Democracy is not in decline. The nation-state is.

Making that distinction—between democracy and the nation—is crucial to understanding what’s really going on when it comes to self-government on this planet.

It’s a distinction we rarely make. When people around the world talk about how democracy is doing, we talk about democracy almost exclusively at the national level.

We see this every year, when think tanks and NGOs issue reports and rankings on the state of democracy—that consider the national governments only.

Take International IDEA, a Sweden-based intergovernmental organization that supports elections and democracy worldwide. In its September 2024 Global State of Democracy Report, IDEA declared that democracy remained in decline because only 1 in 4 nations were becoming more democratic, while 4 in 9 nations were becoming less so. IDEA also noted that 1 in 5 national elections is now contested by the loser, and that the global average for electoral turnout declined by 10 percentage points (65.2 % to 55.5 %) in the last 15 years.

Similarly, Freedom House, based in Washington D.C., points to growing numbers of nation-states with problematic elections and armed conflict to declare that this is the 18th consecutive year of decline. And, in its 2024 report, Varieties of Democracy, a global think tank in Sweden, says that democracy has been in decline for 15 years in a row because the share of the population living in nations that are becoming more autocratic is higher than the share living in democratizing countries.

To be sure, these national-level trends are not good news. But they paint an incomplete and misleading picture of the state of democracy on this planet, for three big reasons.

The first is rather obvious. Democracy is self-government, the business of everyday people governing themselves. And most democracy on this planet takes place where most people experience the ins and outs of day-to-day existence—in local communities, rather than at the national level.

Second, these global rankings of democracy rest heavily on elections, which are only one democratic process. Yes, trust and participation in elections are declining. But other forms of democracy—in which people themselves make decisions, rather than delegating power to elected representatives—are growing.

Consider four of these forms.

Direct democracy, in which people vote to enact laws or amend constitutions through referenda, is now a part of governance in more than half of countries. But such procedures are mostly used at the local and sub-national levels, according to the new Global State of Direct Democracy report.

Participatory democracy, involving tools that allow residents of a neighborhood or other jurisdiction to formulate budgets or development plans themselves, has been expanding rapidly since the launch of one such tool in 1990 in Porto Alegre, Brazil. People Powered, a global hub for democracy and participation, reports that more than 7,000 budgets—mostly in cities and local schools—have been made through the participatory budgeting process.

Deliberative democracy has become so popular in recent years that practitioners speak of a “deliberative wave.”  The most popular forms of such democracy are citizens’ assemblies—bodies of everyday people, assembled using “sortition” or lotteries rather than through elections. At a recent global conference for the network Democracy R&D, panelists estimated that about 1,000 such assemblies have been held to deliberate on and find solutions to difficult challenges, most at the local level.

Digital democracy is being used worldwide, often locally, to allow ordinary citizens to make proposals, develop policies, and govern their own communities. Among the best-known digital democratic tools is Decidim, an open digital platform developed by the city of Barcelona and now used in hundreds of localities and institutions worldwide.

But beyond all this growth in local democratic practice, there’s a bigger reason why we are misunderstanding the state of democracy: Nation-states are in retreat, regardless of their systems of government. The signals so often interpreted as democratic decline are actually evidence of something larger and more fundamental.

Nation-states everywhere—be they more democratic or more authoritarian—are in crisis, with their rulers losing the ability to govern their own countries. The United States, as a nation, is in danger of breaking apart. So too is Russia, which is caught up in a war in Ukraine, and suffering long-term declines in the health and life spans of its people. Germany is losing its dynamism and cohesion, for sure, but so is China—struggling with a debt crisis, an aging population, profound corruption, and an increasingly isolated dictator in Xi Jinping.

Why is this happening?

“The most momentous development of our era, precisely, is the waning of the nation-state: its inability to withstand countervailing 21st-century forces, and its calamitous loss of influence over human circumstance,” the British novelist and scholar Rana Dasgupta writes in his book After Nations. “National political authority is in decline, and, since we do not know any other sort, it feels like the end of the world.”

Nation-states simply can’t manage up or manage down in the 21st-century world. Looking up, nation-states have proven incapable of handling planetary forces and threats—climate change, finance and capital flows, technological advances, disease, religious-oriented terrorism. If anything, nation-states have made such problems worse, while ceding more and more power (and formerly national functions like surveillance) to multinational institutions like big tech companies from my home state of California.

Looking down, nation-states can no longer unify their peoples. Instead, national leaders routinely exploit divides to maintain power. Almost all wars are between groups of people inside nation-states that are breaking down. Many of these civil wars have been internationalized by other nation-states, seeking short-term advantage. The most awful example is the current civil war in Sudan, fueled by Russia and the United Arab Emirates, which has displaced millions, killed hundreds of thousands by starvation, and reduced the city of Khartoum to a ruin.

