Phil Cerny, Neomedievalism Civil Wars

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Neomedievalism, civil war and the new security
dilemma: Globalisation as durable disorder
Philip G. Cerny a
a
Professor of International Political Economy, University of Leeds,
Online Publication Date: 01 March 1998

To cite this Article: Cerny, Philip G. (1998) 'Neomedievalism, civil war and the new
security dilemma: Globalisation as durable disorder', Civil Wars, 1:1, 36 - 64
To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/13698249808402366
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Neomedievalism, Civil War and the New
Security Dilemma: Globalisation As
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Durable Disorder
PHILIP G.CERNY
Globalisation is creating a growing range of complex challenges to

the autonomous policy-making capacity, authority and legitimacy of
nation-states, while a new security dilemma is challenging the ability
of states and of the states system to provide both international and
domestic security as a public good. These changes are leading to an
unbundling of basic state functions and the growth of uneven, cross-
cutting and overlapping levels of governance and quasi-governance,
the fragmentation of cultural identities and the reconfiguation of
social, economic and political spaces. At the same time, systemic
pressures for the consolidation of new forms of transnational and
international authority are insufficient, resulting in a governance gap.
Exit is becoming an increasingly viable option for a growing range of
actors and groups, leading to endemic civil and cross-border wars.
The result will be not mere chaos, however, but something resembling
the 'durable disorder' of the Middle Ages.
THE CRISIS OF THE OLD SECURITY ORDER

States have been the structural lynchpin of the modern international system,
but the structure of the international order today1 is undergoing a long-term
transformation. One of the most salient features of that change is a shift in
the dominant form of violence and conflict from one characterised by
interstate wars to one in which civil and cross-border wars increasingly
predominate and proliferate. Of course, significant structural pressures on
the nation-state have been identified at several levels not only in recent
decades but over the longer run of modern history too, and civil and cross-
An earlier version of this paper was presented to a Workshop on Globalisation: Critical

Perspectives, Department of Politics and International Studies, University of Birmingham, 14-16
March 1997.1 am particularly grateful to Grahame Thompson and Bob Jessop for their extremely
helpful comments.
Civil Wars, Vol.1, No.l (Spring 1998), pp.36-64
PUBLISHED BY FRANK CASS, LONDON
GLOBALISATION AS DURABLE DISORDER 37
border wars are certainly nothing new. Alternative attempts to analyse

structure and change in the international order have focused predominantly
on the relationship of states and state forms with economic changes, and the
most significant variable in recent versions of this debate has been the
advent of the so-called 'Third Industrial Revolution' and the deepening of
transnational economic interdependence or globalisation. But alongside
these economic developments have come a range of social and political
developments too.
New information and communication technologies have intensified
pressures resulting from the interaction of previously compartmentalised
social and cultural categories, with an emphasis on the sheer speed of that
interaction.2 The development of Marshall McLuhan's 'global village'3 has
been parallelled (or, for some, superseded) by a postmodernist
fragmentation of cultures and societies. In political terms, the re-
identification of societies as 'multicultural', emphasising shifting identities
and loyalties,4 is unravelling the consolidation of national culture societies5
which was at the heart of the nation-state project from Bismarck's
Kulturkampf'to postcolonial 'nation-building'.6 Many major social causes
and cause pressure groups, as well as sectoral interest groups, are thus
becoming less concerned with negotiating direct benefits from the state and
more focused on transnational issues such as the environment, women's
issues, the international banning of landmines, opposition to the holding of
political prisoners worldwide, promoting sustainable development and the
like. And in security terms, the end of the Cold War is said to have
unleashed a huge number of social and political demands which had
previously been kept in ideological and political check.
In this context, the very notion of the 'public interest' and the viability
of the national state as a form of political community are being questioned.
Whether democracy itself can be an effective form of political organization
is under challenge too - not only in terms of what actors want from
governments, but also as to whether national, territorially-based
institutional structures in the future can reasonably be expected to
effectively aggregate and reconcile divergent individual and sectoral
demands in the first place.7 National-territorial institutions are being
overlaid, cross-cut and even replaced by a range of multilayered
public/private arrangements bridging the micro-level,8 the meso-level and
the transnational in ways the state cannot.' This is the essence of what
Hedley Bull and others have called 'neomedievalism'.10 At one level, these
changes may be seen as part of a wider transnational restructuring of
domestic political systems, challenging the operation and even the very
legitimacy of nation-states from within. After all, transnationalisation is as
38 CIVIL WARS
much a domestic political process as an international one. But they also

challenge the states system from what has been thought of as the 'outside',
cutting across and blurring the traditional 'inside/outside' distinction. In
particular, as already mentioned, the end of the Cold War has had a
profound effect on international relations as they have been understood in
the modern world. Indeed, the phrase 'the end of the Cold War' per se does
not merely denote an event that occurred in 1989 or thereabouts. It involves
a longer-term process which has progressively (if unevenly) undermined the
states system from both above and below, inside and out, since the 1960s.
THE NEW SECURITY DILEMMA

The central mechanism of stabilisation and ordering in the states system -
taken, as it has been in the study of mainstream international relations, as a
separate level of analysis from domestic politics - has usually been seen to
be the way balances of power operate to counteract the so-called 'security
dilemma'. The security dilemma is the notion that perceived external threats
generate feelings of insecurity in those states that believe themselves to be
the targets of such threats, thereby leading to measures to counteract those
threats (alliances, arms buildups, and so on). These countermeasures in turn
are perceived as threatening by others, leading to further counter-
countermeasures, and so on - undermining existing power balances and
creating a vicious circle of ever-increasing insecurity. Only by creating and
recreating balances of power, whether through war, through developing and
manipulating power resources, or through politically effective (strong-
willed) foreign policy, can this tendency to system breakdown be
counteracted. In structure-agent terms, specific structural conditions limit
the options faced by particular agents, limiting the range of likely
behavioural outcomes. In game-theoretic terms, the payoff matrices built
into the international system create incentives for players to "defect" rather
than co-operate, unless restrained by the operation of the balance of power.
Such an analysis has been at the heart of both classical realism" and
neorealism.12
But the end of the Cold War did not result so much from the breakdown
of a particular balance of power - the bipolar balance between United States
and the Soviet Union - as from the increasing ineffectiveness of interstate
balances of power generally to regulate the international system. For
example, the failure of large powers to determine outcomes in the Third
World through traditional security means - the most salient examples being
Vietnam for the United States and the Sino-Soviet split (and later Angola
and Afghanistan) for the Soviet Union - Was merely the first major shock
to the balance-of-power system. The demise of the Soviet Union did not
result just from some change in its relative overall power position vis-a-vis
the United States. The USSR collapsed because of the evolving
configuration of domestic and transnational pressures stemming from

