If the authority for verifying and authenticating entities is centralized, you don't need a blockchain. A centralized, publicly-readable database is the same thing.
Who does the permitting?
If there are 196 countries in the world they could all be registered as valid entities using their respective public keys. New entities could be added is through a soft fork of mining/processing nodes that add public keys to the list, and thus would be distributed consensus like other blockchains.