There are fewer than 200 countries in the world today. But do you know how many different states there were just in Europe only 500 years ago?
1,500.
And there was a network of very complex overlapping jurisdictions of different kinds between them.
Something really crucial had to happen to reduce that insane number of European states, territories, free cities, principalities, etc to just 50 today, right?
That might be a sign that the nation state has strengthened.
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Yeah, knock down those borders to commerce, the Baselischer Banker Bastards need to have more playgrounds for their money … 🙂
Seriously though, you realise that it could go back the other way? In the United States, there’s plenty of talk about various “secessionist” movements, and if you spend enough time in the Southeastern US, you may even hear a Charlie Daniels Band song about how “the South’s gonna do it again (yes it is)” …
Imagine the Cascadian Republic turning up Hanford’s reactors so it can have a nuclear programme, then imagine the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge being kicked into overdrive so the New Confederacy of the Southern States can have nuclear warheads for the ballistic missiles already stored across the landscape. Add to this the Republic of Texas, which is having none of this arms race madness and is sending out Texas Rangers to kill off all of those rogue nuclear scientists.
So where would that leave Southern Illinois?
As part of a vastly over-armed and aggressive Kentucky, naturally. 🙂
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No, anything but Kentucky! For some bizarre reason, all of the Putinoid robots I get commenting on the blog are from Kentucky. I have no idea why but it’s like they have a nest there.
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BTW, on a tangentially related but possibly plausible note, I’m sad that some English lads no longer make this lovely board game …
“War on Terror: The Board Game” —
http://www.waronterrortheboardgame.com/thegame/
As seen on Das Tube (no, that other one) —
You can enjoy playing it on some mobile devices still — I think it’s still sold for Apple devices. However, you won’t have the fun of wearing a black balaclava with a giant red “EVIL” sewn onto the front, nor will you have the fun of washing it after several other people have worn it. 🙂
As for the goal, it’s … World … DOMINATION!
[loves saying that like Darwin Mayflower from “Hudson Hawk”, a movie so terrible it’s magnificent …] 🙂
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How many of those 1,500 were the various bits and bobs that now compose Germany/Italy? Some countries didn’t change much if at all, and some underwent a predictable cycle of two-way border pushing. And there’s definitely a disintegrative side to nationalism – the Spring of nations, among other things, was about gleefully slicing up the multiethnic empires of the time into smaller pieces, no?
I watch some version of this video every once in a while: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDxs8YSdBWE For whatever reasons, it has the same soothing effect on me that a fireplace does. God knows if I can catch any real patterns, but I’m pretty sure that whatever’s been happening wasn’t straightforward unification.
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The very idea of “countries” is decidedly modern. We go to this concept so easily and directly that it begins to seem to us that it always existed. But it isn’t. It’s a very recent invention.
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About the idea of countries being entirely modern. Sure, I believe that’s for the most part true! It’s just that I’m not sure if the raw number of state-like-objects over the limited slice of time we’re talking about is a good standalone indicator of any one major cultural change; and I believe that there was genuine variety in how fragmented and scattered these state-like things were.
You could have that many state-doohikeys because of something like a “split it down the middle after I die” political property inheritance law, because somebody’s the object of a divide and conquer strategy by a bigger neighbour, or because the village on the other side of the brook is entirely different people, or because the complexity of the genealogical system induced a hairsplitting “I own this on Mondays, you own it on Wednesdays” tendency. But these are all different things, some of which still are (or feasibly could be) in play, some of which are defunct, and some of which didn’t transfer historically but are nonetheless similar in the way they work.
I guess the general argument here is that “I think it’s a hundred little things instead of one big thing.” 🙂
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You are absolutely right. Another huge part driving the fragmentation was the constant competition between the religious and the secular authority. The nation-state needed for religion to step back to start its work.
But as you say, it’s this and that and a million other things that had to come together.
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And sometimes they didn’t — there’s a part of the Netherlands and Belgium where you can walk a few hundred metres and cross several national borders because of nested enclaves and exclaves.
Then there’s the United States, which is really like 50 squabbling countries under one federal system, combined with one rotated square-ish “capitol territory” that likes advertising its “taxation without representation” status on its vehicle number plates … 🙂
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Something really crucial had to happen to reduce that insane number of European states, territories, free cities, principalities, etc to just 50 today, right?
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Empires tend to help with reducing the number of states. 
The explosion of nation-states increased the number of significant political entities. It didn’t decrease them.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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