technological backwardness, international economic interdependence,
awareness of social and cultural alternatives by individuals and groups
made possible by international contacts and communications, the growth of
consumerism and other pressures for "modernisation" which the USSR was
less and less able to meet. Likewise, growing complex interdependence in
the West undermined the hierarchical alliance structures set up in the
postwar period by the United States, for example through the development
of Gaullism in France.'3 Both superpowers became weaker in systemic
terms, because traditional forms of power could not cope with the
challenges of the late twentieth century international order.
The lack of utility not only of nuclear weapons (increasingly seen as
unthinkable and unusable) but also of limited 'low intensity warfare' (more
and more costly and counterproductive, as demonstrated in Vietnam and
Afghanistan) is leading to a common sense realisation that neither national
nor collective security can any longer be reliably based on balances of
power among nation-states perse. Furthermore, this change has entailed not
merely the replacement of interstate competition for military security by
new forms of interstate competition, for example, for 'economic security',
but rather a realisation that security based on the simple interaction of
unitary nation-states itself is becoming a cause of even greater insecurity. A
new sense of generalised insecurity has emerged, symbolised not only from
above by a general threat of uncontrollable nuclear annihilation, but also
from below, by the rise of civil wars, tribal and religious conflicts, terrorism,
civil violence in developed countries, the international drugs trade, and so
on. This sense of insecurity has led to a growing realisation that the
provision of security itself as a public good - the very raison d'etre of the
states system - can no longer be guaranteed by that system.
A kind of generalised 'insecurity from below' has emerged, bound up
with the dual character of globalisation as a global-local dialectic,
whipsawing the state between the international and transnational, on the one
hand, and an increasingly complex set of micro- and meso-level phenomena
on the other - what Rosenau has called 'fragmegration'.14 Post-feudal state
formation and consolidation, from Westphalia to the twentieth century,
revolved around the capacity of the Janus-faced state to provide security
simultaneously at two levels: Weber's 'monopoly of legitimate violence' in
the domestic sphere; and the capacity for Clausewitz's 'pursuit of politics
by other means' in the international sphere. Institutionalising a more rigid
40 CIVIL WARS
inside/outside distinction - providing a stable internal arena for collective

action, alongside the capacity of states to make 'credible commitments'
externally - made politics into an increasingly coherent two-level game
articulated around and through structurally differentiated states.15 States

today, however, are increasingly challenged at both levels. In this 'new
security dilemma', changing payoff matrices crystallising in the late
twentieth century international order are creating a range of incentives for
players to defect from the states system itself- unless restrained from doing
so by the as yet embryonic constraints of complex, especially economic,
interdependence.
The decline of interstate wars at the end of the twentieth century and the
increasing prevalence of civil wars today therefore mirror deep structural
changes in the international order itself. Whether a layer of institutionalised
power will crystallise and converge to provide effective collective security at
a global level is highly problematic. Of course, new constraints are also being
created by expanding intergovernmental and multilateral cooperation.
However, these essentially involve a process of 'catch-up', lagging the
development of micro- and meso-level processes. They are also vulnerable to
micro- and meso-level defection. What we are left with, then, is a new
security dilemma. In this situation, attempts to provide international and
domestic security through the state and the states system actually become
increasingly dysfunctional. They create severe backlashes at both local and
transnational levels, backlashes which further weaken the state and undermine
wider security. Furthermore, these backlashes do not develop in a vacuum;
they interact with economic and social processes of complex globalisation to
create overlapping and competing cross-border networks of power, shifting
loyalties and identities, and new sources of endemic low-level conflict - a
'durable disorder' analogous to some of the key characteristics of the
medieval world.16 This article, then, seeks to examine the complex interaction
of globalisation, on the one hand, and the fragmention of security, on the
other. Its underlying theme is that this interaction is indeed leading towards a
kind of new medievalism that challenges a wide range of familiar
understandings of social structure and change.
GLOBALISATION AS COMPLEXITY
The new security dilemma, then, is inextricably intertwined with

globalisation, broadly defined. Critics of globalisation discourse present the
very idea and image of globalisation as representing an oversimplified
linear approach. 'Globalises' argue, these critics say, that the world is
increasingly being pushed by market forces (or, in the Marxist version, by
the requirements of global capital accumulation) into becoming a

homogenised, undifferentiated economy and, ultimately, society and
polity.'71 would argue, on the contrary, that globalisation, like any process
of the expansion and development of social systems, is characterised not by

increased homogeneity, but by increased complexity and circularity.'8
Complexity signifies the presence of many component parts, intricately
linked in ways which create multiple potential equilibria; as a system
expands, so the number of parts and the intricacy of their linkages also
expands. Circularity means that the evolving relationship between these
parts develops along multiple pathways which interact with each other,
feeding back in loops which do not merely repeat themselves but provide a
dynamic which multiplies the effect of otherwise static complex structures.
Thus sufficient slack is present (and continually being recreated and
reshaped) within the system to make any process of change 'path
dependent', i.e. open to some extent to the influence of agents as to the
direction of future developmental pathways - although the scope for agency
is always circumscribed in various complex ways.19 Furthermore, while
complexity and circularity can mean a sophisticated and elegantly co-
ordinated structure on the one hand, they can also mean that the different
parts mesh poorly, leading to friction and even entropy, on the other.20
Thus globalisation is constituted not by unambiguous homogeneity, but
by the interaction of differences — not just of national differences, of course,
but of differences which persist or arise along a variety of levels and
dimensions - in a complex process of divergence and convergence. This
process, in sociological terms, is path dependent because complexity and
circularity are to some (variable) extent reflexively monitored and shaped
by social actors, making the process not merely a Darwinian one but partly
a Lamarckian one. However, at each potential evolutionary moment in a
process of globalisation (as with any form of structural change), although
multiple potential equilibria exist, existing conjunctural conditions,
previously embedded structural constraints and underlying structural
tensions21 none the less limit the possibilities and probabilities for such
reflexive action either being undertaken in the first place or, indeed,
succeeding.
COMPLEX GLOBALISATION AND THE EVOLUTION OF GOVERNANCE

