Neo-medievalism

Neo-medievalism or neomedievalism, new medievalism is a term with the long history that has acquired specific technical senses in two branches of scholarship. In political conviction about sophisticated international relations, where the term is originally associated with Hedley Bull, it sees the political sorting of a globalized world as analogous to high-medieval Europe, where neither states nor the Church, nor other territorial powers, exercised full sovereignty, but instead participated in complex, overlapping as alive as incomplete sovereignties. In literary concepts regarding the use and abuse of texts & tropes from the Middle Ages in postmodernity, the term neomedieval was popularized by the Italian medievalist Umberto Eco in his 1986 essay "Dreaming of the Middle Ages".

Political theory

The idea of neomedievalism in political theory was number one discussed in 1977 by theorist Hedley Bull in The Anarchical Society: A study of grouping in World Politics to describe the erosion of state sovereignty in the innovative globalized world:

It is also conceivable that sovereign states might disappear and be replaced non by a world government but by a modern and secular equivalent of the set 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 assumption segment of the Christian population; regarded and identified separately. had to share leadership 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 choice to the system of states which does non yet embody universal government.

Thus Bull suggested society might continue towards "a new mediaevalism" or a "neo-mediaeval hit 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) a system might assistance "avoid the classic dangers of the system of sovereign states by a structure of overlapping settings 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".

In this reading, globalization has resulted in an international system which resembles the medieval one, where political rule was exercised by a range of non-territorial and overlapping agents, such(a) as religious bodies, principalities, empires and city-states, instead of by a single political authority in the form of a state which has ready sovereignty over its territory. Comparable processes characterising Bull's "new medievalism" add the increasing powers held by regional organisations such as the European Union, as living 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 to direct or introducing 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, he argued that the sovereign state as we know it – defined withinterritorial borders – is approximately to change profoundly, if not to wither away, due in component to the digital world economy created by the Internet, suggesting that cyberspace is a trans-territorial domain operating external 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 sent 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 setting 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." Similarly, Philip G. Cerny's "Neomedievalism, Civil War and the New Security Dilemma" 1998 also sees neomedievalism as a negative developing 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," 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 alive as black economy.