Kind of a showerthought, at the same time. I honestly have no idea.
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The main force pushing countries to be bigger is conquest and imperialism. A particular group or government gets powerful enough to dominate unrelated areas and unite them into the same state. The main force pushing countries to be smaller is nationalism. People are more likely to share values and sympathy with others who grew up in the same place and with the same culture, so they dislike sharing their country with unrelated groups.
Europe has recently been subject to much more nationalism than it has conquest. There were big 20th century wars of conquest fought in Europe, but the conqueror consistently lost. The USSR assembled a large bloc of what were essentially conquered territories and vassal states, but this dissolved in the 1990s. The chaos caused by the fall of the USSR, combined with an overall move towards democracy, has led to a tendency to carve European territories into finer and finer divisions based on national identities. This process is ongoing (see for example Scotland, Catalonia, and Brittany).
In most of the rest of the world, the situation is the opposite. European conquest and imperialism glommed together people of many different national identities into administrative colonies (sometimes intentionally, to sow discord amongst the colonized). The process of sorting that mess out will likely require much more time than it took to create, but slow progress is being made, and absent another wave of conquest, borders outside of Europe will eventually shrink and reshape themselves to better reflect traditional national boundaries.
A major exception to this is former colonies that are now mostly populated by colonists/immigrants. To put it bluntly, in places like the USA, Canada, and Australia, the nations originally occupying the land were so thoroughly decimated by disease and dominated by colonists that their traditional borders are largely moot.
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