Neo-Medievalism

= the return to a situation of complex, overlapping, and incomplete sovereignties

Description

From the Wikipedia:

"Neo-medievalism (or neomedievalism, new medievalism) is a term with a long history that has acquired specific technical senses in two branches of scholarship. In political theory about modern international relations, the term is originally associated with Hedley Bull. Political theory sees the political order of a globalized world as analogous to high-medieval Europe, in which neither states, nor the Church, nor other territorial powers, exercised full sovereignty. Instead, the institutions participated in complex, overlapping, and incomplete sovereignties."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-medievalism)

History

From the Wikipedia:

"The idea of neomedievalism in political theory was first discussed in 1977 by theorist Hedley Bull in The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics to describe the erosion of state sovereignty in the contemporary globalized world:

It is also conceivable that sovereign states might disappear and be replaced not by a world government but by a modern and secular equivalent of the kind of universal political organisation that existed in Western Christendom in the Middle Ages. In that system no ruler or state was sovereign in the sense of being supreme over a given territory and a given segment of the Christian population; each had to share authority with vassals beneath, and with the Pope and (in Germany and Italy) the Holy Roman Emperor above. The universal political order of Western Christendom represents an alternative to the system of states which does not yet embody universal government.[4]

Thus Bull suggested society might move towards "a new mediaevalism" or a "neo-mediaeval form of universal political order", in which individual notions of rights and a growing sense of a "world common good" were undermining national sovereignty. He proposed that such a system might help "avoid the classic dangers of the system of sovereign states by a structure of overlapping structures and cross-cutting loyalties that hold all peoples together in a universal society while at the same time avoiding the concentration inherent in a world government", though "if it were anything like the precedent of Western Christendom, it would contain more ubiquitous and continuous violence and insecurity than does the modern states system".[5]

In this reading, globalization has resulted in an international system which resembles the medieval one, where political authority was exercised by a range of non-territorial and overlapping agents, such as religious bodies, principalities, empires and city-states, instead of by a single political authority in the form of a state which has complete sovereignty over its territory. Comparable processes characterising Bull's "new medievalism" include the increasing powers held by regional organisations such as the European Union, as well as the spread of sub-national and devolved governments, such as those of Scotland and Catalonia. These challenge the exclusive authority of the state. Private military companies, multinational corporations and the resurgence of worldwide religious movements (e.g. political Islam) similarly indicate a reduction in the role of the state and a decentralisation of power and authority.

Stephen J. Kobrin in 1998 added the forces of the digital world economy to the picture of neomedievalism. In an article entitled "Back to the Future: Neomedievalism and the Postmodern Digital World Economy" in the Journal of International Affairs,[2] he argued that the sovereign state as we know it – defined within certain territorial borders – is about to change profoundly, if not to wither away, due in part to the digital world economy created by the Internet, suggesting that cyberspace is a trans-territorial domain operating outside of the jurisdiction of national law.

Anthony Clark Arend also argued in his 1999 book Legal Rules and International Society that the international system is moving toward a "neo-medieval" system. He claimed that the trends that Bull noted in 1977 had become even more pronounced by the end of the twentieth century. Arend argues that the emergence of a "neo-medieval" system would have profound implications for the creation and operation of international law.

Although Bull originally envisioned neomedievalism as a positive trend, it has its critics. Bruce Holsinger in Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror argues that neoconservatives "have exploited neomedievalism's conceptual slipperiness for their own tactical ends."[6] Similarly, Philip G. Cerny's "Neomedievalism, Civil War and the New Security Dilemma" (1998) also sees neomedievalism as a negative development and claims that the forces of globalization increasingly undermine nation-states and interstate forms of governance "by cross-cutting linkages among different economic sectors and social bonds,"[7] calling globalization a "durable disorder" which eventually leads to the emergence of the new security dilemmas that had analogies in the Middle Ages. Cerny identifies six characteristics of a neomedieval world that contribute to this disorder: multiple competing institutions; lack of exogenous territorializing pressures both on sub-national and international levels; uneven consolidation of new spaces, cleavages, conflicts and inequalities; fragmented loyalties and identities; extensive entrenchment of property rights; and spread of the "grey zones" outside the law as well as black economy."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-medievalism)

Status

Medievalism today, in military affairs

Rand Corp. :

