While the politicians at the head of the member states are directly dependent on the people who elect them, the leaders of the empire have only to answer to their overseas retainers.
Rana Dasgupta (born: 1971) is a well-known fiction writer of Hindu and British parents. His novels and fact-analysis writings caused excitement and brought prizes to the author as early as the 1910s. In his studies, he raises the big questions of the 21st century: among them the future of the nation-state system. We often come across his statements in discussions about globalization, so I think it is important that we think through his statements ourselves.
After nations (2021) about the futility of nation-states, is also eloquent in its title, meaning: "What comes after the nations" and The silenced majority (2020) , i.e.: "The silenced majority" is the birthplace of many findings suitable for substantive discussion . , the Demise of the nation state: "The fall of the nation state" (2018) , which appeared in the Guardian and made a lot of noise, seems even more fundamental The crisis phenomena that have greeted us since then make the disputability of his analysis timely again and again.
In his article, Dasgupta begins by saying that politicians who want to discourage immigration do so as a substitute; to divert attention from the weakening of local governments. Although he obviously makes a mistake right at this corner point; since we know from experience that, compared to this, the primary experience is that the need for security of the residents of the affected areas is destroyed by the massive influx of wild animals. Orbán's system, for example, shows no signs of weakening, and it was precisely with this that he was able to prevent the multitudes coming from the third world. And since it succeeded, it got even stronger.
He then takes turns with the forces that reject the operation of the so-called liberal democracy; this is how he sees the Brexit movement and Trump's rise to power. However, it does not seem to be noticed that the process did not come out of nowhere: the intellectual and then political movement of the Enlightenment attacked the building of religion, and this has continued today with the warfare against bourgeois values. In other words, it started with the attacked person trying to resist. And the author is wrong when he claims that - the governments of Myanmar, India and Hungary, which are not at all similar to each other, but which are still close to him, build their policies on the preservation of some kind of ethnic-religious purity. (With this all smeared with the glaze of fascism.)
At least in the case of Hungary, we know that we have not set ourselves the "purity" of our worldview, but the protection of the existing part of our self-determination. (Just as we do not want autonomy for the Hungarians across the border for the sake of some aristocratic separation, but for the sake of the unimpaired self-administration of the communities.) That keeping away those who seek to invade by force does not stem from xenophobia is best shown by Hungary's willingness to accept Ukrainians who are actually fleeing the dangers of war. Those coming from the country where the community rights of our Hungarian brothers and sisters living there are constantly denied.
According to Dasgupta, it is indeed anti-foreign to protect borders with fences; and the assertion of sovereignty is nothing more than the form of post-defense battles associated with the collapse of nation-states. So, while he believes that the essence of the problem is that the governments of the nation states are no longer able to keep control in their hands, because a significant part of the things that decide everyday life are decided above their heads, I think the problem is with subsidiarity, with the ability of citizens to manage their affairs of its right (according to the principle of subsidiarity, all decisions and implementation must be made at the lowest possible level, where they have the greatest competence - ed.) for the sake of empire building. In the case of the EU, the economic crisis of 2008, migration, the covid epidemic, and the war in Ukraine are a series of challenges that should have been solved on a supranational or at least an inter-national level, but this was unsuccessful. A counterexample is Greece: where life stopped under the yoke of the IMF. Well, from such experiences - and not on the basis of world view fog - the perception of the nation-state grew stronger.
According to our author, the institutional framework built for the cooperation of nation-states is weakening because there are no substantive consequences for violating the rules. Not if it's committed by giant companies or the lords of the financial world - but these fall outside the framework of the nation-state in the first place! He suggests that those wretched persons who want to enter our earthly paradise will be punished. It does not even occur to him that this does not occur in the form of regular, individual immigration, but in the form of violent mass invasion, which entails social disintegration in the Western world and neglect of problem management in the abandoned homeland. He is not talking about the intention to subvert Western societies, about organized human trafficking. He claims that the nation-state is unable to give a meaningful answer to this problem. No? After all, the border fence is already worthwhile, and so is the Hungary Helps program. So, together.
All the while, the seduction goes on behind our backs, says the flute of the Hammeln rat catcher. And this has no meaningful , retaliatory consequences. If EU leaders or, as we saw with the election of Biden, American leaders violate democracy, well, there is no punishment for that!
Without taking this into account, our author can safely state that with the weakening of the center in the individual countries, tax revenues fall short, and state services deteriorate or are left out, be it education, healthcare, or law enforcement. At the same time, the needs of the public are being met more and more by private companies, and thus less and less depends on the will of national governments. We also experienced this in the PPP deals that continue to plunder the country under the left-wing governments...
In public services, the profit principle often does not work. That's why it was necessary, e.g. to nationalize the British railway again after the great privatization. Or the energy service with us. Because the question here is how satisfy the needs of the public. Namely: on a business basis. We saw this in the fight over the selection of vaccines during the epidemic, or in the skyrocketing energy prices around the world! A counterexample is the Hungarian overhead reduction. Where they did not act according to the Hungarian model, they are now recommending a substantial reduction in the use of heating and hot water in residential buildings. And the fact that the states in the globalized world are not able to collect taxes effectively, and thus the better services have to be bought more and more for money from private companies, is counteracted by the almost full employment achieved in Hungary and the IT connection of the goods traffic to the tax office. This is undoubtedly the intervention of the state in market processes - but it worked!
Finally, the author argues that the world order resulting from the Peace of Westphalia in 1648 is a completely European idea, and although the II. After World War II, it spread throughout the world, but as a result of arbitrary territorial divisions, it was accompanied by the severing of ethnic groups and the forcing of mixed populations into one state. In other words, they are not actually nation-states. But then their operational problems cannot be considered as arising from the nation state! A nation-state is sustained by a community.
This is about something else. Proxy wars of empires can be fought on such mosaics of territory. The extermination of millions of human lives is therefore not a result of the nation-state system, but lies in the "divide and conquer" efforts of the great powers. Empires really have a need for proxy wars, let's take Korea, Vietnam, or most recently Ukraine.
Dasgupta therefore suggests the following.
Incomes must be distributed more fairly among the states, because otherwise the huge differences will lead to new wars and refugee flows. In essence, he is proposing a giant supranational budget. (Meanwhile, EU members are also sucking their teeth from the 1 percent payment.) National governments must be forced to comply with common rules. According to him, such an international supervision can only gain democratic authority if the current citizenship rules are abolished; because nation-state elections are not suitable for democratically controlling the institutions that watch over nation-states. According to Dasgupta, the above aspirations have all already appeared in a fairly large system: the European Union. Even if the EU is imperfect now and does not seem to be heading in the direction of strengthening, it still offers the principled examples here to the attention of the whole world.
On the other hand, we can say from the inside that the main problem is that the election of European leaders has nothing to do with popular representation. Therefore, if the leaders do not comply with the democratic mandate and cause mass dissatisfaction, then there is no consequence - and especially at the head of our Union. (As we saw this most recently in connection with the corruption charges against Stella Kyriakídis, the EU Health Commissioner, who also signed the vaccine contracts.) If you are not satisfied with them, you can be replaced - by the people: this is what the people of Great Britain decided in Brexit. While the politicians at the head of the member states are directly dependent on the people who elect them, the leaders of the empire have only to answer to their overseas retainers.
At least this is what the well-known idyllic picture of the kiss between Jean-Claude Junker and American financier György Soros suggests.
András Kelemen
Featured image: Rana Dasgupta / hiap.fi
