On the perils of the nation-state paradigm
From all indications, it appears that Beelzebub, the prince of devils, is upon the world. The entire globe is roiling in crisis and confusion. No part of the globe seems exempt from the phenomenal disorder. It is just as well if everything ends in Great Britain where modern democracy first stirred with Oliver Cromwell infamous dismissal of parliament swiftly followed by the execution of the reigning monarch.
Several centuries later, it feels as if the spirit of Oliver Cromwell has returned to haunt Britain, this time not as an avowed regicide but as a grim reaper of regnant executives. The nation-state paradigm appears to be unraveling at the seam.
For a moment last Wednesday evening, Britain’s famed and iconic House of Commons was in danger of dissolving into a house of commotion as restive members chafed and snagged at Liz Truss’ heels following a heated debate which put a question mark on her competence and ability to lead the nation.
By the time it was put out on Thursday morning that Graham Brady, the leader of shadowy and mildly sinister 1922 Committee, was on his way to Downing Street, it was obvious that the fat lady was about to sing once again. The eerie feeling of Déjà vu became reinforced as the public address system was wheeled out. Britain was about to have its third leader in six months. The world’s most competitive democracy was beginning to show signs of terminal stress.
Meanwhile as British democracy was openly combusting, the entire world looks on in stunned silence and disorientation as Russia takes Ukraine apart in saturation bombing the like of which has not been seen since the Second World War. Thrice in three decades, the Russians have willfully altered the global geopolitical cartography and still counting.
As usual, and not unexpectedly, Africa appears to be the worst hit. The benighted continent is already reaping the whirlwind of the Ukrainian debacle in terms of skyrocketing energy bills, soaring wheat price and runaway stagflation. But since those who are already down need fear no fall, it is in the most advanced and civilized parts of the world that the pain and anguish are being felt the most.
Yet it bears observing that once again, and as it has been the case since this epoch of absolute western dominance, Africa is a passive and inert receptacle of world-historical developments. As keen readers of this column will testify, we have been shouting from the rooftop that the nation-state paradigm is fraying at the edge. Unanticipated historical developments have rendered the paradigm frazzled and fraught.
Establishing its own ascendancy as Europe gained unrivalled and unchallengeable global dominance from the fifteenth century, the nation-state paradigm seems to have exhausted its possibility. Whether it will come unstuck from sheer superannuation or whether some instances of extreme human heroism will force it to yield ground to emergent, far more humane and apposite mutations is what remains to be seen.
As we write this, France is convulsed by widespread social unrest caused by critical fuel shortage, rising inflation and mounting immiseration of the populace, particularly the hordes of unemployed and homeless. With the unfinished business of class inequities and racial discrimination simmering right below the surface and with the far right doing its best to stoke the embers, France seems to have its back to the wall.
In the case of Germany, it is facing a loud murmur of disapprobation from hard-pressed citizens over its liberal attitude to economic and political migrants. Long hailed as a model of humane integration of refugees, the government is facing a severe backlash from the far right and extremist groups often wielding the swastika who believe that the joke has gone on for too long. Italy has just elected its first proto-fascist government since the hanging of Benito Mussolini and his mistress.
In America, the avuncular but occasionally bewildered Joe Biden, is facing the prospects of mid-term electoral blues or even annihilation as a resurgent, neo-fascist rightwing bent on turning America into a vast Bible belt and a totalitarian anti-democratic nirvana ramps up. It will make Hitler cringe in his bunker.
It doesn’t get more bizarre in the midnight of the nation-state paradigm. With the hulking and sulking shadow of Donald Trump chomping and chaffing at their heels, the chances of the country of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson transforming into a Banana Republic under an unhinged caudillo must not be discounted.
With the fate of the prime minister now sealed and her departure imminent, not many of Britain’s refined and normally civilized denizens can still recognize their country in the disfigured ill-tempered bedlam that has overtaken the entire society in the wake of the fiscal chaos that erupted after an attempt to tweak the economy went awry.
What began as the summary defenestration of the Chancellor of the Exchequer has now snowballed into a full blown crisis of governance and leadership recruitment. With Boris Johnson, the disgraced former prime minister, making the early round of betting as the rogue joker, it doesn’t get more surreal and self-indicting for a ruling class that was once master of the entire universe.
It is obvious that if Britain were to suffer further economic implosion as a result of deepening political instability, the agitation for Scottish independence is likely to resume with increasing vehemence. The Scottish people who voted largely to remain in Europe voted narrowly to remain in the union because of the economic advantages and opportunities accruing. If those were to disappear, it will be sayonara to the United Kingdom.
All these little local difficulties can be traced to a nation-state paradigm in traumatic throes. Beware of success, for success often embeds in its bosom the seeds of ultimate failure. The nation-state is arguably the most powerful and innovative instance of territorial domination and domestication to have come out of the ruins of the old empire-state. It facilitated rapid industrial development and institutional innovations which pushed the human race forward towards a particular telos.
