“Nations will revert to their natural tendency of hiding behind their borders, of moving towards protectionism, of listening to vested interests, and they’ll forget about transcending those national priorities,” said Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund back in 2013.

The problem is that, nowadays, nation-states can’t even think of solving the world’s problems on their own. The most pressing challenges for the humankind are obviously transnational and so complex that no country has enough resources to tackle them by itself.

But even in the case of issues that apparently affect just a single country, solving them always requires the conjoined effort of many states. Technology entangled the world in a web of relations and there’s no way back.

However, it’s evident that in Europe, and in the Western hemisphere in general, nationalism is making a comeback and there’s an increasing number of people that find it difficult to think beyond the boundaries of their own country. This is literally a quite limited horizon. If we want to deal with global issues such as climate change, we need to start thinking of the Earth as a single entity, beyond the narrowness of national borders