question:  What is a potential risk of cities seceding from their nation-states?
context: What cities in the post-Brexit era could learn from a 14th-century trading bloc As you fly from the country now known as Germany to Britain, the coastal geography of northern European cities gently unfurls. You can see where the sea smacks into them, or where yawning estuaries unfold like funnels between green and brown city and choppy blue water. You can track the snaking rivers and canals that form unrepentant umbilical connections to the settlements set a little further inland. By their nature cities along coasts and rivers developed so they could be open to trade with each other. It could point us towards new relationships between progressive city dwellers in a world that otherwise seems to be putting the brakes on modernity. The League is most easily understood as a loose federation of cities that acted together in self-interest to promote trade. Merchants who wanted to buy and sell and travel were taking the lead at a time when nation states were not fit for purpose: in the case of England or Denmark, leadership was too centralised and authoritarian, while in German-speaking lands a nation had yet to be formed. Yet look at any city of Mitteleuropa and you'll see the many different names it has had as borders and regimes have shifted with the sands of time. "It is often said that great cities survived great empires," says Cristina Ampatzidou, editor-in-chief of the Rotterdam-based online publishing platform Amateur Cities. "So it is not unrealistic to think of cities as discrete entities that compete and collaborate with each other, independently from the states to which they belong." The League stretched from Novgorod in the east – in what is now Russia – to London in the west. Tallinn, Riga, Gdańsk, Visby, Berlin, Cologne, Antwerp, Stockholm, Bergen, Kiel, Rostock, Dinant, Bruges, Turku, Groningen, Hanover, Wroclaw, Kaliningrad: all were involved at different stages in the Hanse's history, which ran on into the 1500s. In some ways it was an exercise in what we today call 'soft diplomacy'.
output:  Ideological differences between city and rural dwellers could grow farther and farther apart.
options:  Rural areas may see a rapid economic decline.  Ideological differences between city and rural dwellers could grow farther and farther apart.  A food shortage could arise if the rural areas refuse to trade with the city that seceded.  Rural and city dwellers may decide to engage in warfare.