War is not the only tool that nation-states use to cling to their diminishing power. Leaders of nation-state democracies and autocracies alike have taken to scapegoating outsiders, especially migrants, and pledging to exert dictatorial power. But such authoritarian performances are really signs of desperation and weakness.

The void left by the decline of the nation-state is frightening, because of the potential for violence as our world’s governance infrastructure falls apart. But that same void is also an enormous opportunity for democracy and for those forms of democracy being practiced more often on the local level.

Tellingly, democracy is finding ways to grow even inside hostile and authoritarian nation-states. Turkey, with a religious autocrat as prime minister, has seen a wave of democratic participation in its cities, particularly Ankara and Izmir. Syria, ruled by a ruthless dictator, is the site of democratic cantons along its border with Turkey. Myanmar, in the midst of a crackdown by its military rulers, is sprouting new forms of local self-government.

Attacks on democracy also are redounding, to democracy’s favor. Ukraine, in the midst of Vladimir Putin’s invasion, is awash in ambitious local plans for rebuilding cities in more democratic and sustainable ways.

Around the world, alliances of cities are working together to address climate change, poverty, and other problems that the failing nation-states can’t solve and in fact are making worse. These alliances, which often combine democratic processes with technocratic expertise, point the way to a brighter future, in which stronger and more democratic local governments handle more of their own problems, together.

Visions of a local planetary replacement for the nation-state system might be dismissed as implausible, but the nation-state idea dates only to 1648, and the modern nation-state is less than a century old. It is obviously vulnerable.

And democracy—and particularly the people-driven forms of democracy now on the rise at the local level—is our best bet to replace that system.

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Similarly, the World Cup fuses sport and national identity on a quadrennial basis. In both cases, media coverage transforms feats of physical prowess into stories of national triumph or defeat, and in the process recasts athletes, many of whom the larger public has never cared about previously, into national heroes and sometimes even villains.

Lost in the drama and pageantry is the question of why sports should be framed in terms of political geography at all. How is it that we have learned to see the world as a collection of countries?

A nation is a group of culturally similar people who believe they belong together and deserve to govern themselves. This way of thinking about the world, or imagining the world, begins by kindergarten, when children are taught to read basic maps and globes depicting the world as organized into a jumble of colorful, interlocking shapes demarcated by clear borders, invariably accentuated as black lines. We are taught that these borders delineate distinct peoples, societies, and environments, and dutifully memorize their locations, names, and physical features—and of course their flags—by coloring maps with crayons. Teachers emphasize knowing our own place within this political jigsaw puzzle, and, over time, we come to identify ourselves as belonging to a nation.

The staging of the Olympics and the World Cup and the teaching of geography in the intimate confines of an elementary school classroom seem worlds apart, yet both are simultaneously cause and effect to how we think of the world as a world of borders, a globe comprised of clearly partitioned, sovereign political territories. The process of nationalization, however, is much more complicated than simply putting crayons in the hands of five-year-olds. It extends beyond education to encompass most aspects of daily life, from the media and popular culture to professional and political organizations.

Today’s most pressing debates are rooted in and around notions of borders. Some focus on overturning accepted borders, such as the attempts of ISIS to establish a new caliphate across Syria and Iraq, the Chinese government’s ongoing efforts to secure control over the South China Sea, or the disputes between Russia and Ukraine over eastern Ukraine and Crimea.

Other debates have little to do with the location of the borders, but rather involve how borders should function and be marked or policed. President Trump’s call to build a new southern border wall funded by Mexico is a prominent example. Another is the struggle among members of the European Union to maintain open borders while simultaneously strengthening border controls along their southern and eastern peripheries—demonstrating the poignancy and power of borders in contemporary politics. For better or worse, our disparate views on belonging, migration, trade, political populism, sectarian strife, natural resource extraction, environmental sustainability, climate change, and even, of course, global sports, are filtered through the spatial paradigm of a bordered world.

This is a relatively recent phenomenon, though. It is also one that is incomplete, inconsistent, and might ultimately prove to be transitory.

Scholars trace the origins of our modern notions of borders to Western Europe. As that region transitioned from the Middle Ages to the Early Modern Period, Europe was structured around a political system of mutual obligations and privileges between lords, vassals, and peasants, later known as feudalism. Lacking the ability to govern their kingdoms directly, kings granted nobles the right to administer certain areas, or fiefs, on the king’s behalf in exchange for allegiance and military service. The king retained nominal authority over the kingdom through this system of vassalage, but nobles soon gained considerable autonomy over their fiefs, including the rights of taxation and hereditary title.

