Rana Dasgupta’s book, After Nations. The Making and Unmaking of a World Order (London, William Collins, 2026, pp. 488) deserves to be taken into consideration by federalists for its in-depth and original analysis of the crisis of the post-Cold War international order, although its conclusions on possible remedies do not appear convincing for the reasons we will see. Those who set out to understand the causes of the crisis of the international order and the practicable ways to overcome it must explore without preconceptions all the well-argued analyses, because the future of humanity will depend on the negative or positive developments in international relations: it is enough to recall the possible recourse to nuclear weapons by the superpowers and the unstoppable ecological crisis that from year to year suffocates all continents with increasing heat waves. Today, many inhabitants of planet Earth, especially young people, are asking, “Will humanity have a future?”
Dasgupta’s analysis is interesting because it analyses the international system from multiple points of view: culture, civilization, religion, political and economic institutions. It also examines the political consequences of great revolutions and the relations between small and great powers; the economy in its historical phases of development, information technologies and the environmental crisis. “In the late 1970s – Dasgupta says – there began a set of processes which restored the autonomy of financial capital, reset the purpose of politics, and generated a number of formidable new competitors to the nation-state. What these process were, and where they willl lead, forms the core of this book. Here we need only say that nearly five decades later, the nation-state is unable even in theory to manage reality as once it did. Its capacity to deliver progress and human welfare has been significantly undermined” (p. 5). The book is divided into four Parts and each part into chapters. The Parties are: 1. God-France; 2. Money-Britain; 3. Law-America; 4. Nature-China. Finally, there is a Conclusion in which some reforms of the international order in crisis are proposed.
The Part God-France It is mainly dedicated to the formation and development of the French state, as a model followed by all the other European and non-European states that have progressively become part of the society of nation-states, therefore an interdependent system of sovereign national governments, often fighting for supremacy or their independence. Here is how Dasgupta specifies the formation of this political paradigm: “Considering the comparative poverty and unproductivity of Europe, the Capetian conception of sovereignty generated a reasonably effective military and economic machine. But it also produced a religious paranoid kingdom obsessed with the control of inner life and fundamentally inimical to scientific progress, cosmopolitanism and banking. This was in marked contrast to the non-national polities at the European fringes, which were also inordinately richer. The Abbasid caliphate, the Ottoman empire, the Mamluk sultanate, the Iberian empire of al-Andalus – none of these required homogeneity of belif. Catholics and Jews enjoyed freedom of warship in Andalus, and frequently rose to high political office” (p. 29). This model of coexistence between political power, religious power, agricultural and urban society allowed the European continent to promote a decisive transition towards the era that we now consider modern: trade intensified between all European countries, productivity in agriculture increased, city-states were formed and then the first regional states, especially in Italy, and a little later the first great monarchies in France, Great Britain and Spain. These developments increasingly relegated religion to a marginal role. “In the modern cosmology, God does not intervene directly in the world. The prime mover of history is the state, which takes over most of the coercive functions previously associated with God, and in which faith is non-negotiable. The divinity is pushed to the edge of the cosmos, a remote guarantor of state legitimacy (“God save America”). Individual citizens are free to imagine this divinity as they please, so long as it does not interfere with the primary allegiance to the ‘mortal God’.” (p. 43).