We define the neomedieval era as having begun around 2000; it is characterized by weakening states, fragmenting societies, imbalanced economies, pervasive threats, and the informalization of warfare. Weakening states refers to the decay in the political legitimacy of states because of their declining ability to maintain legitimacy; ensure domestic security; and provide levels of goods, services, and opportunities satisfactory to the populace. Fragmenting societies refers to the erosion of national spirit and the increasing salience of competing group identities, such as diverse sub- and transnational communities that prioritize loyalty to something other than the nation-state. We use the term imbalanced economies to refer to the disparate growth patterns of neomedieval economies, in which rapid growth is concentrated in a few sectors, while the rest experience marginal growth at best. It also includes the related problems of entrenched inequality, stagnant social mobility, and a large illicit economy. Pervasive threats refers to the proliferation of dangers from both military and nonmilitary sources, such as natural disasters, infectious disease, and violent nonstate actors, underscoring the increasing salience of domestic and transnational dangers even as the possibility of conflict with rival state militaries persists. The informalization of warfare refers to the shift away from warfare conducted exclusively by national militaries toward diverse forces consisting of professional troops; contractors or mercenaries; and sympathetic armed groups, such as militias, as well as the revival of older methods of fighting, such as intrastate conflicts, sieges, and irregular conflict.

These trends dynamically interact with and compound one another, magnifying their collective impact.

(https://alicemaz.substack.com/p/neomedievalism-and-transnational)

Source — ”US-China Rivalrly in a Neomedieval World,” RAND Corporation (2023)

Discussion

William Irwin Thompson:

"You can begin to understand the beginning of something when you are at the end. The two sides are somewhat alike, or if you want to look at it more visually, think of this as the turn of a spiral and as you are about to move into something you can see what it was you moved into so long ago. The period of, say, 1500 to 2000 is one kind of cultural epoch that can be called the modern world system. We are now moving from the modern world system to the new one, whatever you want to call it. I’ve used the phrase Planetary Culture. You can call it something else.

We’re moving from a period of expansion in which we have discovered a new world, new markets. It’s been a voyage of discovery, moving from that neat, concentric, medieval universe to one that is a kind of centrifugal force spinning out with new energies, and new humanism. But outside expansion has reached its limits. We are moving into a new kind of opposite phase that could be called neo-medievalism. It is more a sense of implosion. We feel the limits, we feel the ecological pressures of the biosphere, we feel the limits of certain kinds of industrial mentalities. Lewis Thomas, in Lives of a Cell, says the planet is most like a living cell and that we are all organelles within the single cell. If that is your perception of nature then your vision of your economic relationship with your neighbor is quite different than if you feel you are an autonomous individual moving around in a free market system, that you are basically by yourself. So that as one vision of interconnections goes out and another one comes in, the implications of personal relationships, of economic relationships, of political relationships all follow from this new archetypal world image."

(https://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/54/the-end-of-the-modern-world)

The Digital Renaissance as Neo-Medievalism

Douglas Rushkoff, interviewed by ERIN LYNCH:

* In one of your recent lectures at The New School you talked about the initial purposes of the industrial age, one of which was to remove peer-to-peer transaction. Do you see that reversing and what would be the overall benefits of it?

I see almost everything about the industrial age being reversed by the things being “retrieved” by the digital age. A renaissance means old, repressed ideas being reborn (re-naissance) in a new context. So industrialism really came out of the last renaissance, which was largely about rebirthing the ideas of ancient Greece and Rome: centralization of authority, empire, and expansion.

Today’s renaissance would retrieve the medieval values (not the lifestyle!) that were stamped out by the renaissance: crafts, peer-to-peer trading at the market, local value creation…even craft beers! Really, it’s no coincidence that the cultural expressions of the digital age – like Burning Man and etsy – share so many medieval qualities.

The benefits of reversing the dehumanizing bias of the industrial age – the drive to reduce human involvement and intervention in production and expansion – is to put the economy and technology back in the service of human beings, instead of letting them continue to devalue us. Because today’s technologies are so much more powerful than they were in the era of the steam engine. If we program them to remove human interference, this time they may be able to do it." (http://www.webvisionsevent.com/2016/01/the-throes-of-change-an-interview-with-douglas-rushkoff/)