and liberal rules-based international orders. We need world history, not international relations systems.
Theories of international relations in the Anglophone world are dominated by two ideas: liberalism and realism. The liberal school has collapsed into the ruins of the ‘liberal rules-based order’. The ‘realist’ school has the virtue of caution, but strips world history down to a brutal struggle for survival between hegemon and challenger nation-states. Neither theory describes the world as it is. Nor do they offer much hope of peaceful cooperation between many-cultured peoples in a world that could be.
But there are more inspiring, ethical alternatives to liberal and realist world orders, or to nationalist or globalist loyalties. We can find them, outside Western traditions, in an essay on nationalism in the West by Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali winner of the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature, and in the historical essays of Priya Satia, the Stanford University historian of British Empire whose family fled Punjab.
Rabindranath Tagore on Nationalism
The essay on nationalism in the West by Rabindranath Tagore was published in 1917. It was part of a booklet, Nationalism that was based on lectures given by Tagore in Japan: on nationalism in India, Japan and the West, and on ‘the sunset of the century’. You can read the full book here via the Internet Archive. I read the essay, Nationalism in the West, on the Burning Archive podcast and my YouTube channel, and I gave a brief introduction to the key ideas and their relevance to our situation today. I will be reading Tagore’s related, later essay, Crisis in Civilization, written in the darkness in which the post-1945 world was born, in my audio-minis series for paid subscribers in late November.
I will not repeat all that, except to encourage you to check out this remarkable essay which explored alternatives to the idea of nation. Tagore saw the idea of nation, which most leaders of the West saw as the foundation of world order, as mechanical, competitive, and expressive of the West’s history of conquest of the “no-nations” of the rest of the world. The first paragraph of this essay contained like a compressed diamond the thoughts elaborated in the rest.
“The truth is that the spirit of conflict and conquest is at the origin and in the centre of the Western nationalism; its basis is not social cooperation. It has evolved a perfect organization of power but not spiritual idealism. It is like the pack of predatory creatures that must have its victims…. Because this civilization is the civilization of power, therefore it is exclusive, it is naturally unwilling to open its sources of power to those whom it has selected for its purposes of exploitation.”
Tagore, “Nationalism in the West”
Tagore is a profoundly ethical writer, and these words still echo powerfully in our present when the multipolar world slouches toward Bethlehem against the resistance of the ‘predatory creatures’ of the ‘golden billion’ of the West.
Priya Satia on a world freed of the idea of nation
The inspiration from quality world history comes from Priya Satia. Satia is a history professor at Stanford University. She grew up in California, but her family come from the agony of British empire in India. Her mother’s family fled West Punjab during the Partition of 1947. Her father’s grandfather and aunts were part of the anti-colonial resistance in a cotton-growing town in Punjab.
Today Satia practises as a cultural historian who brilliantly threads together mental and material strands of the modern world in the age of empire. Her books are:
Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East (2008)
Empire of Guns: The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution (2018)
Time's Monster: How History Makes History (2020), which I have read and recommend.
Time's Monster includes a profound set of reflections on how British historians have served imperial and national interests, sometimes explicitly as the ‘school of statesmen’. It explored how history might be reimagined for more ethical purposes for the powerless many. Towards the end of that book, Satia wrote,
many in the modern period believed that conquest and nation-building might be exercises in virtue—perhaps the biggest proof of that flawed nature. Billions of us now are working out our destinies in the shadow of states and political relationships that are the wreckage of that folly.
Satia, Time’s Monster, pp. 297-298
Priya Satia is one of the most imaginative of the historians of empire writing today. This quote echoes today as ‘nationalists’ scrap with ‘globalists’, and many of us long for a better way.
She described the moral quagmire of visions of the end of history, or the profound dissatisfaction so many of us feel with the possibilities of the world as it is in a world of nations and undeclared empires. She offers an alternative to the ‘realist’ choice of ruthless statecraft: act ethically in the now, without regard to whether history or an imagined progress in the future justifies your action. For Satia, a different kind of imaginative, manifold, and generous history can support that ethical choice.
We will need history to understand how we got here—the tension between a historical and antihistorical outlook will be permanent in our souls. We might tell new, more encompassing, perhaps more chaotic stories that will return us to the fullness of time. In their telling, we may make new history, too. That history can have no end; the struggle to renew humanity is an end in itself.”
Satia, Time’s Monster, p. 298
While Time’s Monster focused on British historians and imperial statesmen, Satia’s most recent essay explored the dilemmas of this ethical choice in India’s founding statesperson, Nehru. Her essay “Nehru’s Other Indias” is a fine, free essay that draws on her draft book on British colonialism in Punjab and its legacies, and her Nehru Memorial Lecture 2024 at King’s College, which you can watch on YouTube here.
The essay traces how Nehru struggled to make an ethical choice to fashion the political order of post-colonial India, pulled on one side by visions of internationalist federations and on the other by practical, ‘realist’ statecraft, driven by the idea of the nation-state. It is a brilliant essay that shows how many ideas were formed, in the wake of Tagore’s essays on nationalism, for some new kind of ‘world order’ and some kinder form of political community.
Those working for decolonisation in the last century put forward many possible visions of a postcolonial order; their goal was not to make new nations but to change the world order. This story of the contested and contingent way that decolonisation actually led to a world of nation-states rather than federations might help us see our present less as a “natural” formation and open up our horizons to different political futures. Our challenges of climate change, pandemics, nuclear weapons, AI – demand movement toward a world order of partnership, interdependence, pluralism – the horizon of the planet not the nation-state.
Satia, “Nehru’s Other Indians”
Satia’s verdict on Nehru is rich, complex, and thought-provoking. She judges him to have failed Tagore’s inspiration because Nehru succumbed to the dreary practicalities of deciding on things that worked in the world as it is.
When internationalism, secularism, federalism, antimilitarism seemed unlikely to “work” in India’s interest, the statesman Nehru set those commitments aside, as he continued to understand India’s interest in terms inherited from the colonial state, as industrial catch-up. If it was motivated by a desire to fortify the subcontinent against recolonisation, it did so in a manner that kept India enslaved to Western measures of civilisation.
Satia, “Nehru’s Other Indians”
She may be a little harsh on Nehru and the limitations of choices in statecraft. She may be a little too dreamy about the prospects of a state launched on a wing - of the world as it could be - and a prayer - that utopias just might work. But the dilemma of judgement she points to is newly relevant to us today, and there is little evidence of much concern for deeper questions of ethical history among our leaders.
In our current moment, when the ‘multipolar world’ is being reborn again, the political leaders and citizens of this world face this same ethical and intellectual dilemma. Can we tell stories of the world order that are not distorted by the “idea of the nation” that Tagore criticised back in 1917? Can we imagine alternatives to the liberal hegemony of undeclared American empire or John Mearsheimer’s dog-eat-dog world of a realistic struggle between great powers? Can we, global citizens who seem powerless to stop our world of nations careening to disaster, find resources in history and imagination to live ethically in the now, without seeking either compensation in a future progress or consolation in a melancholy memory?
Satia evokes Tolstoy and Gandhi’s insistence on “the regeneration of the inner man” as the source of hope. In doing so, she recovers some hope from the burning archive of history. Please do read her inspiring histories.
Her vision of an open post-1945 world will be the focus of my posts over the next five weeks where I will be exploring in detail:
the account of the post 1945 world presented in John Darwin, After Tamerlane (for paid subscribers), and
the main history myths of five major powers in the post-1945 world (for free subscribers)
Become a paid subscriber to get the full benefit of learning from history to live well today, without having to read all those long books by yourself.