Part Two – Money-Britain – discusses the complex relationship between personal wealth, democracy and social justice. The subject of the study of this crucial historical process is Great Britain. “For centuries, England was distinguished from other European monarchies by the power of parliament, which acted to limit crown prerogative, principally by controlling access to taxation. … One advantage was a political system which excluded all interests save their own: only those in possession of significant estates could vote or serve in parliament” (p. 95). This power structure generated a continuous tension between the government and the ruling class. “Elizabeth I squandered much of crown wealth to the purchase of political support … Her successor, James I, attempted a turnaround … He created new excise duties on England’s expanding trade” (p. 96). In the same years, England had to begin to compete with an ambitious neighbour. “In 1578, the Dutch Republic became the first large state to be ruled by the capitalist class. The result was a formidable engine: in a short century the world was taken over by the Dutch empire” (p. 99). Thus began the race of the European powers to conquer Asia and the Americas, the great European colonial empires were formed, which would resist until the second half of the twentieth century, and the first financial institutions of modern capitalism: the stock exchanges. In England, after the transitory phase of Cromwellian authoritarianism, relative political stability was achieved. “The ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 saw the definitive takeover of English politics by interests of property, and the establishment of a ‘fiscal-military’ state committed to the expansion and defence of those interests at home and abroad” (p. 109).
In the second half of the seventeenth century, the English economy embarked on a profound transformation that would become overwhelming in the following century and that would extend from Europe to the whole world: the industrial revolution. Its relationship with the development of democracy is, however, problematic, partly contradictory. “The state could not Afford democracy. More than that, it did not need democracy. … Britain was no budding democracy. It was a successful and secure property despotism which, far from relaxing its exclusions, enforced them more brutally as the eighteenth century advanced. The British state did not represent ‘the people’, who saw it for what it was: a venial imposition. All but propertied men were excluded from the political system” (p. 113). These crude observations do not concern only the social and political situation of those years. “Britan’s eighteenth-century elites were open-minded radicals, who might have felt quite at home in today’s Silicon Valley. They had no sentimentality about political order – cutting the head from one king, for instance, and sending another into exile. … they were, in fact, the ‘founding fathers’ of our own world – indeed, there mines and plantations would supply the capital for the Industrial Revolution” (p. 119).
An unforeseen consequence of the Industrial Revolution was the formation of a class of a large mass of working poor. “The ‘Poor Law’ of 1834, introduced as part of the process of labour rationalisation, instituted houses of forced labour for poor adults and children; the purpose was to convince them that charity was a more arduous and humiliating form of slavery than anything they might encounter through wage work. The law revolted paternalist conservatives such as Charles Dickens and John Ruskin, who retained a belief in the responsibilities of wealth towards unfortunate” (p- 134). The new phenomenon was the symptom of a deeper social transformation, it was not only a matter of facing the drama of poverty, but of the formation of a new social actor: the working class. Over the course of the century, workers’ unions were organized and real political parties were formed to support their rights: thus a new political thought developed: socialism and communism. A further development of the social process connected with the industrial revolution was the conquest of universal suffrage. “As suffrge expanded, politicians also needed proletarian votes, and it became convenient to have the working classes massed into unions under identifiable leadership. Worker ‘combinations’ moved gradually from the illegal fringes, therefore, to the centre. Unions were fully legalised in Britain in 1871, and the right to strike acknowledged.” (p. 142). Workers not only gained the right to join unions and parties, but soon became a relevant political subject in national politics. “Universal male suffrage was conceded in Britain in February 1918. Female suffrage was finally added in 1928; this too had much to do with wartime experience, which had highlighted the essential role of women in industrial society” (pp. 147-8). In conclusion: “This was the high era of the Western nation-state: a time of great internal conflict, of course, but also of stupendous achievement” (p. 153).
The most recent developments in the international economic system since the fall of the Berlin Wall can be summarized as follows: globalization without government. Dasgupta states: “this revolution began in the banking centres of London and New York, and was extendet across the world. Though it spoke the language of markets, currencies and products, its target was states, taxes and laws. It was a political revolution … globalisation was criminal” (p.157-61). In the most recent phase, globalization, which favours the adoption of powerful ‘smart’ technologies, is seriously jeopardizing democracy. Some AI ideologues, such as Peter Thiel, argue that “The notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ he believes ‘has become an oxymoron’ … Thiel’s investment in crypto currencies, like his founding vision at PayPal, aimed to foster a new kind of money ‘free from all government control and dilution'” (p. 165). Dasgupta recalls: “Foreign Affairs observed in 2021 that ‘states have been the primary actors in global affairs for nearly 400 years. That is starting to change, as a handful of large technology companies rival them for geopolitical influence. … The democracy heyday had already ended” (pp. 169-74).
