It is apposite that ‘After Nations, The Making and Unmaking of a World Order’ – written by English novelist turned historian Rana Dasgupta – should be published as Donald Trump is desperately seeking to extract America from an ill-judged and calamitous war in Iran.

‘After Nations’ is an analysis of the rise and fall of the modern nation state – which Dasgupta sees as a uniquely powerful, secular political entity that first emerged in Western Europe some 300 years ago. The nation state’s theological foundation was reformation Christianity, its political philosophy was enlightenment liberalism, and its economic base was the then emerging capitalist economy.

For Dasgupta, the modern Western nation state is an intrinsically exploitative and aggressive political organization, which derived its unprecedented power from capitalist exploitation of its own citizens, and an even more brutal domination of its colonial possessions.

He views Britain and America as having been the most powerful modern nation states. Britain was the first modern nation state, and was the dominant global power from the 18th century until World War I. Thereafter, America supplanted a declining Britain, becoming the domineering global hegemon after World War II – by means of establishing a new global economic and political world order.

That American-controlled world order is now collapsing, and contemporary America and other Western nation states find themselves beset by acute internal crises that, because of their intrinsically exploitative and aggressive nature, they are incapable of resolving.

In the concluding chapter of his book, Dasgupta suggests that the nation state as a generic political entity may itself be doomed to disappear, and be replaced by more ecologically friendly, less exploitative political structures.

He sees this coming about as a result of an ideological transformation engendered by digital technology and the big tech companies. This radical change will involve mankind embracing “a new universal faith” based upon a “planetary godhead”; creating “a universal digital citizenship”; adopting a “digital currency”; adopting “a new digitally based planetary law”; and radically “reforming our relationship with nature.”

The final chapter the book reads like an eco-technological fable, and Dasgupta’s belief in the eventual disappearance of the nation state reveals itself to be a frankly utopian philosophical assumption, rather than a reasoned conclusion that arises from his own otherwise acute historical analysis.

The notion that the nation state as a generic political entity might disappear is, in fact, inconsistent with the historical analysis at the heart of ‘After Nations’. As that analysis makes clear, the crisis of the nation state described in the book is confined to Western liberal democratic nation states and cannot be applied to powerful contemporary illiberal nation states like China and Russia.

In fact, Dasgupta himself characterizes contemporary China and Russia as unique “transnational political entities” that possess a greater degree of political stability and resilience than Western nation states. If his analysis of the........

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