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Governments everywhere that are unable to guarantee equitable growth and social welfare have suffered a fatal decay of legitimacy.
Pankaj Mishra -
For almost a century since 1918, the centralised nation-state has been the world's default political form. Its various experiments in industrialisation, urbanisation, mass literacy and consumerism have brought more people into public life.
Pankaj Mishra
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In the 1950s and 60s, geopolitical intrigues did not much engage masses in Asia and Africa; it was something for elites to sort out.
Pankaj Mishra -
Minorities within nation-states frayed by global capitalism are naturally more resentful of hollowed-out but still heavily centralised systems of political and economic domination.
Pankaj Mishra -
German writers in the late 18th century were the first to uphold a prickly, literary nationalism, in reaction to the then dominance and prestige of French literature.
Pankaj Mishra -
Tenured professors are more prone than the rest of us to think that the university is the universe.
Pankaj Mishra -
I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.
Pankaj Mishra -
In a typically contradictory move, globalisation, while promoting economic integration among elites, has exacerbated sectarianism everywhere else.
Pankaj Mishra
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An enlarged global public society, with its many dissenting and corrective voices, can quickly call the bluff of lavishly credentialled and smug intellectual elites.
Pankaj Mishra -
Many ethnic minorities chafed at the postcolonial nationalism of India and Pakistan, and some rebelled.
Pankaj Mishra -
I think subsuming political and economic conflicts into some grand 'clash of civilisations' theory or 'the West versus the rest' binary is a particularly insidious form of ideological deception.
Pankaj Mishra -
Like the Britain of Beaverbrook and Kipling, Japan in the early twentieth century was a jingoistic nation, subduing weaker countries with the help of populist politicians and sensationalist journalism.
Pankaj Mishra -
As the years passed in my village, I witnessed poorly educated young men leaving to seek the greater comforts and liberations of big cities. I would see them on my visits to Delhi.
Pankaj Mishra -
It turns out that globalisation, while promising sameness through brand-name consumption, was fostering, through uneven economic growth, an intense feeling of difference.
Pankaj Mishra
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Obama was expected to restore an ethical sheen to post-9/11 foreign policy, but he has intensified drone warfare in Yemen and Pakistan, pursued whistle-blowers, and failed to close down Guantanamo.
Pankaj Mishra -
Happily, financial capitalism and free trade have not done away with national languages and literatures, as Marx rather too blithely hoped.
Pankaj Mishra -
Living in a cultural milieu where the foreign writers most widely available and admired were Russian, I came very late to postwar American writers, and I had great trouble with the canonically exalted white male writers I tried first.
Pankaj Mishra -
Policymakers can draw much from 'The Need for Roots': such clear prescriptions as that employers ought to provide an adequate vocational training for their employees, education should be compulsory and publicly funded, and include technical as well as elementary education.
Pankaj Mishra -
Ordinary Muslims in Europe, who suffer from the demoralisation caused by living as perennial objects of suspicion and contempt, are far from thinking of themselves as a politically powerful, or even cohesive, community, not to speak of conquerors of Europe.
Pankaj Mishra -
Local markets for literary fiction remain underdeveloped; the metropolis often holds out the only real possibility of a professional writing career.
Pankaj Mishra
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As the 19th century progressed, Europe's innovations, norms and categories came to achieve a truly universal hegemony.
Pankaj Mishra -
The Turkish, Arab and Chinese nationalists who built new nation-states out of the ruins of old empires scorned their old, decrepit rulers as much as they did the foreign imperialists who imposed free trade through gunboats.
Pankaj Mishra -
If your writing collides with the conventional wisdom, there's going to be some kind of friction.
Pankaj Mishra -
It's strange to recall that America animated none of my youthful daydreams. I did not see a Hollywood film until my late teens.
Pankaj Mishra