I think it relies on defining the nation-state as a specific organizational technology. Nation-states are built on the idea that all the people within them are part of a single, mostly fictiousious, cultural and language group, and as such they all have shared interests and should be legally, economically, and militarily bound together. This is, of course, bullshit; It's all a ruse for the ruling classes to better control the proletariat and exploit the resources of the nation-state. The fictive ethno-national identity concocted and imposed by nation state projects isn't the same as more authentic ethnic and religious identities that evolve more naturally. Pashtunwali, the code of honor and hospitality by which many Pashtuns define themselves and their identities, arose from long standing custom and cultural evolution. It was not created the way nation-state cultural identities were deliberately created in Europe in the 19th centuries to collapse all the many cultures and languages of Europe in to a single national culture that was centrally controlled and defined and could be enforced by centralized government power. Afaik Pashtuns don't have any organ like the BBC that exists to normalize and reinforce a "British" culture. They don't have the equivalent of the French Academie that exists as a (technically, per international law) genocidal government organ tasked with exterminating peripheral French cultures and rigidly enforcing Parisian culture in every corner of France. Pashtun culture is defined, innovated on, and constantly recreated by Pashtun people doing Pashtunness.

This isn't better, please don't mistake me for doing the Noble Savage thing. I'm trying to highlight that the Nation State is a specific organizational technology that uses the deliberate creation of an ethno-national identity, a largely artificial identity built using historical revisionism and the violent destruction of competing or dissenting ethnic and linguistic groups, to build a centralized government authority which it's subjects will voluntarily buy in to, convinced that because they share a language and a culture they also share interests with the ruling class and/or bourgeoisie. It's goal is to streamline the process of subjugation by convincing random peasants that it's a good idea to go to another country, murder the indigenous people, and die in a miserable muddy hole in the ground "For the good of the nation" or some bullshit.

Whereas societies that came before or survive within and outside of nation states tend to lack that artificiality, the process of artifice, artifice being the creation of an artifact, a tool, and object. They arise and evolve from the day to day interactions between people and between adjacent societies and often lack the rigid, violently enforced physical borders of nation states, and the officially enforced linguistic and cultural norms.

America is an interesting contrast; Most Americans are extremely America-pilled on the idea that there is an America, it is a monolithic entity, and it has legitimacy. There are wildly diverging ideas on what that all means; Libs believe in the American Civic Religion. Fash believe in a divinely appointed and ruled white ethnostate predestined to dominate the world. But most of them are tied up in the unquestioning notion that they're all Americans, and that "American" means something. They define their enemies as not being real Americans. They're loyal to the organs of the state even when those organs are flagrantly and obviously hostile to them. They believe ridiculous things because the truth runs contrary to their beliefs about Americanness. It's the fictive Americanness, the largely false idea of a unified American culture, language, and ethnicity, that keeps the country from ripping itself apart under the massive force of it's internal contradictions. Americans are so convinced of their Americanness that they'll put up with unbelievable mountains of bullshit because they believe America is good and America is the best government and blah blah blah blah.