Hal Rothman describes how the town has perfected the arts of service, entertainment

Sunday, July 16, 2006 | 7:50 a.m.

The strains of "La Marseillaise," the French national anthem, are still ringing in my ears after the end of the World Cup. Rank nationalism was rampant on the soccer pitch.

Stadiums full of partisans singing the national anthem of their country, "God Save the Queen" or "Inno di Mameli," the Italian national anthem, showed the spectacle of international sport.

Time and again, fans bellowed their country's hymn, as if it would somehow inspire the polyglot collection of people wearing their nation's jersey. The commercials said that soccer stops wars; from the looks of their partisans, they seemed a lot more likely to start them.

For a long time, I have said that people care more for their leisure than for their nation-state. It was never more true than in the stadium that Adolf Hitler built for the 1936 Olympics. You remember, the one where Jesse Owens smashed every Aryan fantasy when he streaked to four gold medals. This time, a multi-racial cast of characters adorned the stage, each representing their country.

But nationalism is a dying construct, a relic of a world that really came to an end as the information revolution began. Once, we were bound to place and language, defined by visions of national power. Now, we are free to move about the planet, at least virtually - with almost all the benefits of being there.

Beginning with the breakup of the Habsburg Empire after World War I and continuing through the freeing of the European colonies after World War II, the rise of the nation-state came to a quick end. You might chart the beginning of the end to the Biafran War, the late 1960s conflict between the seceding Ibo minority and the dominant Yoruba majority in Nigeria. What we should have learned then is that different ethnic groups only tolerate each other in the U.S.

The information revolution freed us from lots of things, not the least of which were the limits of the nation-state. First, we saw the Maquiladora corridor, the narrow band on the American-Mexican border in which American companies could operate, but could pay Mexican wages. Then we endured the outsourcing of everything to India. No longer did you have to be on the same continent to provide the necessary service - albeit with an accent.

It also diminished the meaning of the nation-state. When capital could move across international boundaries with a keystroke, the protection that an army might provide it became a lot less important.

For what was the promise of the nation-state in a liberal consumerist society but to be the protector of capital? The image of people with diamonds sewn into the lining of their coats as they fled from somewhere became obsolete. Now you could simply send an e-mail and move all your assets.

In the U.S. we are largely immune to this change, for we are the least affected by the diminishment of global nationalism. We continue to careen through the world, in search of state actors to punish for the transgressions of nonstate adversaries. But the world is changing around us, a fact driven home by the importance of nationalism in sport and its almost irrelevance in every other dimension of post-industrial life.

Las Vegas is a crucial part of this equation. Not only did our transformation coincide with the appearance of the ATM machine, but it also is intimately connected to the decline of the nation-state. We are a safe harbor, the equivalent of Paris in the 1920s or New York after World War II.

We ask nothing of people but that they have access to cash. We embody the idea of post-industrialism, for we never had more than a bit part in industrial America. As we spread the gospel of Las Vegas to the Far East and beyond, we illustrate how much nationalism has become a prop for leisure and recreation.

"This is America," the narrator in Neal Stephenson's 1992 brilliant futuristic classic "Snow Crash" asserts. "People do whatever they feel like doing ... because they have a right to."

In Stephenson's world, there are four things his "we" - the people who live in North America - do better than anyone else: they make music, movies and microcode (software), and they deliver pizza. One of those, microcode, belongs to Silicon Valley and its offspring. The rest - service and entertainment - belong to Las Vegas.