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What comes after the nation state?

Gepubliceerd op

01-01-1970

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2 minuten

Opinie & analyse

|Trash lines a river in the center of Bandung

Between 1 and 14 September, NIMD External Advisor Will Derks visited three Democracy Schools (Lviv and Odessa in Ukraine and Gori in Georgia), where he discussed the difficult times democracy is facing, and the innovations that may help us answer these challenges. In Kyiv and Tbilisi he gave a talk about the status of the nation state in contemporary politics. The basic idea is that, in terms of our political system, we are seeing an epoch coming to an end. The old is dying, the new is struggling to be born. Here’s his take on the subject.

In the hectic world of modern politics, a tough question that sometimes come up is whether this is ‘The End of the Nation State?’ (indeed with a question mark). What I think is that the international political system with the nation state as its chief protagonist is changing. This system has been around since the end of World War I, but for all kinds of reasons we now see that it is deteriorating and losing its strength, which many see as a cause of the populist nationalism taking hold in many democracies today. In fact, populist nationalism is a symptom of the decline of the nation state, rather than a sign of its revival.

The end of an era

To be sure, even though the question is a bit provocative, I am not saying the nation state will disappear any time soon. However we are witnessing the end of an era in which the political system we’re familiar with is changing fundamentally, if only because the defining challenges of our time such as inequality, migration, climate change, and terrorism are all beyond the influence of individual nation states.

Trash lines a river in the center of Bandung, West Java. The challenges of pollution and environmental degradation are very difficult for nation states to act on unilaterally. (Image credit: Asian Development Bank via Flickr)

A multi-polar world where power is dispersed

Moreover, what we can observe is a transformation from a relatively monolithic political infrastructure into a multitude of power units, both bigger and smaller than the nation state. These can all exert substantial influence on the course of things in our globalized, interdependent world. Put differently, the nation state will not vanish, but will become just one source of authority among many others.

In today’s world there are many international bodies that sit alongside nation states in the global political economy. How they relate is constantly in flux, and the connection between these bodies and national governments and each other can range from highly harmonious to highly fractious. (Clockwise from top left: The European Union, NATO, OPEC, and the UN)

Pressing cross-border issues

As well as these multinational groupings, we should also focus on other emerging sources of political authority; namely the city, the large urban conglomerate, and especially the innovative ‘Global Parliament of Mayors’, founded by Benjamin Barber, which had its inaugural convening in The Hague in 2016. The idea of the city as a laboratory of change and innovation is at the heart of this Global Parliament of Mayors, a sort of first Hanseatic Society since the Middle Ages, though now on a global scale. Typically, the member cities of this Parliament have pledged to develop what they call ‘common policies and common action to pressing cross-border issues’, especially migration and climate change. In other words, they intend to develop their own foreign policy and they are serious — for instance they have agreed to financially support so-called ‘sanctuary cities’ in the US, which face cuts in federal funds by the Trump Administration.