STRUCTURES
Even the structural predominance of nation-states and the international

states system per se represents the crystallisation of a particular set of
successive, path dependent equilibria in global politics. Broader social,
42 CIVIL WARS
economic and political structures beginning with the transition from

feudalism to capitalism became absorbed and 'locked in' (to use
Granovetter's phrase) to this increasingly embedded order; indeed, states
and the states system became the core around which other complex
structures in turn emerged and developed.22 Of course, the fully-fledged
'modern' state did not thoroughly develop until the Second Industrial
Revolution and the Great Transformation.23 Globalisation, however, impacts
that system in a range of complex, circular ways which challenge both of
the main characteristics which gave the nation-state the edge in the last
round of 'institutional selection' - that is, the multi-tasking or
multifunctional character of the nation-state as an institutional structure, on
the one hand, and the ability of state actors and their allies to make the side-
payments necessary to effectively maintain the provision of collective
goods and the credibility of international commitments, on the other.24
In this context, the debate has opened up not merely on what
globalisation will really mean for nation-states and other interstate forms of
governance, but, more importantly, on what sort of governance structures
may eventually emerge from the globalisation process. Both the
multifunctional character of nation-state institutions and processes and the
capacity of the state to make side-payments are under threat. With regard to
the first, the different tasks, roles and activities of nation-states and state
actors are being increasingly 'unbundled' by cross-cutting linkages among
different economic sectors and social bonds. With regard to the second, the
capacity of the state to make effective economic policy, especially
redistributive policy, along with challenges to state ideological and cultural
supremacy in the ongoing quest for loyalty and identity, have significantly
transformed - and, some would say, undermined - the ability of the state to
marshal both material and ideational resources in its interaction with other
social and economic (and political) structures. The state, as David Lake has
put it, is in the process of 'disarticulation'.25 Complex globalisation thus
creates a governance gap which is likely persist and deepen.
PROBLEMS OF STATE CAPACITY AND AUTONOMY UNDER COMPLEX

GLOBALISATION
If the state is in the process of disarticulation, what kinds of rearticulation
might conceivably occur in the next phase of the process of institutional
selection? For example, to expect the sort of fragmented, disarticulated
international and transnational governance structures which are emerging
from the processes of globalisation to maintain, expand or even defend the
institutional gains of existing liberal democratic nation-states is simply not
credible. Even as nation-building and democratisation processes are

ostensibly being extended in the Second and Third Worlds, state policy
capacity is being both hollowed out and put at the service of enforcing the
outcomes of globalisation themselves.

On the one hand, states today are increasingly bad at certain key tasks
which have been important for their social, economic and political
development and effectiveness in the modern era. These underperformed
tasks include redistribution, structural regulation (the broad 'design capacity'
to structure the way social and economic activities are carried out26) and the
direct delivery of public services. Conservative neoliberals applaud such
changes. And even social neoliberals, for example the 'reinventing
government' school, try to make a virtue out of this: 'Governments should
steer but not row', say Osborne and Gaebler.27 The 'New Labour'
Government in Britain today is pursuing such a course.28 Of course, state
capacity is being eroded at different rates in different sectors, and these
different sectors are evolving distinct public, private and mixed governance
structures - on multilayered domestic, global and transnational levels.
On the other hand, states are left with a range of important but none the
less residual tasks, and some of those tasks may paradoxically be expanded
and reinforced in a complex globalising world. In the first place, the state
will still be left with ensuring the provision - increasingly indirectly,
however - of some distributive public services; that is, those which are not
sufficiently profitable or altruistically motivating for transfer into the
private or voluntary sector. Minimal welfare states will have to be
maintained; the absence of any public safety net would lead to social unrest
and destabilisation. This function, however, is primarily in evidence in the
advanced capitalist world; in areas of the world where the welfare state has
remained underdeveloped or essentially absent, there will be little effective
structural pressure to create or develop one. Secondly, some states are still
relatively good at prudential regulation and the ex post enforcement of
contracts, as well as the promotion of certain forms of competitive
advantage in a more open world through limited industrial and trade policy
measures.29 Furthermore, older, more entrenched states still have something
of a comparative advantage in providing identity and a sort of ersatz
Gemeinschaft, but such ties are less compelling in newer states or latent and
manifest non-states. However, the Gemeinschaft function too is being
unevenly eroded by the postmodern fragmentation of national identities. In
fact, however, what the state is best at is enforcing the norms generated and
decisions made at the international and transnational levels.30
As market outcomes, the transformation of production processes,
technological innovation, socio-cultural globalisation, and the marketisation
44 CIVIL WARS
of the competition state combine to transform nation-state structures and

processes - in the absence of effective direct international 'police powers'
and judicial and legal systems - state capacity in terms of enforcement will
continue to grow and certain kinds of state intervention to expand. Indeed,

the weight of state intervention overall - and its penetration into social and
economic substructures - is actually increasing, not declining, as the result
of globalisation. What is different, then, is the substance of the tasks, roles
and activities that fall within the state's remit, with a particular emphasis on
enforcement - and with a growing deficit with regard to redistribution
between different socio-economic groups or to designing the structural
contexts within which social and economic processes take place. Therefore
the range of goals that political actors, both elite policymakers and mass
publics, can aspire to is becoming increasingly circumscribed. The process
of enforcement, furthermore, increasingly involves enforcing norms, rules
and decisions which have not in the first place been arrived at through
autonomous, endogenous (including democratic) processes, but which will
instead reflect market decisions and the preferences of transnationally-
imbricated, private oligarchic or oligopolistic structures. Challenges to the
legitimacy of enforcing such decisions and preferences may therefore in
some circumstances rapidly evolve into challenges to the state's primoridal
claim to represent the public interest or common good and therefore to a
monopoly of legitimate violence. A policy deficit is leading to a legitimacy
deficit. This is already having far-reaching effects, especially in weaker
states.
THREE SCENARIOS OF COMPLEX GLOBALISATION

So how is governance likely to evolve in this context, and what are the
probable consequences of this for states? A range of hypothetical scenarios
can be situated along a scale running from ideal-type global hierarchy at one
end to ideal-type global chaotic anarchy at the other. In the middle of the
scale we find a 'rosy scenario' - an image of a relatively stable, quasi-
pluralistic system, which I have elsewhere called 'plurilateralism'.31 In this
case, whereas the formal democratic chain of popular sovereignty and
governmental accountability ideally characteristic of national state forms of
democracy may still be broken, there could be a strong possibility for the
development of niches of individual and group autonomy to persist and
even for pluralist norms of what David Held has called called 'cosmopolitan
democracy' to emerge." However, given the increasingly embedded
character of transnational private interest governments and their
oligopolistic control of resources in the more transnationalised sectors -
along with the continuing fragmentation of nation-state-based identities and

institutions - I find this scenario less than credible."
Towards the 'hierarchy' end of the scale, another scenario which I call
'sectoral hegemony' can be situated. Instead of a core state being

