Imagine a world free of the idea of nation
Alternatives to nationalism, globalism and realism from Tagore, Nehru and Satia
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 for Literature, and in the historical essays of Priya Satia, the Stanford University historian of British Empire whose family fled Punjab.
I explain all to my members below.