Danes love to talk, to mingle and to simply sit together, enjoy the candlelight, good food and interesting talks. View image of New Zealand citizens 65 and older automatically receive generous government allowances Credit: That scroll can be viewed in the museum now, and I think it should be something that tourists go to see, like the Statue of Liberty.
The country also has generous policies that support single parents, children, students and seniors. View image of Alia Bickson: In fact, Canada comes close to many of the Scandinavian countries in its near-perfect scores, including access to nutrition and medical care, as well as to basic knowledge and personal rights. View image of Japanese schools rank well globally, with elementary and secondary schooling being mandatory Credit: Not only does the island nation rank highest in Asia by the World Bank for overall government effectiveness, rule of law and political stability, it also received the highest marks in Asia from the Social Progress Index for its access to basic knowledge, water and sanitation, and access to nutrition and medical care.
However, a big part also owes to effective and in some cases quite liberal policies, especially in comparison to my home country, the US.
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Though the aging population and population decline is putting pressure on the solvency of the programme, said Goulston, overall, the system works. Japan also has some of the world's best cancer doctors. Though the schools are highly regimented and systematic — which can lead to over-standardisation, according to Goulston — they have prioritised nutrition as a key part of education, with school lunches prepared with locally grown ingredients and paired with lessons on healthy eating and food history.
View image of Botswana is known for having strong personal freedoms, such as freedom of the press and personal property rights Credit: Botswana consistently ranks as one of the strongest-governed countries in Africa, especially in its role in containing corruption, regionally ranking the highest in both the World Bank assessment and Rule of Law Index. Not only that, but the national revenue from diamond mining has been fairly well distributed throughout the county. We are a nation that believes disputes are resolved effectively by debating them to a conclusion, and not by going to war.
The country is known for having strong personal freedoms, scoring high in both freedom of the press and personal property rights. By the end of 19th century, European nations had acquired uniform attributes still familiar today — in particular, a set of fiercely enforced state monopolies defence, taxation and law, among others , which gave governments substantial mastery of the national destiny. In return, a moral promise was made to all: Spectacular state-run projects in the fields of education, healthcare, welfare and culture arose to substantiate this promise.
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The withdrawal of this moral promise over the past four decades has been a shattering metaphysical event in the west, and one that has left populations rummaging around for new things to believe in. For the promise was a major event in the evolution of the western psyche. It was part of a profound theological reorganisation: During the period of decolonisation that followed the second world war, the European nation-state structure was exported everywhere.
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But westerners still felt its moral promise with an intensity peculiar to themselves — more so than ever, in fact, after the creation of the welfare state and decades of unprecedented postwar growth. Nostalgia for that golden age of the nation state continues to distort western political debate to this day, but it was built on an improbable coincidence of conditions that will never recur.
Very significant was the structure of the postwar state itself, which possessed a historically unique level of control over the domestic economy. Capital could not flow unchecked across borders and foreign currency speculation was negligible compared to today.
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Governments, in other words, had substantial control over money flows, and if they spoke of changing things, it was because they actually could. The fact that capital was captive meant they Governments could impose historic rates of taxation, which, in an era of record economic growth, allowed them to channel unprecedented energies into national development.
For a few decades, state power was monumental — almost divine, indeed — and it created the most secure and equal capitalist societies ever known. The destruction of state authority over capital has of course been the explicit objective of the financial revolution that defines our present era. As a result, states have been forced to shed social commitments in order to reinvent themselves as custodians of the market. This has drastically diminished national political authority in both real and symbolic ways.
The picture is the same all over the west: We can all see the growing fury at governments that refuse to fulfil their old moral promise — but it is most probable that they no longer can. Western governments possess nothing like their previous command over national economic life, and if they continue to promise fundamental change, it is now at the level of PR and wish fulfilment. There is every reason to believe that the next stage of the techno-financial revolution will be even more disastrous for national political authority.
This will arise as the natural continuation of existing technological processes, which promise new, algorithmic kinds of governance to further undermine the political variety. Big data companies Google, Facebook etc have already assumed many functions previously associated with the state, from cartography to surveillance. Now they are the primary gatekeepers of social reality: And, as the growth of digital currencies shows, new technologies will emerge to replace the other fundamental functions of the nation state.
The libertarian dream — whereby antique bureaucracies succumb to pristine hi-tech corporate systems, which then take over the management of all life and resources — is a more likely vision for the future than any fantasy of a return to social democracy. Governments controlled by outside forces and possessing only partial influence over national affairs: But in the west, it feels like a terrifying return to primitive vulnerability.
It is an epochal upheaval, which leaves western populations shattered and bereft. There are outbreaks of irrational rage, especially against immigrants, the appointed scapegoats for much deeper forms of national contamination. The idea of the western nation as a universal home collapses, and transnational tribal identities grow up as a refuge: The stakes could not be higher. So it is easy to see why western governments are so desperate to prove what everyone doubts: The era of globalisation has seen consistent attempts by US presidents to enhance the authority of the executive, but they are never enough.