'hegemonic' in determining the rules of the game and in controlling free-
riding (as is the case with realist versions of hegemonic stability theory in
international relations), this function will fall to particularly autonomous,
well-entrenched, highly transnationalised economic institutions and
processes. The two major candidates for the role of such a sectoral hegemon
are first, the largest multinational corporations, engaged in transnational-
scale production and/or strategic alliances on the one hand, and, second,
global financial market on the other. But whereas the former are only likely
to be clearly dominant in their particular specialist sectors, financial markets
and institutions are present in and cut across all sectors, setting the basic
conditions, as well as making concrete decisions, for determining the price
and distribution of capital - capital which constitutes the lifeblood and
sinews of the international economy. To the extent that financial markets
and institutions can organise an effective private regime across state
boundaries, they would be the best placed sector for exercising some sort of
co-ordination and control - governance - function. Nevertheless, both
potential hegemons would still be dependent on states to provide legal
mechanisms for the enforcement of decisions and market outcomes.
Towards the other end of the scale, however - that of chaotic anarchy -
is the neomedieval scenario. With nation-state-based institutions and
processes having been transformed into transmission belts and enforcement
mechanisms for decisions arrived at on different levels of the wider global
system, but with that system as a whole becoming increasingly incapable of
generating effective, authoritative, multifunctional coordination and control
mechanisms or governance structures, the international system is likely to
be characterised once again by a number of attributes which echo features
of the medieval world, attributes which will be considered in greater depth
below. These include: first, competing institutions with overlapping
jurisdictions (states, regimes, transgovernmental networks, private interest
governments, and so on); second, more fluid territorial boundaries (both
within and across states34); third, a growing alienation between global
innovation, communication and resource nodes (global cities) on the one
hand and disfavoured, fragmented hinterlands on the other; fourth,
increased inequalities and isolation of permanent sub-castes (the
underclass); fifth, multiple and/or fragmented loyalties and identities (ethnic
conflict and multiculturalism); sixth, contested property rights and legal
boundaries ( disregard for rules and dispute resolution procedures, attempts
46 CIVIL WARS
to extend extraterritorial jurisdiction, and so on); and seventh, the spread of

what Alain Mine has called 'zones grises', or geographical areas and social
contexts where the rule of law does not run (both localised ghettoes and
international criminal activities).35
THE NEOMEDIEVAL SCENARIO

According to Mine, the medieval system - which, in its own terms, was a
relatively successful one in political and economic terms over the long
term36 - was not genuinely chaotic, but nor was it a stable, coherent order of
the sort that could support a modern nation-state, much less a democratic
one. Rather, it was characterised by a 'durable disorder', a situation of
relative (but increasing) entropy over the centuries. The medieval era, taken
as a whole, was one of increasing social, economic and political
development as economic efficiency and an uneven quasi-stability led to
growing surpluses, the spread of knowledge and innovation, and the
emergence of more centralised bureaucratic hierarchies - although
underlying tensions in its economic and political substructures eventually
evolved into contradictions and crises in its political order. Today we now
live in an era of increasing speed, global scale and the extremely rapid
diffusion of information and technological innovation, characteristics too
which seem to be outgrowing the political capacities of the existing
institutional order. An extended phase of neomedievalism, punctuated by
episodic structural mutations and the uneven maintenance of pockets of
plurilateralism and elements of sectoral hegemony, seems the most likely
scenario.
Can a neomedieval durable disorder endure as long in the context of the
twenty-first century as it could during the several centuries of the medieval
era? Must it evolve either towards postmodernistic fragmentation and
breakdown, on the one hand, or towards increasingly hierarchical
transnational governance, on the other? Only in the first of the three sub-
scenarios canvassed above - the 'rosy scenario' - would there be much
hope for recreating the preconditions necessary for developing a relatively
pluralistic and quasi-democratic, "cosmopolitan" form of effective
governance, for a rearticulation of the multitasking character of
authoritative institutions and for a renewed capacity of authoritative agents
to make the kind of side-payments and engage in the kind of monitoring
necessary to control free-riding and assimilate a huge range of alienated
groups into such a society. Such an outcome seems highly unlikely,
however. Quasi-democratic, cosmopolitan niches may be found, as they
were in some medieval cities. But the nation-state and the states system will
no longer function effectively in this world of fragmented globalisation, and

there is unlikely to be any other coherent, regularised and stable institutional
location or site for the pursuit of the 'public' as a whole, la chose publique
or res publica. Until it does, then neomedievalism would constitute the most
probable, and indeed the 'least worst', scenario.
Neomedievalism as a concept is notable primarily for its metaphorical
value. After all, in the longue duree of human history, the nation-state is a
very recent phenomenon. Most societies have been a complex mixture or
congeries of either or both small and large units, overlapping and nesting
within and around each other, differentiated along a variety of purely
conventional as well as functional fault lines. Where the neomedieval
metaphor breaks down, of course, is the extent to which medieval social
structures - and a whole range of other pre-state social forms - sprang from
and reflected a fundamental parochialism. In the medieval era the great bulk
of social, economic and to some extent political relationships were
essentially built around the interaction of genuinely local identities,
exchange relationships and power relationships. Not much room for
globalism in the simple sense in this aspect of medievalism. However, such
a picture does evoke the image of the environmentalist slogan 'Think
globally, act locally' as well as the clumsy but useful word 'glocalisation'
which has achieved a certain celebrity in academic and policy wonk circles.
It also reflects Roland Robertson's wonderful neo-Parsonian definition of
globalisation: 'We may best consider contemporary globalisation in its most
general sense as a form of institutionalisation of the two-fold process
involving the universalisation of particularism and the particularisation of
universalism'.37
THE PREDOMINANCE OF SUBOPTIMAL -MULTILAYERED AND

ASYMMETRIC -GOVERNANCE STRUCTURES IN PREMODERN AND
POSTMODERN SOCIETIES
Nevertheless, in contrast to our modern notions of statehood or governance,

as local societies have become interlinked and interpenetrated with each
other, they have generally not done so - prior to the consolidation of the
modern nation-state - in terms of establishing consolidated, integrated,
multitasking administrative hierarchies with a general grant of social
authority analogous to the authority of village chiefs or big men, Roman
potestas, or modern sovereignty. Rather, their structures have been
multilayered and asymmetric. Different, asymmetrically structured
hierarchies have usually held various kinds of authority, competing and
overlapping with each other within the same broad territorial expanse. The
shift of society to a wider base of interactions and linkages has usually been
48 CIVIL WARS
accompanied by locking in suboptimal equilibria (with the partial exception

of the modern nation-state era) as layers of new and old social, economic
and political relationships have essentially been imposed and juxtaposed
around and on top of each other in patchwork fashion. The development of

