THE carnival is over. After four weeks of passion and spectacle, the best World Cup in living memory drew to a close on Sunday.

Watching Russia 2018, transfixed by the dramatic ebbs and flows of tournament football, I’m sure I wasn’t the only viewer whose mind turned to the 1976 satire ‘Network’. OK, so maybe I was. Specifically, I recalled the scene in which Ned Beatty’s character gives Peter Finch’s sweating would-be prophet a lesson in modern economics 101.

“You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples,” he bawls. “There are no nations. There are no peoples. There is no America. There is no democracy. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business.”

‘There are no nations’. Clearly there are, I decided, confused, because who else were all these footballers playing for? Whose flags were those? Whose anthems? But I couldn’t escape the feeling that Ned Beatty had a point, and what I was watching was an imprint of something that perhaps doesn’t quite exist anymore. The tribes and clubs and allegiances that the players and fans represented seemed a little anachronistic – a little 20th century.

“What is Peru, anyway?” I mused.

“You alright mate?” frowned the barman.

This is 2018. Governments are outsourcing power to corporations and trade is increasingly free. Capital pours over borders as if - heaven forbid - they weren’t there. International trade deals are giving companies legal rights over Governments.Technology has shrunk the planet.

Network’s lesson has become orthodoxy. It can now be heard in the rhetoric of almost every politician. ‘Almost’ every one. Because the faultline between those who still believe in nations and those who don’t is surely the great battleground of our time.

In a recent piece on the Conservative Home website, for example, former party special adviser Nick Hargrave wrote that he foresees an inevitable splintering of his party. It will be cloven in two, he said, into the nationalists and the globalists. The leavers and the remainers.

The nationalists have scored some great recent victories. Brexit, of course, and Trump: insofar as Trump and Brexit can be smooshed together. They don’t feel like coherent political projects. No-one seems to have any clue where either is going. Maybe they will be considered by future generations as a detour in the journey to a nationless planet. But for now, our media cannot deal with these victories. They are a mistake; they Weren’t Meant To Happen. Millions of words are being written attempting to delegitimize both.

Here are some things that I have seen blamed for Brexit recently: the BBC, Putin, Facebook, Vote Leave, the weather that day, the Electoral Commission, the Left, the Right, hicks, bumpkins and rubes. And for Trump? Putin, again. Bernie Sanders. Even, in one Guardian thinkpiece, the actress Susan Sarandon.

Meanwhile, there’s been a great stirring of globalist centrists who, after living through rocketing inequality and the privatisation of everything public with barely a squeak, have decided that the thing that is really going to get them out of their nice houses and onto the streets is... some trade tariffs. A whole tier of society is waving EU flags and wielding signs declaring: ‘I am a European’. Nationalism is out, supranationalism is in.

The World Cup of 2218 won’t be played between nations. More likely, in the great borderless corporatocracy of the future, it will be played between companies. McDonald’s to play Uber in the final, perhaps.

The huge, genetically-engineered players of the McDonald’s team are lined up at the start of the match. Vast, glittering, holographic Golden Arches expand over the megastadium. An announcer declares it is time for the anthems. As one, the crowd whistles a short motif, sounding like a million blackbirds (a species now extinct). The whistling ends and the players join in as they all chant in deafening unison: “I’m lovin’ it!”

Automatic face-monitoring technology catches out those in the stands who declined to sing. Smart-seats lock the dissenters in place while security drones zip up to escort them away.

The carnival continues.