Those governments best able to unify their regions, store records, and coordinate action (especially war) grew more powerful vis-à-vis their neighbours. As industrialisation made societies more complex, large centralised bureaucracies grew up to manage them. Until the mid-19th century, most of the world was a sprawl of empires, unclaimed land, city-states and principalities, which travellers crossed without checks or passports. Which is all rather odd, since they’re not really that old. Our sense of who we are, our loyalties, our rights and obligations, are bound up in them.

Try to imagine a world without countries – you can’t.

This means a blend of ‘nation’ (people with common attributes and characteristics) and ‘state’ (an organised political system with sovereignty over a defined space, with borders agreed by other nation-states). Yes, there are dictatorships and democracies, but the whole world is made up of nation-states. We are just as deluded that our model of living in ‘countries’ is inevitable and eternal. Just as they must have been for those living through the collapse of the Pharaoh’s rule or Christendom or the Ancien Régime. To the people living under the mighty empire, these events must have been unthinkable. And yet, following a period of economic and military decline, it fell apart. It had, after all, been around for 1,000 years. If you’d been born 1,500 years ago in southern Europe, you’d have been convinced that the Roman empire would last forever.

Pronlems with nation state