 According to the author, what is the major factor that will determine if modern nations will adopt a replica of the Hanseatic League?
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. 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. In the traumatised atmosphere of post-Brexit Britain, it is worth remembering the Hanseatic League. 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. "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 cities involved in the Hanseatic League are found along the Baltic and North Sea coasts, and slightly inland too. The League stretched from Novgorod in the east – in what is now Russia – to London in the west. The League covered lands that today find themselves a part of the modern nations of Finland, Sweden, Poland, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Norway, Lithuania, Estonia and Latvia. In some ways it was an exercise in what we today call 'soft diplomacy'. As David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge points out, "The lack of an elaborate superstructure was one of the things that made the Hanse work.
 Whether a model can exist without creating further disparities among citizens
 Whether a model can exist without creating further disparities among citizens  Whether citizens can avoid war and hording of resources without permanent borders  Whether urban areas can accommodate the preferences of rural areas  Whether urban and rural denizens can orient goals based on shared values