human politics and society has not on the whole been a teleological process,
of evolution towards a particular goal, but one of bricolage. Indeed, the
development of the modern state is the exception that proves the rule.
Village and tribal/clan societies, unless highly isolated, have usually
been drawn into wider systems of competing landlord/warlord relationships,
in which layers of hierarchy are permeable and territorial frontiers fluid -
sometimes merely around border areas, sometimes in terms of core
territories and cities too. Such overlapping and cross-cutting landlord/
warlord societies have also usually become imbricated in wider quasi-
monarchical and imperial systems, ranging from tributary and suzerain
systems within which the concept of 'unity' has little social or economic
depth or penetration, to complex, quasi-confederal, quasi-patrimonial
empires. Religious hierarchies have frequently cross-cut such systems in
complex ways; trade routes and fairs have sustained a limited market
economy, usually on the margins but with growing structural impact; and
cities have provided havens for groups which find themselves either on the
periphery of, or able relatively easily to navigate across, the complex inner
boundaries (and often external frontiers too) of such multilayered,
asymmetric social formations. Communications and transport systems have
obviously constituted a key set of technological constraints and
opportunities within which such societies could evolve.
Today, the global system ought in principle to be able to transcend the
limitations of pre-state societies, including medieval ones. Indeed, nation-
states have been the incubus of the transnational as well as the international;
the capacity for globalisation processes to occur in the first place is due to
the pre-existence of the nation-state/states system and its capacity to
overcome many of the bounds of such parochialism. For example, national
economies themselves evolved in the context of an increasing global
division of labour and the spread of international markets for commodities
and finance; national societies provided the breeding ground for both the
Enlightment and the spread of modern universalistic religions (in contrast to
the 'civil religions' of Ancient Greece or the insulated, centripetal belief
systems of village societies) where previous social formations, even
traditional empires, were more particularistic in their belief systems; and the
emergence of the modern state - in both its European or Western form and
later attempts at 'nation-building' - gave rise to different yet analogous
political systems based on an 'international of nationalisms', bureaucratic
rationality, economic modernisation and the like. The fact that modern
states have had crucial structural similarities indicates that the states system
is not the antithesis of globalisation, but its precursor.38
The main problem, of course, is that the very success of the state is also
its prison - that is, that its success limits both the capacity of the state to
operate transnationally in a global structural context and the potential
capacity of latent or potential global-level equilibria to consolidate into
similarly multifunctional, transnational governance structures with the
capacity to make the necessary side-payments for survival and
effectiveness. The nation-state both creates and underpins globalisation
processes, on the one hand, and prevents those processes from effectively
rearticulating governance at a 'higher' level, on the other.3' The result may
well be the crystallisation of increasingly suboptimal forms of governance
at both the state and transnational/international levels and the threat of
growing institutional entropy in world politics generally. The 'hollowing
out' of the state is not matched by any equivalent 'filling in' of multilateral,
transnational, regional, or whatever, governance structures — thereby
creating not only a 'democratic deficit' but also a wider and deeper
governance gap as we move into the twenty-first century. In this context,
neomedievalism, for all its limits as a concept, provides us with a range of
analytical tools for understanding and evaluating these changes. One of the
main consequences, of course, is the increasing breakdown of the state's
monopoly of legitimate violence, and thus the growing incidence and
structural significance of civil wars.
This paper is merely a first cut at dealing with this issue, so I will at this
stage simply outline some of the key characteristics, already listed, of the
neomedieval model (see above) and ask some rather crude questions about
the applicability of each to the 'global era'. The result will be more
suggestive than conclusive, and some characteristics are more plausible
than others in the contemporary context. Nevertheless, together they paint a
rather different picture of the world than we are accustomed to in the main
paradigmatic debates in international politics such as debates between
neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism or globalisation versus 'inter-
nationalisation'. Remember that the key common features of neomedieval
structures are that they are multilayered and asymmetric, giving rise to
increasingly suboptimal outcomes and long-term entropy.
CHARACTERISTICS OF A NEOMEDIEVAL WORLD I: MULTIPLE

COMPETING INSTITUTIONS
The first characteristic mentioned is that of competing institutions with
overlapping jurisdictions. Traditional historians and state theorists have
50 CIVIL WARS
focused on the modern transcendance of this aspect of the medieval world

as the key to understanding the nature of the nation-state and the states
system.40 The core of the medieval system, in contrast, was the development
of complex structures of obeisance and vassalage. The early (or pre-)

medieval order in Europe, often called the Dark Ages, was a period when,
given reverses suffered by the Roman Empire and its eventual withdrawal
and collapse, an extreme form of localism existed. Roman-era trade routes
were abandoned, Imperial legal norms forgotten, and political power
fragmented and diffused. The feudal order subsequently emerged
essentially in bottom-up fashion through the exchange of obeisance and
sharecropping (often imposed through predatory expansion) on the part of
village and local societies for military protection from other relatively
localised predators. This patchwork stabilisation of early feudal society,
however, involved overlapping claims to power and territorial lordship -
claims originally settled in ad hoc fashion and later ritualised in overlapping
hierarchies. Such hierarchies, originally very flat, became increasingly
pyramidal as relative stabilisation enabled economic production to expand
- thereby creating larger surpluses to be expropriated for conspicuous
consumption, demand for the increasingly elaborate equipment required for
warfare over strategic territorial areas (such as finite tracts of arable land),
the establishment and protection of newly emerging trade routes and cities
(originally for providing services to the nobility), and so on. Unevenly
intertwining and interacting with this feudal hierarchy was of course the
Roman Catholic Church (and, at times, rival Churches), which had its own
extensive, complex hierarchy and problems of monitoring and controlling
its vast lands and activities.
As more surplus came to be produced, expropriated and exchanged,
merchants, financiers, artisans and labourers created guilds and urban
corporations which interacted with preexisting hierarchies in novel and
increasingly complex ways - often cutting across ill-defined territorial
frontiers with poorly enforced borders. There was also no real exclusive
'ownership' of land (and indeed other forms of property) in the modern or
even the Roman Law sense; feudal property was 'entailed', with different
castes having overlapping rights and privileges in the same lands and partial
privileges stretching across different territories. Hierarchies were entrenched
through vows of obeisance to feudal superiors and involved the provision of
services, mainly military services, to superiors. Eventually, of course, as the
aristocratic pyramid became steeper, embryonic administrative and
diplomatic classes emerged in order to monitor and control the widening
activities undertaken by or on behalf of their noble employers or to administer
quasi-autonomous cities. Dispute resolution procedures and norms of
authority in feudal society therefore revolved around settling questions of

which individuals and groups possessed rights and privileges to territorial
suzerainty, surplus expropriation and loyalty in this multilayered and
asymmetric institutional system. Wars were essentially what would now be

