The year is 2020. Emperor Xi of the communist dynasty rule China. After ruling a good chunk of the world the British have forgone their empire in favor of just being really good friends with the ones who have the most money and natural resources much to the same effect. The HRE has been replaced with a different conglomeration of peoples in the same general area. Russia is ruled by what's basically a czar/emperor and suffering a pandemic.
National borders and systems of government in mainland Europe have been somewhat unstable ever since 486AD. I don't see why the difference between the HRE and Germany matters. The point is there's a strong central European power. Other than a few upstarts being added to the list of "countries other countries have to take seriously" things have been pretty much the same.
> don't see why the difference between the HRE and Germany matters. The point is there's a strong central European power.
The HRE was neither a "strong power" by any means nor a (German-) nation state. The only ones that referred to the HRE as "The First Reich" were the Nazis for propaganda reasons.
In reality the so called "empire" was a decentralised, loose association of kingdoms and duchies struggling against each other for power. The was no nation state, no central government and no standing army.
The HRE had more in common with the Commonwealth of Nations than a single state.
You're technically correct but missing the point that there's a regionally dominant power. Whether it's headquartered in Berlin or Rome and the particulars doesn't really matter. Central Europe has been pretty politically unstable for last millennium and a half with various ethnic groups and regions joining and leaving various empires and nations. You've got Scandinavia, Switzerland and the low countries off doing their own thing, Spain, France, Russia and England as more or less defined entities but with their own varying levels of internal stability. Meanwhile everything from the Rhine to the Pripet is always a dumpster fire but there's always a dominant player (the HRE, Austria Hungary, Germany, etc). It would take like 10min to explain the current geopolitical situation to Napolean. That's how similar it is.
There were no nation states of the size and scope know today until industrialization because industrialization is required to support nation states as we currently know them. If you're trying to argue that things changed a lot then obviously you can win by cranking down the threshold of "a lot" but I think that with allowances for how what we think of as "empires" morphed into "nation states" things have remained pretty static.
National borders and systems of government in mainland Europe have been somewhat unstable ever since 486AD. I don't see why the difference between the HRE and Germany matters. The point is there's a strong central European power. Other than a few upstarts being added to the list of "countries other countries have to take seriously" things have been pretty much the same.