We're seeing this pattern where the coasts of many countries are cosmopolitan and well-integrated into the world economy, but the interiors are very conservative and nationalistic. Scotland & London vs. Wales & the rest of Britain. The U.S. West Coast & Northeast vs. the Farm Belt, Rust Belt, and Mountain states. Croatia & Slovenia vs. the rest of Yugoslavia. The Baltic Republics vs. the rest of the USSR. Even in a Red State like Texas, Houston (on the coast) has gone democratic.
What happens if economic ties between coastal regions of major trading partners become greater than cultural ties within nations?
Here in California, some of the proposals about sending all the immigrants back to where they came from seem absurd. The economy would cease to function. On one of my teams of 10 people at Google, we had immigrants from Iceland, England, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and India, and I was the only native-born American citizen. California would sooner secede than deport all of its immigrants.
What if it actually came to that? If push came to shove and the interior decided to push a nativist, nationalist agenda, what if the coastal regions that benefit significantly from trade were to say "Okay, you guys can play with yourself, we're going to play with the rest of the world." Scotland has threatened to do exactly that, and is planning on holding another referendum on independence if Britain actually follows through on Brexit.
What sort of organizing principle would the world have then? I haven't seen anything historically like that - the closest would be the Roman Empire that rimmed the Mediterranean. For most of recorded history, the primary means of production has been land and so fights have been over land, but over the last 150 years or so (contemporaneous with the nation-state as a social organizing principle, BTW), the primary means of production shifted to capital, and now it's shifting to information. What kind of social organizing principle does that imply?