question:  What is the primary purpose of the article?
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. By their nature cities along coasts and rivers developed so they could be open to trade with each other. From the middle of the 13th century, and for some 300 years after, many settlements dotted along this route formed the prosperous Hanseatic League, a European trading confederation of market towns, before the rise of the nation state led to its dissolution. It could point us towards new relationships between progressive city dwellers in a world that otherwise seems to be putting the brakes on modernity. Despite some of Britain's Leave voters longing to inhabit a fantastical realm immune to foreign influence, the reality is patently very different to that. In the late 1300s, Chaucer wrote about characters travelling to Jerusalem, and others who came from Europe; and it was at exactly this point that the Hanseatic League slowly started to coalesce, eventually influencing our isles. The League is most easily understood as a loose federation of cities that acted together in self-interest to promote trade. The Hanseatic cities developed their own legal system, and their armies came to one another's aid. We think of nations today as elemental almost, immovable. "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. It was a huge – and hugely ambitious – undertaking in the days when communications consisted of ink and paper and the only viable method of travel was by ship. But what was also exchanged was knowledge. In some ways it was an exercise in what we today call 'soft diplomacy'.
output:  To propose a model for international commerce in nation-states with divided populations
options:  To share a historical account of 14th century commerce practices and why they were replaced  To propose a model for international commerce in nation-states with divided populations  To lament and decry Britain's misguided decision to abandon the European Union  To entertain readers with an ironic predicament that has resulted from western globalization