En orsak till nationalismens historiska framgångar

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I'd say, on the balance, that it was(though it isn't self-evidently so).

From the perspective of the present, where highly centralized governments are a nontrivial threat to freedom and efficiency, decentralized systems sound like a good idea. And, it is true that centralization can, and frequently has, taken a downright nasty turn. However, the feudal model of decentralization looks very little like the modern one and, to be frank, it sucked.

Central government existed largely in theory(the king did have power, under the right circumstances; but it was severely tempered by the local power of the nobility and the church); but that didn't make the people any freer. In the country, many people were serfs(legally bound to the land and service to the local noble, though not salable as slaves are) or small renters. In the towns and cities, the guilds controlled much of the commerce and industry. Religion exerted considerable temporal power(and siphoned off a good deal of wealth). Because of the fragmentation of power and the quasi-independence of numerous little fiefdoms, codes of law were a hideous mess of customary cruft, civil and ecclesiastical, that often varied from place to place. Weights and measures were not standardized across many areas and running into taxes, tolls and whatnot at the edge of every petty strongman's domain was always a risk(does wonders for trade, that).

For all its(considerable) vices, the notion of the nation-state, first under monarchs of greater or lesser absoluteness, and gradually under more representative flavors of government, was vital in breaking down the heavily entrenched local nobility, and their webs of onorous customary obligation, and replacing it with the notion of equals under law, with standardized rights and obligations. This is not to say that that was the intent(indeed, it almost certainly wasn't, it was about the king attempting to consolidate his own power at the expense of other strongmen); but it turns out that the effect of the absolutist project was the creation of an institutional system of governance that could survive a transition from dynastic power to representative governance.

In a sense, it took a period of centralization to attenuate the power of local nobility and create a uniformity of infrastructure and law sufficient to allow the modern concept of decentralization(often an excellent idea) to exist. Feudal decentralization was pretty pathological.

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