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I am sympathetic to the idea of bottom-up collaboration, and peace and trade between distinct cultures. The issue is the incentive structure. If one of those states defect and starts to build an empire, the others need to either join or build their own. The Internet does offer new tools. With cryptocurrency, a thousand network states can have the integrated market and commons of a global empire while staying physically disjoint. And China is the other extreme, where they have civilizational scale under one roof without the same need for a European-style evangelistic empire. But prior to the Internet and modern China, you didn’t have scale without empire.