The Twilight of Nations: Are We Witnessing the End of the World as We’ve Known It?

For those of us born in the latter half of the twentieth century, the nation-state has always seemed as permanent as the ground beneath our feet. We carry passports that proclaim our nationality, pay taxes to national treasuries, and when crisis strikes, we look instinctively to our governments for protection. Yet this seemingly eternal arrangement is, in historical terms, remarkably young, and increasingly, it appears to be showing its age.

Rana Dasgupta’s thought-provoking work “After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order” arrives at a moment when more than 99% of humanity lives within the borders of nation-states, yet faith in this system has never felt more fragile. From the resurgence of xenophobic populism in Europe and America to the mass displacement of people across continents, from spiraling national debts to the existential threat of climate change that laughs at our carefully drawn borders, the cracks in the nation-state edifice are becoming impossible to ignore.

The irony is almost too perfect: the nation-state reached its zenith just as it began revealing its inadequacies. After the collapse of European empires and the wave of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century, the planet was carved into discrete territorial units, each claiming sovereignty over a particular patch of earth and the people within it. This arrangement was supposed to deliver on the liberal promises of the postwar order: human rights, dignity, and security for all. For a few decades, it seemed to work, at least for some.

But today, those foundational liberal ideals are in retreat across much of the world. The very notion of universal human rights, once considered the bedrock of the international system, is being challenged by governments that view such concepts as Western impositions. National dignity has morphed into narrow nationalism. Security for all has given way to security for “our people” at the expense of everyone else.

The evidence of this unraveling is everywhere. Consider the global migration crisis, which is not merely a humanitarian catastrophe but a symptom of the nation-state’s fundamental failure. Millions of people are voting with their feet, risking their lives to cross borders because the nation-states they were born into cannot, or will not, provide them with basic opportunities for survival and dignity. These are not simply individual tragedies; they represent a massive crisis of legitimacy for the entire system.

Meanwhile, those of us fortunate enough to live in wealthy democracies face our own forms of abandonment. The social contract that bound citizens to their states, wherein we pay taxes and obey laws in exchange for education, healthcare, infrastructure, and opportunity, is fraying. Across the developed world, a generation is coming of age knowing they will likely be poorer than their parents, unable to afford homes, burdened by debt, and increasingly cynical about the capacity of their governments to address their needs.

The nation-state’s inadequacy becomes even more glaring when we confront challenges that are planetary in scale. Climate change does not respect borders. Ocean acidification cannot be solved by any single country, no matter how powerful. The loss of biodiversity is a global emergency requiring coordinated action that nation-states, jealously guarding their sovereignty, seem constitutionally incapable of delivering.

We’ve tried to work around these limitations through international institutions like the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, and various climate accords. But these bodies lack real authority and remain dependent on the voluntary cooperation of nation-states. When national interest conflicts with global necessity, we know which one usually wins.

Yet despite these mounting failures, it’s difficult to imagine what might replace the nation-state. Humans seem to need belonging, identity, and political community on a human scale. The nation-state, for all its flaws, provided that. What alternative could command similar loyalty and legitimacy?

Some observers point to the rising power of cities, suggesting that mayor-led networks of global metropolises might be better positioned to address problems like climate change and inequality than sclerotic national governments. Others see the future in regional blocs, expansions of models like the European Union, that might preserve some aspects of national identity while pooling sovereignty on crucial issues.

There are darker possibilities too. We could be headed toward a new age of empire, with spheres of influence controlled by great powers like China and the United States. Or we might see a fragmentation into something more feudal, with loyalties divided between various non-state actors: corporations, religious movements, ethnic groups, even algorithmic platforms that command more of our attention and shape more of our reality than any government.

The question Dasgupta’s work forces us to confront is not whether the nation-state is perfect (it clearly isn’t) but whether we’re prepared for what comes after it. Revolutionary change in world order doesn’t arrive on schedule or according to plan. The last great transition, from empire to nation-state, took centuries and cost millions of lives in wars and violence.

Are we in the early stages of such a transition now? The signs are certainly there. But transitions are dangerous times, periods when the old order has lost legitimacy but the new one hasn’t yet been born. In such moments, all sorts of monsters can emerge from the shadows.

Perhaps the nation-state can yet be reformed, its liberal foundations restored and adapted to meet twenty-first-century challenges. Perhaps we can find ways to preserve what’s valuable about national identity and community while creating new structures of global governance equal to our global problems. Perhaps.

But we should not underestimate the difficulty of this task, nor the stakes involved. The nation-state, young as it is, has become so deeply embedded in how we organize human life that its unraveling, whether through reform or collapse, will reshape everything: how we define ourselves, how we relate to each other, and how we govern our shared future on this increasingly fragile planet.

The only certainty is that the old answers no longer suffice. The question is whether we’ll find new ones before it’s too late.