The history of political organization is driven by the history of military technology. Historically, the earth has flip-flopped from centralized to decentralized power several times, eg. Rome (legion) => feudalism (mounted knight) => Mongol Empire (mounted archers) => Rennaissance city states (crossbow, musket) => nation state (industrialization) => global superpower (atom bomb, ballistic missile). Basically whenever the dominant military technology is expensive to produce or benefits from large highly-organized armies, the trend is toward centralization, while whenever it is cheap to produce and gives the advantage to independent guerilla fighters, the trend is toward decentralization. There's some evidence (break up of Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Islamic terrorism) that we're headed toward a new era of decentralization, driven by microchips, the Internet, drones, and cheap encrypted communication.

I agree with your main point, but not the last sentence. The complexity and expense of state of the art military technology is beyond the means of smaller nation-states, let alone rebel groups, and that trend has been accelerating since WWII.

Stealth, space supremacy, global surveillance, carrier groups, strike wings, nuclear arsenals, reaper drones and all the other crazy battlefield robot tech in service or development can cut to pieces any obsolete nation state military, let alone some rebels armed with cheap 3d-printed guns.

"Stealth, space supremacy, global surveillance, carrier groups, strike wings, nuclear arsenals, reaper drones and all the other crazy battlefield robot tech in service or development can cut to pieces any obsolete nation state military, let alone some rebels armed with cheap 3d-printed guns. "

So why isn't the US (which has all this tech) winning in Afghanistan over some rebels with AK 47s? Likewise Vietnam after literally a decade of fighting.

Weapons superiority is one factor in winning wars. Likewise, to address the gp's point, the history of political organization is partly driven by military technology.

There are definitely other factors at play, but have no illusions about it: if the United States didn't mind killing and maiming a large number of innocent civilians, it could just knock down entire cities and wipe out entire populations if it wanted to. The main reason that those conflicts are tough is because the US tries to make a show that they care about human rights instead of just shelling the crap out of insurgents.

And the current struggles of the American military only result in hundreds or maybe thousands of American deaths, which historically, would be a mere rounding error. Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, et. al. are a mess, but they don't come to a significant human cost to America.

The United States and its voting populace doesn't really care about whether or not developing countries are wartorn, and quality of life is decimated—America and other states have completely destroyed the backbone of several societies in the Middle East and caused the deaths and relocation of hundreds of thousands of innocents, but you don't feel the pain of that when you live states-side. So the country has little incentive to quickly resolve these conflicts besides the bad PR; ongoing conflicts mostly buy time for protracted, proxy diplomacy with other major powers to lay claim to natural resources, and aren't viewed as conflict with a tangible human cost.

In both those conflict it was mostly not the US being at war with Vietnam or Afghanistan but with them supporting one political faction within the country against another which is a much messier business.

Italy used to be a dozen city states... And before that, Italy, France, Greece, Egypt, Turkey, Israel, Lebanon, a bunch of Baltic nations, England, and a bunch of others were all one state.

The number of states waxes and wanes throughout history, there's not a clear trend.

> Italy alone used to be a dozen+ independent city states. Divided the world 200 ways seems like a lot unless you look at how much it's been divided historically. And in comparison, that's extremely centralized.

What's interesting is to consider that while the world is very centralized in the sense you described, "day-to-day" operations are even more decentralized than ever. That is, (very generally speaking) order is established and maintained, and people go about their lives without huge, burdensome micro-management from "above" in the important aspects of their daily life.

It probably turns out that the most consequential decision-making affecting the modern person's daily life is happening very locally in the social & spatial/temporal sense. So, in that way, authority is effectively decentralized.