A technologically advanced world with no large states. What POD, if any, could make this happen?

Is there any plausible way for separatism to overpower imperialism and universalism to such an extent that small states become the norm, and stay the norm even as the world industrializes? For this challenge, there should be no state with more than 1/500 of the world population. So Chad or Somalia would be the absolute most populous states, and a typical state would be more like Luxembourg or Belize. Another rule is that alliances of nations must not be any more integrated than the present day EU. If this is too extreme to be plausible, that's ok, just describe what you think the most decentralized world could look like. Perhaps a UN-like organization arises early on, and is effective at preventing wars of conquest? Or maybe a worldwide revolution appears during a time of crisis, and has the explicit goal of dividing the world into microstates?
 
Clockwork is discovered in Ancient Greece pre-Alexander, and vastly increases demand for precise machining, creating a revolution in the availability of tools that allows for improved agriculture, which allows for industrial revolution. The Greek city-states industrialize and compete with each other over the Mediterranean and also prevent the unification of Greece by Alexander. Persia is the only large empire and as everyone's bogeyman, gets dogpiled by various Greek factions who fail to unite the new territory. Meanwhile, Chu and Zhao prevent Qin Shi Huang from unifying China. Due to an early lead in industrialization, rivaling Greek economic interests take over the world, but in a politically disunited, and self-decentralizing way.
 
Cool, I like your proposal, SeaCambrian. It definitely helps to have the POD early, because as time goes on, the general trend is toward bigger empires.
 
You could have more decentralized than OTL, but really economics of scale start favoring bigger countries as time goes on. Bigger countries can afford to invest in bigger infrastructure projects, which leave them richer and in a position to invest more or afford a bigger army to conquer their neighbors. Bigger countries also benefit from the Square law, quadrupling the area of a country but keeping the same shape only doubles the borders they have to defend. You also have other economics of scale, you need all the machinery of government whether your country is large or small, but in a large country it is less of a proportion of expenditures

For how nasty economics of scale get by the present, France is the smallest country with a complete defense industry, ie can build everything it uses (chooses not to build some stuff), they have a pop of 67 million or 1/113 of the worlds. They maintain this through exports and regulated monopolies, and are starting to realize they are too small to afford to do everything

As for how decentralized, you run into the issues of natural geographic units. IE it makes sense for places like major river valleys to be all one unit, the Nile valley has basically been one for 5,000 years and that's 95 million right there. Best you could do is probably make no country bigger than the OTL US in population, and do that by keeping the major river systems of India and China separate
 
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