Part Three is entitled: Law-America. In this Part Dasgupta intends to show how the United States of America has played a prominent role in the creation of the contemporary international order based on the rules of international law and on basically peaceful relations between nation states. Of course, this model of international politics dominated by a great power does not exclude wars, genocide and exploitation by rich countries of poor ones. The first pages are dedicated to a rapid reconstruction of the political thought that developed after the discovery of America and the relations between ‘civilized’ countries, the Europeans, and the ‘barbarian’ countries, the non-European ones. In this historical context, the Peace of Westphalia (1748) represented a decisive turning point. A system of sovereign states has been formed in perpetual search for possible dominance over other states and a necessary balance between powers. It is the dramatic alternative between balance and hegemony that the historian Ludwig Dehio (Gleichgewicht oder Hegemonie, 1948) describes in one of his classic works dedicated to international political history. Dasgupta cites some crucial authors: the philosopher Kant criticizes the system of states based on bare relations of power, covered by an ambiguous international law that allows the resolution of disputes through war. For Kant, perpetual peace can only be guaranteed by a world federal union of states. In the cosmopolitan federation, relations between states must be based on an international law that excludes recourse to war. A second philosopher and politician cited by Dasgupta is Marx who inaugurates the politics of the workers’ internationals, which later developed as socialist and communist internationals. Finally, Dasgupta quotes Mazzini, who fought not only for Italian unification, as a nation state, but also for the political unification of European nations. This part of Dasgupta’s work is useful for understanding contemporary problems.
Let us now consider the crucial role played by the United States in the construction of the contemporary international political order. Already during the First World War, Woodrow Wilson in one of his speeches (in 1916) observed that thanks to God’s Providence “a continent had unused and waiting for a peaceful people who loved liberty and the rights of men more than they loved anything else, to come and set up an unselfish commonwealth” (p. 213). As is well known, at the Versailles Conference Wilson proposed the creation of the League of Nations which was supposed to make the world a ‘safe place for democracy.’ A second principle on which Wilson intended to base the new system of international relations was the self-determination of nations, a principle adopted by Lenin in the Communist International (1919). It soon became evident that the League of Nations would not be able to guarantee peace between the most economically advanced countries or between them and those still subject to colonial rule, now able, thanks to the principle of self-determination, to demand respect for their national autonomy, or sovereignty.
In the 1920s, in Italy, fascism managed to conquer state power without resorting to a violent revolution, although the violent groups, the fascists, active in civil society, managed to obtain growing consensus from the ruling class. In the thirties, Mussolini’s example was followed with determination and ferocity by Hitler who managed in 1933 to be appointed Chancellor of the Reich by President von Hindenburg. Democracy, in an international system, where armed violence is a ‘last resort’ remedy for growing political and social disorder, is condemned to give in to authoritarian forces. Dasgupta notes that Wilson had deluded himself into thinking that he was creating a kind of world parliament with the League of Nations, through which sovereign states could peacefully settle their disputes. Wilson, Dasgupta observes, “was no friend of the colonised, who came to realise that Lenin was a much more plausible icon for their struggle. The United States spent much of the second half of the twentieth century fighting the very group which had come to seek America’s help in 1919 and had been turned away. He was himself, in this sense, fully responsible for the breakdown of the ‘world parliament’ he had so fervently set up” (p. 222).