considered civil wars and/or cross-border wars, only there was no overarching
civil authority to be contested or rent asunder. Empires represented high
family rank and prestige but little, if any, actual power or control, and borders
were merely multilevel, shifting frontiers between patchwork patrimonial
estates. Such wars were not only endemic but also essential to the regulation
of the system, creating new (and often unstable) obligations and relationships
imposed over and juxtaposed with the old.
Of course, with the steepening of the pyramid of wealth and control and
the consolidation of competing dynastic monarchies claiming to inhabit the
apex, the increasing autonomy and interdependence of significant sectors of
the feudal economy (urban production, money-lending and finance, long-
distance trade, and so on), and the growing institutionalistion of military and
taxation bureaucracies, the stage was set for the nation-state to emerge from
the creative destruction of fifteenth to seventeeth century warfare.41 The
feudal nobility, of course, did not lose their power and wealth; rather, they
were integrated into the system. Some historians have disputed whether
there was ever a real 'transition from feudalism to capitalism' as such, or
merely a reconversion of feudal power and wealth within a new context -
not finally to be relegated to anachronistic impotence until the twentieth
century (if at all).42 Therefore disputes over the decline of the nation-state
need not imply that nation-states will simply be replaced by some sort of
integrated global order; they may merely be transforming themselves into
structures which will be better able to survive in a multilayered global
context, that is, into the 'competition state'.43 Monitoring and regulating
economic activities are likely to differ from sector to sector, depending upon
the scope and scale of the microeconomic and mesoeconomic
characteristics of that sector - especially its degree of transnationalisation -
with the effective purview of states limited to those sectors the organisation
of which structurally corresponds to the requirements of effective
monitoring and control at a national/territorial level. Nation-states will
probably look more like American states within the US federal system with
circumscribed remits, but retaining important residual policy instruments
and the ability to exploit niches in the wider system through limited taxation
and regulation. They will be like residual aristocracies in an increasingly
'global' integrated capitalist environment, focusing on what is good for
their own estates and seeking not to lose too much power and prestige to the
nouveaux riches or transnational elites of the global economy.
52 CIVIL WARS
At the same time, it follows that the more transnationalised a sector, the
more it will tend towards developing transnational self-regulatory
institutions - whether with the implicit or explicit authoritative delegation
of nation-states, as in traditional international regimes, or in increasingly

unaccountable private regimes. Specific crucial tasks such as rating the
bonds issued by firms and government institutions, maintaining common
rules and monitoring and sanctioning the activities of the larger financial
firms are already highly privatised on a transnational scale, of course.44
Transnational strategic alliances will increasingly regulate relationships
between firms in sectors characterised by international-scale specific
assets.45 The interaction of such private regimes will be mediated through
global financial markets, which are likely to retain a fairly open structure,
and through certain limited, residual intergovernmental regimes such as the
International Monetary Fund. At the same time, regulatory or policy
arbitrage (seeking out the most favourable regulatory and policy
environments for particular activities) on the part of relatively
transnationalised firms is increasingly homogenising the rules and
outcomes of public policy formulation and implementation across borders.
When added to transnational interest group formation and the development
of transgovernmental coalitions bringing regulators and policymakers in
overlapping spheres into regular networks cutting across 'splintered states',
the rapid but asymmetric multilayering of political and economic
institutions will lead, at best, to the emergence of quasi-public, quasi-private
dispute settlement regimes seeking to arbitrate competing claims for rights
and privileges in this patchwork system.
CHARACTERISTICS OF NEOMEDIEVALISM II: THE LACK OF

EXOGENOUS TERRITORIALISING PRESSURES
The main causal factor missing from this process today that was present in
the transition from feudalism to capitalism is the element of exogenous
systemic competition. It was the institutionalisation of competition and
conflict between increasingly powerful dynastic families in the late
medieval period which led to the consolidation of state bureaucracies and
their growing penetration into more and more exclusively territorialised
social and economic bases. With the exception of unexpected intergalactic
warfare, there will be no external consolidating pressure on the
contemporary system analogous to the inter-dynastic struggles of the
Hundred Years' War, the Thirty Years' War and the subsequent three
centuries of interstate competition both within Europe and across the world
as Europe expanded. Just as the Chinese Empire, in Paul Kennedy's
analysis, stagnated because it experienced no fundamental external threat

for many centuries,46 so the neomedieval international order will face no
direct exogenous political or military pressures for institutional
consolidation at a transnational level. Indeed, the only analogous

institutional development in recent decades has been the European Union,
but that may prove relatively stagnant in a world of fragmentary, privatised,
deregulated global economic competition. Thus an increasingly dense,
multi-layered and asymmetric set of suboptimal competing institutions with
overlapping jurisdictions - including, not breaking up, a residual nation-
state - will stumble on, untroubled by exogenous pressures to consolidate.
In this context, nation-states will find, weaker states first, stronger states
later on, that their territorial and authoritative boundaries will effectively
become more fluid - even if legal sovereignty is not formally threatened,
state borders still appear as real lines on the map, and guarantees of
diplomatic recognition and membership of certain international institutions
remain. Collapsing states, like the Lebanon and Somalia; 'transnational
territories' such as those unevenly controlled by the National Patriotic Front
of Liberia;47 so-called 'archipelago' states like the former Zaire, now the
Democratic Republic of the Congo; and sub-state ethnic and separatist
movements, will threaten state cohesion at the same time that existing
borders are clung on to for dear life in the name of elite legitimacy.
However, it is unlikely that the actual breakup of nation-states per se will be
as significant a development as the exogenous and endogenous
differentiation of their authority, as discussed above - especially for the
older and wealthier nation-states of the North. Nevertheless, centrifugal
pressures on 'empire-states' like Russia and China are likely to grow in
importance as the penetration of cross-cutting sectoral and market pressures
of transnational capitalism expands within those territories. Some authors
have always believed that even if China does not break up (with, for
example, its long externally-interdependent Southern coastal region and
hinterlands breaking away, among other oft-canvassed potential
developments), its pre-modern structure of regional quasi-warlords loosely
held together by a weak imperial bureaucracy will return in a form adapted
to the structures of a complex global economy.
At another level, the emergence of international or transnational regions
is playing an increasing role in territorial organisation. However, what is
most interesting about these regions is not their institutional coherence or
supra-state-like structural form; indeed, the European Union is the only
region with that sort of quasi-state coherence. What is most interesting is
that they are themselves multilevel, asymmetric entities, with criss-crossing
internal fault lines - sub-regions, cross-border regions, local regions, not
54 CIVIL WARS
merely 'nested' but often conflicting, with national, transnational and

subnational rivalries poorly integrated - based mainly on the density of
transactions which also reflect the complexity and circularity of wider
globalisation processes.48 Will regions in the future reflect the macro-

structures of the European-North American-Asian 'Triad'? Or are they
fundamentally much smaller but overlapping nodal areas in which the
density of particular (especially sectoral) socio-economic transactions and
infrastructure is forming de facto cross-border regional clusters, such as
around the Sea of Japan, the emerging German-Central European industrial
economy, the maquiladora export zones in northern Mexico, or the much
poorer cross-border social economies of Kurdistan or eastern Liberia?
Regionalisation is thus itself a multilayered phenomenon, reflecting the
interaction of processes of convergence and divergence in international
politics - a world in which the whole is increasingly less than the sum of its
complex parts.
CHARACTERISTICS OF A NEOMEDIEVAL WORLD III: THE UNEVEN