Nobles repeated the basic arrangement with lesser nobles and further partitioned their estates into ever smaller fiefs, eventually creating a confused patchwork of overlapping loyalties and decentralized governance scattered across an assortment of principalities, duchies, counties, etc. In some cases, nobles held fiefs in different kingdoms and therefore nominally owed allegiance to multiple kings. The situation was further complicated by what we would today call non-governmental organizations, such as the Catholic Church, military or monastic orders, occupational guilds, and city-states. Within this feudal system, clear territorial borders were unnecessary, as long as lords and vassals honored their mutual obligations.

This decentralized system began to break down by around the 15th century for complex reasons, including the rise of capitalism and wage labor, advances in military technologies, and the growth of an urban-based merchant class. The incessant religious wars that marked the Reformation brought developments to a head, culminating in the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

These treaties helped usher in the notion of territorially sovereign states, which became the foundation for the contemporary international system. Basically, these monarchs mutually recognized each other as possessing the right to exercise absolute authority over their territories free from outside interference. In theory at least, each monarch possessed absolute sovereignty over his or her territory and all the people within it.

During this transition, monarchs also began to acquire the tools to more directly exercise sovereignty, most notably standing militaries, professional bureaucracies, and systematic taxation. The grounding of state sovereignty in territory also created a need to precisely determine the territorial extent of the state. The blurry borders of the Middle Ages were incompatible with these new notions of territorial sovereignty. Aided by advances in surveying, navigation, and cartography, governments carefully mapped and marked their respective territories. Borders as we conceive of them today came into being.

The final shift occurred when royal sovereignty was replaced by popular sovereignty. The rise of nationalism as a mass social movement in the decades following the French Revolution led to the corollary idea that the political borders of the state should conform to the cultural borders of the nation. The idea of a nation-state—in which the French state should include all French people, while the German state should include all Germans—was born.

The idea of grouping culturally similar peoples within their own states makes sense in theory, but has proven impossible to put into practice without widespread forced migration and horrendous violence, as demonstrated by two World Wars, among other tragedies.

Those western notions of the nation-state, territory, and borders—and their underlying assumptions—would eventually be exported around the world by force through colonialism to form the foundation of the modern nation-state system. Still, this nation-state system contains a fundamental contradiction: The idea of territorial sovereignty exercised by states can’t always be reconciled with the right of national self-determination and sovereignty.

This leads to confusion and conflation between the terms state and nation. For example, the Charter of the United Nations simultaneously affirms its commitment to the territorial integrity of states and the right of national self-determination. The actual name of the United Nations is misleading since only states, not nations, can be members. The United Nations is actually an organization of disunited states.

Some saw the end of the Cold War, the advent of the internet, and the growth of multinational corporations, organizations, and treaties, among other developments, as heralding an embryonic borderless world. Globalization became a buzzword. Yet because of our continued proclivity to think of most issues, from politics and economics to identity and culture, in state-centric terms, the framework of territorially sovereign nation-states marked by clearly defined, linear borders continues to exert a powerful hold over our understanding of the world and our place in it.

During this year’s winter Olympics, television commentators debated whether America’s historically low medal count in PyeongChang should be a cause of national concern. Brazil’s 7-1 World Cup loss to Germany in 2014 provoked discussion of a national identity crisis. The fact that these issues were raised in earnest demonstrates the continued power of borders to frame how we think about the world, including in such apparently trivial matters as sports.

We may live in a world of unprecedented connectivity marked by dramatically increasing flows of people, goods, technologies, and information, as well as issues like climate change, sectarian strife, demographic transitions, and economic dislocation that seem to beg for global responses, yet the world will remain a very bordered one for the foreseeable future.

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Answering these questions might begin with the Spanish conquest of the New World in the 16th century—a moment that changed empires forever, because the Spanish empire became global then in a way that was not possible earlier.

Although Alexander the Great constructed a vast Eurasian empire, and the Roman Empire regarded itself as ecumenical, neither of them incorporated the enormous variety of peoples and cultures to be found in Spain’s empire. And that variety was also characteristic of the other overseas European empires—the Portuguese, Dutch, French, and British—that would follow it. This presented the rulers of these global empires with novel problems—most pointedly, the problem of managing diversity.

Differences among the subject peoples of these new global empires called for new ways of thinking about empire. Initially, European rulers were very conscious of following in the tradition of previous empires, which are among the most enduring political forms in human history. In particular, the longevity and achievements of the Roman Empire made it an exemplary empire for most of the European empires (including the Ottoman).