But it also engendered a destructive rat race and a self-obsession among nations which make them prone to strife and bitter competition leading to wars and unending violence. After five hundred years of uninterrupted supremacy as the principal mode of organizing territorial space, the nation-state paradigm is unable to cope with the new realities and contradictions of a world polarized by competing civilizations and countervailing consciousness.
While the civilized world does not want unserviceable refugees and economic migrants swarming and swamping them from the hell-holes of humanity, it is not averse to facilitating the continuous hemorrhaging of priceless talents from Africa and the rest of the Third World to boost its own economy and human capital.
Very rarely do contradictions driving the global geopolitical system come together to achieve the effect of a perfect storm as they have done in the third decade of the twenty first century. We can isolate only three. First was the calamitous Covid-19 pandemic which held the entire world in evil thralldom and which in likelihood is a spin-off of the destructive rat race among leading nations of the world.
As we all witnessed, the inability or unwillingness of the leading nations to share intelligence and collaborate about how to end the incubus prolonged the trauma for the entire human race. Less endowed nations are still reeling from the catastrophic side-effects and baleful aftermath. No one is sure of when the next scourge will come. As flies are to wanton boys, so have the developing nations become for the leading nations of the world. They kill them off for their scientific gaming.
Second is the ruinous invasion of Ukraine by Russia whose terrible side-effects have devastated the global economic outlook as soaring energy bills, rising food costs, stunted growth, mortgage collapse and massive infrastructural deficits trigger a wave of panic and unrest in many western societies. An affronted rump of the old Russian empire is bent on reclaiming part, if not all, of the geopolitical advantages it claims to have lost to western dubiety as the Soviet Union unravelled.
Vladimir Putin, who has claimed that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the most potent geopolitical catastrophe that has befallen his nation in the modern era will not be placated until the badly limping nation-state paradigm is upended. As we write, Kamikaze drones believed to be of Iranian provenance are pulverizing Ukrainian cities, thus rendering the possibility of a negotiated settlement more remote.
The possibilities of a proxy warfare broadening the scope and scale of hostilities are not that remote. If the military stalemate persists and Russian prestige is further eroded, Putin may reach for the ultimate weapon. A nuclear holocaust will put an end to further speculations about the fate of the nation-state paradigm.
Finally, the scourge of global warming triggered by unrelenting tampering with the eco-system, unrestrained deforestation, the sharp rise of industrial effluence and the gradual humanization of hitherto uninhabitable and inhospitable arctic wastelands have induced a monstrous deluge which is capable of overwhelming fragile nations without self-insulating capacity.
This week, apocalyptic pictures of drowning humanity and flailing hands as they disappear forever surfaced in the media. From Islamabad in Pakistan to Yenagoa in Nigeria, dazed and disoriented citizenry, their homes having been swept away, camp out in fetid pools waiting for help that will never come. There is something grimly biblical about the misery and human suffering. It feels like Noah without Noah’s ark.
The continent of Africa, in its postcolonial incarnation, appears to be worst served with the monstrous political contraption imposed on it by colonial conquest. All the gains of the decolonizing project which briefly united many of the warring, mutually countervailing communities boxed together in a colonial cage and forced them to entertain the prospects of unity in diversity against a common tormentor have now evaporated into the winds, leaving behind mutually hostile nationalities working at cross purposes.
Unable to reform the colonial monstrosities and photocopies of organic nations handed down to them African elites are at the end of their historic tethers waiting for a miracle which will never come. Mutual cooperation for mutual good has been thrown out of the window. The organic unity which existed among certain pre-colonial communities and kingdoms has been thrown overboard.
Having gone through three different types of colonial rationalizations, namely Belgian, French and Portuguese, the two Congolese nations and Angola will find it hard to be convinced that they all originated from the ashes of the old Kongo kingdom. Only common sense prevented Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia from coming to blows over the construction of a dam across the River Nile by the Ethiopians.
So it is then that when the Cameroun people are forced to release excess water from their Lagdo dam, they cannot care a hoot whatever happens to their laggard neighbours to the south. If they refuse to build their own dam to absorb the water, let them stew in their watery Waterloo. The result has been the apocalyptic debacle unfolding in the Niger-Benue confluence. Yet these were all pre-colonial neighbours and contiguous communities.
What Africa needs now is a reinvention of the avatars of the African project of decolonization, the Nkrumahs, the Nassers, Sekou Toures and the Nyereres who have the visionary capacity to look beyond the confines of the colonial pigeon-holes to see the bigger picture for the Black person. The nation-state paradigm in Africa has reached a perilous conjuncture, just as it has in other parts of the world. But it is Africa that will once again bear the brunt.