CONSOLIDATION OF NEW SPACES, CLEAVAGES, CONFLICTS AND
INEQUALITIES
The main structural fault lines - political, social and economic - in this
complex world reflect not clear territorial boundaries enclosing hierarchical
authority structures, but new distinctions between different levels of
economic cleavage and urban/rural splits. The academic sociological and
geographical literature on global cities reflects the concept that a range of
'virtual spaces' in the global political economy will increasingly overlap
with and possibly even replace the 'real' space of traditional geographical
and topological territorities. These new spaces are embodied - and
increasingly embedded - in transaction flows, infrastructural nodes of
communications and information technology, corporate headquarters, 'edge
city' living complexes for 'symbolic analysts', increasingly
'dematerialised' financial markets, and cultural and media centers of
activity (and identity). According to Christopher May, control of new ideas
and innovations will come to be increasingly concentrated in such areas,
protected and secured by a growing panoply of international and
transnational intellectual property rights.49 On the one hand, therefore, the
specific spaces which people perceive and identify with are likely to
become increasingly localised and/or micro-level in structure (in the Middle
Ages, space was highly localised, of course), while on the other hand,
people may even lose their very perception of space being partitioned
vertically and learn over time to 'navigate' between different overlapping,
asymmetric layers of spatial perception and organisation.
The poorer residents of such areas will find themselves increasingly

excluded from decision-making processes. And in those areas where
navigation among complex structural layers is more difficult - for example,
where such nodes, infrastructure, activities, etc., do not exist within easy
reach and perception, such as across large geographical spaces - many
people will simply be 'out of the loop', country bumpkins or even roaming,
deprived bands, like Hobsbawm's primitive rebels50 (consider contemporary
Albania) forced once again to become predators or supplicants on the cities,
as in the Middle Ages. Changes in institutions, the fluidity of territorial
boundaries and the increasing hegemony of global cities will interact with
new forms of 'flexible' labour processes and economic organisation to
increase inequalities and turn downwardly mobile workers (especially the
less skilled, the ghetto dwellers, and so on) into a new lumpen proletariat,
underclass or sub-caste - a process well underway in the First World and
already dominant in large parts of the Third World. In this context, it will
not be merely ethnic loyalties and tribal enmities which will undermine the
ersatz Gemeinschaft of the nation-state, although they have so far been the
leading edge of cultural fragmentation. It will be the development of
complex new inequalities of both real class and virtual geography. Such
inequalities will be far more difficult to counterbalance and neutralise
without effective or legitimate state institutions, and, especially when they
are allied to other cleavages, they are likely to comprise an increasing
source of civil and cross-border violence.
CHARACTERISTICS OF A NEOMEDIEVAL WORLD IV: FRAGMENTED

IDENTITIES
Such a situation will not merely be one of fragmentation, but one of multiple
loyalties and identities. As in the Middle Ages, loyalty to or identity with
family, local area, region, occupational solidarity, economic class, religious
or ethnic group, ideological preferences, national and/or cosmopolitan
values, etc., will no longer be easily subsumed in holistic images or
collective identities. Indeed, a neomedieval world will be one of social and
political schizophrenia, with shifting patchwork boundaries and postmodern
cultural images. The presentation of this aspect of neomedievalism has been
a controversial one. On the one hand, it has often come under fire from
'inter-nationalists' and believers in the continuing strength of deeply
embedded national identities. However, I would argue that the
fragmentation of identities will basically cut across, coexist and overlap
with pre-existing national identities, although the latter will become
increasingly empty rituals divorced from real legitimacy, system affect51 or
56 CIVIL WARS
even instrumental loyalty. On the other hand, the question of how such
multiple identities can coexist in a stable fashion has led some observers to
attempt to develop analogies with the unifying ideological and cultural role
of the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. Such writers have
attempted to identify possible successors to this role in a neomedieval
world, considering such phenomena as New Age philosophy or the
environmental movement. However, the role of pre-modern imperial
religions tended to fragment and/or become assimilated into the traditions
and social bonds of differentiated local strata, whether in the Holy Roman
or the Chinese Empires, either becoming absorbed into and manipulated
within the multilayered politics of the imperial and aristocratic veneer or
shaping themselves to the substructure in which they operated. Any truly
global cultural identity structure will have to be not so much homogeneous
or unifying as intrinsically multilayered and flexible, being able to adapt
chameleon-like to a wide range of differentiated contexts.
CHARACTERISTICS OF A NEOMEDIEVAL WORLD V: PROPERTY

RIGHTS - AN EXCEPTION TO THE RULE?
One aspect of the medieval world which seems at first glance to be less
problematic today is that of mixed, contested and overlapping property
rights. Probably the most consensual and homogenising dimension of
globalisation is the spread of Western, capitalist conceptions of property
rights at both national and international levels. The conclusion of the
Uruguay Round and the establishment of the World Trade Organisation,
linked to the residual structural power of the Western nation-states and the
growing authority of multinational corporations, global financial markets,
and so on, are likely to ensure not merely the continuation but the further
entrenchment of such rights into the future. Indeed, this will be the main
source of the residual power of nation-states - their role as enforcers of
national, transnational and international property rights. This role will
continue to have an impact well beyond the technical bounds of such issues,
and will lend a de facto coherence to global politics and economics, cutting
across the competing institutions, differentiated sectoral regimes and
multiple loyalties discussed above. Nevertheless, the enforcement of
property rights, without the capacity for states to effectively pursue other
collective values through public policy, may actually undermine state
legitimacy in many circumstances. Governments themselves, by expanding
their monitoring and enforcement roles through such measures as
extraterritorial legislation, may create conflicts which weaken both property
rights and identities.
Therefore it is still unclear what role property rights, especially

intellectual property rights, will play in such a context. In some ways,
capitalist society developed despite rather than because of the existence of
an intellectual property rights regime. The diffusion of scientific and .

technological ideas in the modern period still had something of the character
of a public good, and public or quasi-public institutions like universities
emerged to increase the supply of knowledge on a widely available basis. If
a strict intellectual property rights regime were to be constructed, it might
actually prevent such diffusion in the future - reinforcing monopolistic
practices in leading edge industries, turning university research into an
adjunct of private profit-making by globally-linked firms, and effectively
concentrating innovatory practices in global cities and their hinterlands (or
virtual hinterlands, via electronic connections). Such a regime might well
create an unevenness of access - a new form of 'enclosure' - that would
reinforce other social, economic and political asymmetries in a neomedieval
world.52 Therefore a more carefully specified and strongly entrenched
property rights regime may paradoxically reinforce rather than counteract
tendencies towards neomedievalism.
CHARACTERISTICS OF A NEOMEDIEVAL WORLD VI: THE SPREAD OF

