This analysis is shallow and relies far to much on history repeating rather than rhyming.

The Catholic Church's role in pre-Gutenberg Europe is not strictly analagous to a modern nation state, either in its power, or in the strengths, function, and interaction of the Church.

The Church itself had, as others note in this thread, few overt tools of force. Its principle weapons were ... no, not the Montey Python sketch litany, but faith, and control over education, banking, commerce, and political legitimacy. Above all, pre-Gutenberg Europe was a profoundly information-poor time. There was very little of it, what there was moved slowly with poor fidelity, and was subjected to only the very most limited of processing and analysis.

(In writing that paragraph, I'm realising of course that a future civilisation might look on my words and laugh at my inability to contemplate the possibility that information's future role won't be primarily for human consumption or comperhension but for that of machines, and yes, that's a possiblity that's worth keeping in mind. Let's stick to the human-scale for now.)

A human in Europe circa 1400 was most probably illiterate (even a fair number of nobility and merchants), had access only to village gossip, a town crier (the modern incarnation is the television presenter, or TikTok influencer), and weekly church service, which functioned as the key central information dissemination mechanism, among its other ritualistic roles. In business and politics, the presumption was that one sent an emissary, merchant, or general on a mission and they were incommunicado for weeks, months, or even years during which one had to rely on them to act in the interests of their monarch, investors, or empire. Looking over the florid and obseqious language of the time, I've come to feel that these expressions of loyalty and faith served principally as attestations of trust. (See James Beniger's Control Revolution (1986) for the evolution of communications in business and government over this period. https://archive.org/details/controlrevolutio0000unse/page/n5...)

(I'm not saying the system worked well. I'm saying it was the best that could be had.)

Today, at the human scale we are operating at near-total information saturation. Alvin Toffler's five-decade-old Future Shock is prescient and worth revisiting (I read it last year, for the first time), and makes many observations I think are on point.

Modern nation-states operate principally through a vastly expanded trade, a small set of military giants (the US, and the less-formidable but still daunting Russia, China, India, and Pakistan, amongst others) capable of force projection to any metre of the globe, and the ability to monitor activities, individuals, and organisations to an utterly unprecedented degree. Where trust exists, it's not in the autonomous behaviour of long-isolated agents, but of the couriers, curators, and guardians of information stores --- that they faithfully transmit, equitably allow access, and dont abuse positions of privilege in their own accumulation of and ability to divine insights from data, as well as to act in the common weal on such resources.

Another book also titled The Control Revolution, this one by Andrew L. Shapiro in 1999, addresses many of the risks of this world. Power devolves to points of control, and the ones Shapiro sees (and I tend largely to agree) are in commerce, finance, media and communications, and data storage. The one recent development Shapiro doesn't anticipate is the rise of machine-learning artificial intelligence, and the algorithmic processing of vast troves of data which this presents. I see these as shifts in the landscape of nation-states, but not an overturning of those states. The biggest challenge though may be to premises and foundations of liberal democracy, several of which are rather terrifying to contemplate.

Shapiro on the Net and politics: https://archive.org/details/controlrevolutio0000shap/page/15...