The End of the Nation State?
Show notes
Where did the nation-state come from—and what happens if the conditions that made it powerful are now disappearing?
Thomas discusses these questions and much more in this wide-ranging Conflicted Conversation with award-winning novelist and essayist Rana Dasgupta, whose new book After Nations: The Making and Unmaking of a World Order sets out to explain where our world order came from and where it could be going.
Rana explains:
- The origins of the modern nation-state and the decline of universal sacred empires
- Louis IX, the Crown of Thorns and the sacralisation of the French state
- How Enlightenment political theology transformed God, sovereignty and individual rights
- Industrialisation, mass democracy, welfare states and the political power of workers
- Liberalism, populism and the changing relationship between elites and mass democracy
- The origins of international law in empire, property rights and global capitalism
- Why the postwar rules-based international order is now weakening
- The East India Company, Silicon Valley and the rise of quasi-sovereign corporate power
- China as an alternative model of state power and control over private capital
- Climate change, mass migration and whether the nation-state can survive a new ‘nomad century’
Find Rana on X: x.com/byranadasgupta
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Conflicted is a Message Heard production.
Executive Producers: Jake Warren & Max Warren.
Produced and edited by Thomas Small .
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