Lew, I would even venture to guess that "government" is used inaccurately byThe Economist as well.
Medieval scholars spoke regularly of "government" (e.g. Aquinas used the terms "cvil government" and "church government" in a variety of ways) but those scholars would scarcely recognize the governments of modern States as anything commonly known in the middle ages.
Civil government could consist of a variety of arrangements within a single realm including autonomous cities, ports governed by trade associations, independent church lands, and agricultural lands governed by highly diverse feudal arrangements. Each of these areas had "government" (some of which were voluntary) but one could say that a sort of anarchic relationship between, say, the cities and the rural and noble estates existed in many places, even though they might all be considered within a single kingdom. There certainly was no "supreme law of the land." as we could consider a national government to exercise now.
All of these arrangement could be defined as types of government, but "civil governmet" is an extremely diverse term. Certainly, in the modern world, most would agree that there exists various types of government in international affairs such as international law, trade agreements, treaties, pacts, mediations, and so on. But most also agree that the international system is anarchic.