Towards the end of the Second World War, the U.S. government, under F. D. Roosevelt, took the initiative to plan, in agreement with the USSR, the second great world power, the creation of new international institutions. “The conflagration moved America to position of capitalist superpower. … As the editor of Fortunes put it in 1942, ‘America imperialism can afford to complete the work the British started … American vision, self-government would be granted in the world’s people, while simultaneously and contrarily, global institutions would insulate contracts and property rights from their control. This would be an empire of law … the United States of America emerged from an English principle of property” (pp. 237-8). In fact, the first international institutions created were the economic ones: the Bretton Woods conference took place in 1944, where it was decided to create an international monetary system based on the dollar. In later times, institutions concerning international trade were founded. The UN was founded in San Francisco in 1945. “The American empire was constituted, most obviously, of a system of independent nation-states, each one symbolically represented by a seat in the General Assembly of the new ‘United Nations’. In theory at least, all would be legally equivalent, and the protection of the ‘Westphalian system, which had benefited only a handful of industrialized powers, would be extended to the world” (p. 247).
“This was no ‘Westphalian’ system: once again, a club of rich states enjoyed plenary sovereignty, while a second tier was vulnerable to significant outside infiltration, and for everyone else there were no rules at all. … The much trumpeted Universal Declaration of Human Rights did not stand a chance. The United Nations, once again, was not a world parliament, and could not guarantee those rights, responsibility for enforcing the Declaration was therefore devolved to the highest authority in existence, which was national governments themselves” (pp. 252-3).
The fourth part – Nature-China – it is dedicated to the oldest existing empire (or state). China was official foundation in 221 ECB. “The network of farms and walled cities established along the Yellow and Yagtze rivers could properly and appropriately be called China, … These early societies coordinated human beings, animals, plants and minerals into patterns which proved highly conductive to state-building. … It began to fail only when it came into contact with another, more energetic, formula – that of Europe’s industrialized nation-states” (p. 304). It is certainly not possible here to summarize the history of China over the last two millennia. We must limit ourselves to underlining a political-cultural aspect of Chinese civilization that has some common traits with the European one. The first common aspect is the formation of the ancient state, thanks to the exploitation of natural resources and the development of agriculture. Dasgupta rightly draws attention to the formation of a surplus of agricultural products, which in those centuries allowed the birth of a political-economic function that today we call ‘money’. This phenomenon is connected to the cultivation of wheat. “Grain represented potential consumption – which might be actualised far away in space or time, even by remote foreigners or those not yet born. Since it could be stored … grain could also dispense this value in standard units, and therefore function as a means of exchange. Tax, and therefore states, and therefore ‘modern’ politics, began with grain … No longer did communities labour merely to sustain human life; now they had to sustain the life of states. Farmers produced more than was necessary for their own survival, in other words, and owed their surplus to state-appointed bureaucrats” (p. 308). The downside of these developments in the agricultural-political system was the catastrophic destruction of biodiversity. Archaeologists have been able to verify “the corresponding retreat of those so-called ‘star’ or ‘umbrella’ species – such as tigers and elephants – whose survival is most dependent on the forest hinterland” (p. 309).
Of the fascinating history of China it is now necessary, for obvious reasons of space, to examine only one political-cultural aspect of China, ancient and modern: its conception of the necessary unity and harmony among the different populations. Let us focus on two dynasties: Quin (221-206 ECB) and Han (200 ECB – 220 AD). “By the end of the Spring and Autumn period (476 ECB) the states of the feudal lords numbered little more than a hundred, of which only fourteen were important. Then under the Quin emperor (221 ECB) there was just one. We should note that China’s ‘monistic’ cosmology was already well established long before political unification. During the ‘Spring and Autumn’ and ‘Warring States’ periods, the states of the Yellow River basin witnessed the philosophical efflorescence of the so-called ‘Hundred Schools of Thought’, which idealised unity and order in both the metaphysical and political domain. According to philosopher Mozi … the Quin triumph was seen as the actualisation of the blessed unity; it was a theological event … Unity was not just territorial. At the centre of Mozi’s thought was the concept of tianxia – usually translated as ‘all under Haven’. Historian normally treat this as a political concept, referring simply to ‘the people living under Chinese imperial rule’, but for Mozi it was also moral, ecological and metaphysical. Condemning the disorder of his own period, he hoped for return to the ideal of the past, when Shang and Zhou emperors unified the world as a harmonious whole…. Unity descended from Haven” (pp. 316-7).
