Imagine, no countries

Here is the natural progression of human political structures through the ages.

1. A million years ago humans lived as hunter-gatherers. We foraged & hunted for food. Humans lived in tribes, each tribe going up to a maximum of 50 to 100 people.
   
2. Sometime around 10,000 ago, we had advanced to an agricultural lifestyle. Agriculture gave humans more control over their food supply, required settled occupation of territory and encouraged larger social groups with the emergence of towns & city-states.
   
3. From couple of thousands to hundreds of years ago, the world progressed to having kingdoms & territories. Mostly imperialistic, a king or queen ruled over a certain territory exercising absolute control.
   
4. Kingdoms evolved into nations. With a few exceptions, most of the present day nations are a collection of kingdoms we saw in stage 3. A perfect example would be that of India.

What’s next? Following the simple progression, here’s what next:

5. Some years from now we will have even larger political groups. Power could be distributed among continents or some other larger divisions. We are seeing this effect already in some cases such as the European Union.
   
6. And very soon after that, we will have the world as a single political unit. Of course, it sounds absurd and preposterous at this time, but the time will come.

We can see an exponentially decreasing time span through stages 1-4. So we can really expect to breeze through stages 5 & 6, possibly in this century itself. Of course we may have achieved Singularity till then, which might put all of this in an entirely different context.

If countries themselves are so ephemeral, most of them not more than a hundred years old, where does this put concepts like “pride for my country” & “greatest country in the world” & “country with a rich culture”?