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Monday, Oct 25, 2004

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The nation state still thrives

By Martin Jacques

Nation states show no sign of going into decline and in the years to come China and India will become major arbiters of all our futures.

FOR A generation or more, it has been an article of faith, at least in Europe, that the nation state is in profound decline. The rise of globalisation, growing economic interdependence, the spread of new international organisations and the power of multinationals, not to mention the European Union itself, suggested that the future lay in new forms of global and regional governance. This was a delusion. The opposite is happening. Nation states will be the decisive players in global affairs over the next few decades.

So much is already clear with the United States. During the cold war, it behaved as a superpower constrained by its allies. Since 9/11 it has acted as Prometheus unbound, a nation state answerable to nobody but itself. Even if John Kerry is elected president, the U.S. will not revert to its pre-9/11 behaviour. Mr. Kerry may emphasise the importance of allies, but the unilateralist instincts of the sole superpower will not be put back in the bottle.

The weakness of Europe as a global player is also a reminder of the efficacy of the nation state. Economically, the E.U. remains a formidable force, rivalling the American economy. As a political player, though, it pales into insignificance in comparison. Even Iraq is a reminder of the importance of the nation state. Before the invasion, liberal imperialists liked to emphasise the limits of sovereignty, and to extol the virtues of imperial power acting to promote human rights and democracy, intervening in order to "civilise the uncivilised." They have gone a little quiet recently, for two reasons I would guess. First, the U.S. has behaved in the way that imperial powers always behave; it is an illusion to believe that it has ever seriously or systematically promoted democracy or human rights outside its own territory. And secondly, Iraq's resistance movement has reminded the world of the power of self-determination, of the resentment felt against rule by an overweening power from an alien culture and race. This was the lesson of the anti-colonial struggle, which somehow had been conveniently forgotten. National sovereignty and independent nation states matter, not just for countries such as Britain that have enjoyed this condition for centuries, but no less for those for which this is a historically novel experience.

There is another sense, though, in which we are likely to see the resurgence of the nation state. The last century was dominated in its first half by medium-sized European nation states, and then subsequently by the rather larger U.S. and Soviet Union. Of the world's presently five most populous countries — China, India, the U.S., Indonesia and Brazil (in descending order) — only the U.S. has been a major global power during the course of the last half-century. This picture, however, is about to change; indeed, given the rise of China, it is already changing.

Over the next half-century, the world is likely to assume a rather different shape. For the first time in the modern era, the world's two most populous countries (by a huge margin) will become major global players in their own right. It will mark the biggest watershed in global affairs since the birth of the modern nation state system.

China and India, with well over a third of the world's population, will become major arbiters of all our futures. Compare that with the late 19th century, when Germany, France and Britain were the dominant powers, while accounting for only around 7 per cent of the world's population (excluding their colonies, of course): or the U.S. and the Soviet Union, which, by the end of the cold war, contained slightly over 10 per cent of the world's population. The emergence of China and India as global powers will, in contrast to any previous period in modern history, introduce a rough and ready democracy to global affairs: the west, still the overwhelmingly dominant power in the world, represents only 17 per cent of humanity, even on the most generous definition of the term.

The arrival of China and India on the world scene will reinforce the importance of the nation state. They will dominate East Asia and South Asia respectively, which between them have well over half the world's population. Any trend in those regions towards the pooling of sovereignty along the lines of the E.U., as in the case of the Association of South-East Asian Nations, will be secondary rather than predominant tendencies.

None of this is to deny the importance of growing global integration, of which the E.U. is one example. Similarly, the accretion of a body of international law and the mushrooming of international institutions, such as the World Trade Organisation and the international criminal court (ICC), are intimations of a nascent sense of global community. But these tendencies have lulled many commentators into underestimating the continuing strength and importance of the nation state.

The emergence of the U.S. as a unilateral superpower was a rude reminder of where power is really located: indeed, it has sought to withdraw from, boycott or ignore the Kyoto Treaty, the ICC and other bodies. The arrival of China as a superpower, and probably India a little further down the historical road, will only reinforce the underlying importance of the nation state. Nation states, not multilateral institutions, will be the decisive players of the 21st century.

- Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

(Martin Jacques is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics Asia Research Centre.)

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