Let us now make a very long leap in time and consider how the ancient conception of tianxia has found a new formulation in modern China, thanks to the political struggles that have developed during the 19th and 20th centuries, up to the present day. Over the years, economic relations between China and the European continent have never been interrupted. “A tense symbiosis emerged, which gave rise, not only a Sinocentric trading system, but ultimately a continental economic network whose effects were felt as far away as Baghdad, Costantinople, Venice and Bruges. … The international order represented by its tribute system seemed truly to embrace ‘all under Haven’ (tianxia). And yet, even as China attained its most spectacular glory, it began to collapse as a result of the unsustainable pressure on society and nature. At that point, it was definitively annihilated by another ecological alternative: industrial Europe.” (p. 326-7).
“How might China absorb the lessons of the West – and so become modern and powerful – without being infected by the West’s nationalism and without losing the empire? … Tianxia was ecological and cosmological, it was a ‘regime of value’, defined through opposition to the Westerners’ anarchic and uncouth guo, or ‘state'” (p. 360). “Social-democratic ideals failed to fit the Chinese reality … The theological space would remain empty for decades. The answer to the question raised in the 1890s would arrive only later, and its name was Communism. Communism was the transitional ‘total theology’ that allowed two empires – Russia and China – to be preserved from collapse, even as several others broke up and surrendered to the national condition. The twentieth-century reincarnation of the Eurasian land empire was the ‘People Republic’ – which was emphatically not a democracy, but what Mao called a ‘dictatorship of the people'” (p. 361).
“Chinese Communism absorbed the ancient charisma of ‘all under Haven’, allowing for the continuity of the political entity. Most significantly for our purposes, the Communist turn allowed China to cut off economic ties with the capitalist world for several decades and, so protected, to transition away from the biological energy regime it had always known. Isolated China would develop a modern industrial base on such a scale that, when the barriers were dropped, it could resume the dominant global position anticipated for it by late-nineteenth-century reformers. … China would be the vehicle for a tradition of cosmopolitan thought – including the Western tradition of Kant – which was otherwise disappearing from international relations” (p. 362).
Dasgupta’s essay on the crisis of the international order and the search for ways to a world based on justice, freedom and peace is very useful for those who intend to act. However, in his conclusions, Dasgupta firmly states that the creation of a peaceful world without wars is only a philosophical dream. “The idea we might replace nation-states with a world state is absurd. Beginning with the practicality: no agency on earth could accumulate the power required for such a takeover. The process would also be violent beyond imagination – and our quest, precisely, is to reduce violence. One of the problems with nation-states is that they destroy too much: a new politics must seek to preserve”. This observation is historically correct: many, almost all, nation states were founded through wars between parties or between states at the end of which the victor obtained the power to dominate the subjugated populations. But the process of world peace must and can follow other paths. The construction of a universal peace between nation states does not require a world nation superstate, but a process of international pacification. Here I propose three critical observations to Dasgupta’s analysis.
The first concerns the thought that Kant develops in his political essays in which he states that humanity must propose to put an end to wars between sovereign states through the creation of a world federation of states. Some interpreters argue that Kant sometimes defended the idea of a confederation (i.e., a diplomatic union between sovereign states) and not a federation. However, the most attentive scholars have ruled out this interpretation. In the Seventh Proposition of “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim” (1785), Kant says: “The problem of establishing a perfect civil constitution is dependent on the problem of a lawful external relation between states and cannot be solved without the latter”. This means that every state that belongs to the international order will have an imperfect constitution – the claim to supreme sovereignty over its citizens and other states – until the problem of the cosmopolitan constitution is solved. In this regard, Kant observes, “after many devastations, reversals and even thoroughgoing exhaustion of their powers, nature drives them [the nation states] to what reason could have told them even without much sad experience; namely to go beyond a lawless condition of savages and enter into a federation of nations, where every state, even the smallest, could expect its security and rights not from its own might, or its own juridical judgement, but only from this great federation of nations (Foedus Amphictyonum), from a united might and from the decision in accordance with laws of its united will.”