Citizens who have nothing are persuaded that they have a lot. These strategies are ugly, but they cannot simply be blamed on a few bad actors. The predicament is this: Instead, they must arouse and deploy powerful feelings: But let us not imagine that these strategies will quickly break down under their own deceptions as moderation magically comes back into fashion. Partly because citizens are desperate for the cover-up to succeed: Almost all those nations emerged in the 20th century from the Eurasian empires. The modern nation of Syria looks unlikely to last more than a century without breaking apart, and it hardly provides security or stability for its citizens.
Empires were not democratic, but were built to be inclusive of all those who came under their rule. It is not the same with nations, which are founded on the fundamental distinction between who is in and who is out — and therefore harbour a tendency toward ethnic purification. This makes them much more unstable than empires, for that tendency can always be stoked by nativist demagogues. Nevertheless, in the previous century it was decided with amazing alacrity that empires belonged to the past, and the future to nation states.
And yet this revolutionary transformation has done almost nothing to close the economic gap between the colonised and the colonising. In the meantime, it has subjected many postcolonial populations to a bitter cocktail of authoritarianism, ethnic cleansing, war, corruption and ecological devastation. In the breakneck pace of decolonisation, nations were thrown together in months; often their alarmed populations fell immediately into violent conflict to control the new state apparatus, and the power and wealth that came with it. Many infant states were held together only by strongmen who entrusted the system to their own tribes or clans, maintained power by stoking sectarian rivalries and turned ethnic or religious differences into super-charged axes of political terror.
The list is not a short one. Formally equivalent to the older nations with which they now shared the stage, they were in reality very different entities, and they could not be expected to deliver comparable benefits to their citizens. Those dictators could never have held such incoherent states together without tremendous reinforcement from outside, which was what sealed the lid on the pressure cooker.
The demise of the nation state
The post-imperial ethos was hospitable to dictators, of course: But the cold war vastly expanded the resources available to brutal regimes for defending themselves against revolution and secession. The two superpowers funded the escalation of post-colonial conflicts to stupefying levels of fatality: And what the superpowers wanted out of all this destruction was a network of firmly installed clients able to defeat all internal rivals. The breakup of the superpower system, however, has led to the implosion of state authority across large groups of economically and politically impoverished countries — and the resulting eruptions are not contained at all.
Over the past 20 years, the slow, post-cold-war rot in Africa and the Middle East has been exuberantly exploited by these kinds of forces — whose position, since there are more countries set to go the way of Yemen, South Sudan, Syria and Somalia, is flush with opportunity. Their adherents have lost the enchantment for the old slogans of nation-building.
Their political technology is charismatic religion, and the future they seek is inspired by the ancient golden empires that existed before the invention of nations. Militant religious groups in Africa and the Middle East are less engaged in the old project of seizing the state apparatus; instead, they cut holes and tunnels in state authority, and so assemble transnational networks of tax collection, trade routes and military supply lines. Such a network currently extends from Mauritania in the west to Yemen in the east, and from Kenya and Somalia in the south to Algeria and Syria in the north.
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This eats away the old political architecture from the inside, making several nation states such as Mali and the Central African Republic essentially non-functional, which in turn creates further opportunities for consolidation and expansion. Several ethnic groups, meanwhile — such as the Kurds and the Tuareg — which were left without a homeland after decolonisation, and stranded as persecuted minorities ever since, have also exploited the rifts in state authority to assemble the beginnings of transnational territories. For many decades, it was content to see large areas of the world suffer under terrifying parodies of well-established Western states; it cannot complain that those areas now display little loyalty to the nation-state idea.
Especially since they have also borne the most traumatic consequences of climate change, a phenomenon for which they were least responsible and least equipped to withstand.
The strategic calculation of new militant groups in that region is in many ways quite accurate: The situation requires new ideas of political organisation and global economic redistribution. Barbed wire and harder borders will certainly not suffice to keep such human disasters at bay. L et us turn to the nature of the nation-state system itself.
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The international order as we know it is not so old. How were human beings to live securely in their new nations, after all, if nations themselves were not subject to any law? Without such constraints, their disproportionate power produced exactly what one would expect: The end of the cold war did nothing to change American behaviour: Just as illegitimate government within a nation cannot persist for long without opposition, the illegitimate international order we have lived with for so many decades is quickly exhausting the assent it once enjoyed.
In many areas of the world today, there is no remaining illusion that this system can offer a viable future. All that remains is exit. Some are staking everything on a western passport, which, since the supreme value of western life is still enshrined in the system, is the one guarantee of meaningful constitutional protection. But such passports are difficult to get. That leaves the other kind of exit, which is to take up arms against the state system itself. The appeal of Isis for its converts was its claim to erase from the Middle East the catastrophe of the post-imperial century.
The era of national self-determination has turned out to be an era of international lawlessness, which has crippled the legitimacy of the nation state system. The true extent of our insecurity will be revealed as the relative power of the US further declines, and it can no longer do anything to control the chaos it helped create. T he three elements of the crisis described here will only worsen. First, the existential breakdown of rich countries during the assault on national political power by global forces.
Second, the volatility of the poorest countries and regions, now that the departure of cold war-era strongmen has revealed their true fragility. So we are obliged to re-examine its ageing political foundations if we do not wish to see our global system pushed to ever more extreme forms of collapse. This is not a small endeavour: We do not know yet where it will lead. All we can lay out now is a set of directions.
