The planet has gotten more tribal, over the past century. Where once you could have covered the world in a United Nations-style organization with, maybe, 50 political entities, the actual UN of 2010 has 192 members.

Empires have been broken up or voluntarily disbanded, larger countries have been partitioned into more ethnically unified states. Et cetera.

What brought this home to me today was our flight path from Paris to Abu Dhabi.

To wit:

Our approximately seven hours in the air (only an hour more than it takes to fly from New York to Los Angeles) took us over … a bunch of countries.

France, Germany (we skirted Switzerland, apparently), Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria (deep breath), Turkey, Cyprus, Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain (plane-change) … and the United Arab Emirates.

I’m not sure we actually went over Cyprus. The “plane on a map” feature on my personal video screen seemed to show us going just north of the island nation, but if we did go over … it couldn’t have been more than 30 seconds over the city of Larnaca. (Hence the headline above, taken from the movie, “Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo,” by James Doolittle.)

A century ago, the same flight would have taken us from France to Germany to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to Serbia (only recently autonomous) to the Ottoman Empire to quasi-colonies of the British Empire. The End.

We often forget how sprawling was the Ottoman Empire, which until 1908 still had nominal control of Bulgaria … and all of the Middle East right up to the border of what is now Bahrain, which (like the UAE) each was more or less run by the British Empire.

This fascinated me. From no borders to sprawling borders to narrow borders … in a millennium or so. From a handful of countries from Germany to Turkey a century ago to something like a dozen.

In a sort of Orient Express flown by Gulf Air.