The alternative is centralization of government which changes nothing except ensures that once corrupted its scale would affect what, at scale, could even be the entire world. It also gives bad actors a single target to focus all their energy (and influence) on. In my opinion the solution is to go in the opposite direction. I think the 'closer' to the people, both figuratively and literally, a government is, the more they tend to be held accountable. Romania's revolution against Ceausescu was a very clear, and quite literal, illustration of this.

As an aside, "nation state" is not a fancy way of saying country. It has a specific meaning denoting a mostly ethnically homogeneous nation. E.g. Belgium is most certainly not a nation state.