The Coastal Confederacy

A loose alliance of port cities bound by trade agreements rather than government. The Confederacy has no standing army, no shared law code, and no agreed process for resolving disputes between member cities. It survives because every member city needs the others' harbors.

It is, by most metrics, not a nation at all. It functions as one when the alternative is losing access to the trade network that each member city depends on for its economy.