The continuities with the past were evident in how the European empires preserved the idea of universality. Though the existence of other empires was usually recognized, all empires tended to think of themselves—like the Roman Empire—as unique and universal, carrying a special truth about the world that they felt entitled and even obliged to carry to the whole of humanity. Usually this sense of special truth took the form of belief in the imperial mission, and it was often expressed in religious terms. Thus, the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs saw themselves as the vehicle for Roman Catholicism throughout the world. The Russians justified their empire for its spread of Orthodoxy; the Dutch and British saw themselves as the champions of Protestantism; the Ottomans were the carriers of Islam.

In later years, as secularism became more pronounced in Europe, the imperial mission was conceived in less religious terms—and instead as the “civilizing mission” of the European powers, through which they spread the ideals and practices of Western civilization. Often this was coupled with the idea of imperial citizenship—the incorporation of all the subjects of the empire into a common citizenship, which they shared with the ruling people.

The ideas of universality, the civilizing mission, and common citizenship were all taken from Rome. But the modern European empires, especially the overseas ones, were also conscious that the peoples over whom they ruled possessed very different traditions and cultures from Western ones, as well as from each other. And so, though convinced generally of the superiority of European civilization, they proceeded with caution.

In the interests of order and efficiency, the promotion of the imperial mission was tempered by a recognition of the need to respect the traditions of the subject peoples. Often empires took the lead in preserving and conserving local cultures, studying the local languages, propping up indigenous institutions, and excavating and restoring often lost or decayed historical sites. This work of conservation and recovery was often done in the spirit of scholarship and intellectual inquiry. But it also had a more strategic purpose: managing diversity in far-flung empires where attempts to impose cultural uniformity might create resentment and resistance.

Such considerations also affected how the ruling peoples of empires responded to nationalism, which from the time of the French Revolution onward became a powerful force—first in Europe and then increasingly in the rest of the world (not least through the global reach of the European empires). Nationalism, which demanded that state boundaries coincide with national ones, was a threat to empires, which were almost by definition multinational and multiethnic. What made the threat all the greater was that empires themselves had often been responsible for the spread of nationalism, not only through their cultural policies of conservation, but also via educational systems that had led to the creation of a class of indigenous, westernized intellectuals who demanded a place in imperial rule—if not outright independence for their nations.

Ultimately, what brought down the empires was not nationalism. Their fall was mostly the result of two World Wars, which were fought mainly among the empires. Indeed, empires could use nationalism for their own purposes; some were particularly adept at exploiting the divisions and conflicts between the many nations that composed the empire. The Habsburg Empire, for example—from 1867 the “Austro-Hungarian” Empire—contained Germans, Hungarians, Czechs, Poles, and Ukrainians who often saw each other as threats, and looked to the Habsburgs to preserve the peace and provide orderly administration. Muslims and Hindus in India long looked to the British Empire as a protective agency, inhibiting communal rivalries.

While managing the nationalism of the subject peoples was one thing, imperial rulers also had to be equally alert to the nationalism of the ruling peoples themselves, and to rein that in where necessary. Allowing the nationalism of the ruling people to express itself too strongly would have been a profound irritant to the other peoples in the empire, and a dangerous provocation. The ruling people—English, French, Austrians, Russians—got their sense of themselves through their imperial, not their national, identities.

One effect of empire, therefore, was a critical suppression of the national identity of the ruling peoples—a diminishment of a sense of themselves as a distinct nation. So long as the empires survived, this was not a problem for the ruling peoples, engaged as they were in the enterprise of imperial rule, and content with the identity and the spoils that this gave them (despite the high costs of empire). Once the empires had gone, though, imperial peoples were faced with a profound question of who they were, of how to find the national identity that they had previously ignored or suppressed.

Empires now seem to have gone, at least in a formal sense, and no one claims to be re-establishing an empire. Empire itself has become a dirty word; and if anyone practices it—Americans or Russians, as many have suggested—they call it something else.

But the nation-state, empire’s successor, has proved to be an awkward and in many ways unsuccessful form for dealing with the problems thrown up by multiculturalism and globalization. Its principle of “one people, one state” has turned out not to be (as 19th-century theorists hoped) a recipe for peaceful coexistence in a world of equal nations; but as a prescription for an unending cycle of violence, bred by the existence of national minorities in most states.

In such a condition—which we find ourselves in today—empires may have much to teach us about the management of difference and diversity, and of the recognition of principles that go beyond the limited vision of nationalism and the nation-state. Yes, it’s true that empires have had their day. But when they were the norm they covered the earth and they lasted for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of years. At the very least their study is likely to prove highly instructive.

The post Were Empires Better Than Nation-States at Managing Diversity? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.