Regarding Kant’s hesitations, understandable in an era in which the system of nation states was chaotically forming, an important scholar of Kant’s thought observes: “Whereas in the “Idea for a Universal History” (1784) Kant emphasizes the analogy between the two levels of the state of nature without restricting its applicability, in the 1790s he modifies this view. He still uses the analogy but now limits its applicability. The Goals is still to form an international federation with the power to enforce its laws, but there are important disanalogies as to how this goal should be pursued. Kant introduces the thought that this goal should be pursued via the establishment of a loose league of peoples, as a first step” (P. Kleingeld, Kant and Cosmopolitanism, CUP, 2012, pp. 47-8).
My second criticism of Dasgupta concerns the misunderstanding of federalist political thought in its dual aspects: as a federal state and as a political ideology. As for the most relevant aspect of the discovery, because it is a crucial innovation in the history of political thought, of the federal state, it is enough to recall an observation by Alexander Hamilton, one of the constituents of Philadelphia. In The Federalist, Hamilton addresses the argument that the 13 states that had fought for their independence could only have the choice between a complete division and a partial “confederacy”, i.e. a diplomatic union. That the confederacy could ensure peace between the 13 states was a naïve illusion, Hamilton argues: “man are ambitious, vindicative and rapacious. To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties in the same neighbourhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages” (The Federalist, No VI). United in a federation, the United States would be able to be completely independent of the hegemonic claims of the European powers. The federation represented an “enlargement of the orbit” of government (No IX), since local governments remain responsible for local affairs, while entrusting the central government with the necessary powers to manage common affairs: foreign policy, defence and the unity of the internal market. There is therefore a precise relationship between federation and pacification between member countries.
The third criticism concerns the lack of understanding of the process of European unification, unfortunately still incomplete if compared to what happened in the United States in 1787, at the Philadelphia Convention. The start of the process of European unification dates back to the Resistance against Nazi-fascism. In all European countries dominated by Hitler’s troops, popular revolt movements were formed inspired by the ideal of European federal unity. These movements, at the end of the victorious war against Nazi-fascism, acted in civil society and national politics to claim the federal unification of Europe. Unfortunately, the two superpowers, at Yalta, decided that European countries should be divided into two different areas of influence: a Western sphere and an Eastern sphere. For this reason, the process of European unification could only begin in the western part, because Stalin was firmly opposed to the political unity of European countries. Political unification thus began through a gradual process, thanks to the creation of the ECSC, based on the Schuman Declaration (1950) in which it was stated that the ECSC was only a first step towards the European federation. In the Statement the relationship between the ECSC and pacification between European nations is clearly affirmed. “The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible. The setting up of this powerful productive unit, open to all countries willing to take part and bound ultimately to provide all the members countries with the basic elements of industrial production on the same terms, will lay a true foundation for their economic unification.” Today this process has reached the monetary unification of the internal market, with the euro, a supranational currency. The European Union is an economic power, but not a political one because it does not yet have a defence and a foreign policy. However, the process of unification is underway and European federalism is now recognized as a new political ideology, an ideology inspired by the Kantian idea of peace (on European federalism: M. Albertini, Nationalism, Federalism and European Integration, Rubbettino, 2017) therefore to a foreign policy of pacification among all the nations of the world through a process that could stop the disintegration of the United Nations. The European Union, if it is given the means to act as a federal state, will be able to form a coalition of states sufficiently authoritative to initiate a democratic reform of the United Nations.