'ZONES GRISES'
Finally, although there is little concrete than can be said in generalisable

terms, it must be recognised that in a neomedieval world, there will not only
be 'niches' for the maintenance of pluralist autonomy for individuals and
groups; there will also be increased escape routes- and organisational
opportunities - for those operating more or less 'outside the law'. Exit from
political society is likely to become a more viable option for a wider range
of actors and activities. At one level, such phenomena involve more than
just international (and domestic) criminal activities such as the drugs trade
or the (semi-transnational) Russian mafia; they also involve the areas where
excluded people live - especially urban ghettoes, at one geographical
extreme, and enclaves in inaccessible areas (jungle, mountains, and so on),
at another. Indeed, the toughest problem in this area is where different
dimensions of extra-legal activities intersect with legal or quasi-legal ones,
for example where the resources and networks of the drugs trade not only
create alternative power structures and social identities for members of the
underclass physically located in ghettoes but also extend into state
bureaucracies and 'legitimate' private firms, as mafias have always done.
Mine, as I have pointed out, calls these areas 'grey zones'. Excluded rural
hinterlands may also become grey zones.
58 • CIVIL WARS
At another level, however, it is likely that many traditionally mainstream

social and economic activities will expand as much through grey zones as
through legitimate means, much as the so-called 'black economy' has done
in many areas during the modern era. A transnationalised black economy

constitutes a major challenge to the enforcement function of even the
residual state, and the inclusion or integration of such areas and activities
into the complex governance structures of a globalising world is likely to be
extremely uneven. At a third level, too, Singer and Wildavsky, in
distinguishing between 'zones of peace' and 'zones of turmoil' in the wider
world order, were inadvertently pointing to another dimension of this
phenomenon which cuts across borders and regions too - shifting the focus
and locus of conflict and violence even farther away from the interstate
pattern and towards the intractable complexities of the micro- and meso-
levels.53 The 'new security dilemma' identified at the beginning of this
article means that as the reliability of interstate balances of power declines,
and as alternative possibilities for global and transnational security are
found wanting - as the governance gap grows - the growth of 'insecurity
from below' will create conditions in which increasingly intractable and
complex civil and cross-border wars will become the norm.
CONCLUSIONS: DURABLE DISORDER AND THE GOVERNANCE GAP
As noted earlier, the medieval world was not a world of chaos and
breakdown. It was a relatively 'durable disorder'. Conflicts and crises did
not cumulate into overall system crisis until the system itself was
transcended by an alternative proto-system.54 This transformation consisted
of the consolidation over several centuries of a steeper pyramid of power
than had existed in the Dark Ages - or, rather, a set of steeper pyramids,
each rooted in the rise to wealth and power of one of a small number of
competing dynastic families across Europe. Out of the entropy of the feudal
system grew a structured competition that engendered the emergence and
consolidation of hierarchical nation-states, states which could consolidate
because they were multitasking and because they could afford to make
increasing side-payments to new and increasingly indispensable groups -
especially the bourgeoisie and the popular classes - seeking to be included
in a growing range of political and economic processes. In today's
globalising world, as in the medieval world, there is no external threat to the
system as a whole which could galvanise a sufficiently hierarchical
response to engender the emergence of genuinely 'global governance', and
no prospect of a sufficiently autonomous and powerful collective vision -
religious, social, economic or political - to transform such a world into a
new transnational res publica.

Consequently, if a neomedieval international order is eventually to be
transformed into a more hierarchical and authoritative global system,
capable of effectively pursuing genuinely collective values on a wider,

global level, then the sources of that transformation must come from within
the newer, essentially transnational structures of such a world. They are
unlikely to come from nation-states as such, however much states engage in
multilateral cooperation as a pragmatic response to transnational challenges.
Nation-states are too limited in the scope and scale of what they can do
(especially in a post-hegemonic world) and too beholden to narrow
domestic interests to be able to lead such a transformation process. They
can, of course, play a facilitating role, especially as domestic enforcers of
global norms and practices, and - paradoxically - as 'competition states', in
pushing forward a process of economic globalisation in order to maximise
domestic returns, a kind of barrier-lowering tit-for-tat. However, such
developments will merely widen the governance gap, not fill it in.
In reality, the source of any further consolidation of genuine global
governance would have to come from a political process, perhaps one
involving both the increasing international and transnational entrenchment
of property rights, on the one hand, along with consequent claims for
countervailing rights and privileges from specific transnational economic
actors and sectors, on the other - restructured through an ongoing process
of interaction with and among transnational interest groups and policy
networks. Bentley's and Truman's 'governmental process' - that is, the
predominance of functional representation over territorial representation55 -
would have to be refocused on genuinely global structures, however
uneven. Both Held's cosmopolitan democracy and my own notion of
plurilateralism would require a transformation of such pressures and forms
of representation into a form of self-balancing pluralism within a complex
global environment. But such actors and groups are most likely to interact
outside the formal-legal bounds of both state sovereignty and/or formal
multilateral political processes. Indeed, the most powerful and effective
actors and groups in the globalisation process are likely to be the most
monopolistic or structurally homogenous ones, such as multinational firms,
transnational strategic alliances and global financial markets. Thus the
outcome of a phase of neomedievalism is more likely to lead to some form
of sectoral hegemony or transnational oligarchy than to genuine world
government or to the establishment of pluralist cosmopolitan democracy.
In any case, the range of potential equilibria characteristic of such a
neomedieval system will be increasingly diverse. Complex situations are
likely to produce complex outcomes. Whether any particular overall
60 CIVIL WARS
equilibrium eventually gets 'locked in' will depend on a kind of uneven -

punctuated, sometimes regressive, probably entropic - evolutionary
process. The best that can be hoped is that such a process will be sufficiently
Lamarckian, rather than Darwinian, that enough people can find a few
virtual spaces within which to construct limited collective decisionmaking
processes and perhaps quasi-democratic values. However, such an outcome
seems both Utopian and highly improbable, at least in the medium term and
perhaps even in the long term, in the light of the current transformation and
splintering of the nation-state and the continuing anarchy of the
international system. The new security dilemma identified at the beginning
of this article means that as the reliability of interstate balances of power
declines, and as alternative possibilities for global and transnational security
are found wanting - as the governance gap grows - the growth of insecurity
from below will create conditions in which increasingly intractable and
complex civil and cross-border wars will become endemic. So long as the
process of reshaping the political environment in reaction to complex
globalisation remains uneven and multidimensional in time as well as space,
we can expect civil and cross-border wars to predominate and proliferate.
Nevertheless, such turbulence does not necessarily mean chaos. Indeed,
the medieval order was a highly flexible one which created a wide range of
spaces which could accommodate quite extensive social, economic and
political innovations - eventually laying the groundwork for the emergence
of the post-feudal, nation-state-based international order. In today's world
of global finance, multinational firms, multilateral regimes and private
authority, therefore, the emerging neomedieval world order, reflecting its
medieval predecessor, is most likely to remain a kind of durable disorder for
the foreseeable future. Nation-states will take on ever more onerous
enforcement tasks in the face not only of endemic multilevel violence but
also of peaceful but cross-cutting forms of political and social conflict.
Nevertheless, in structural terms they will be essentially equivalent to local
governments, with neither an effective general policymaking capacity nor
an authoritative central government to appeal to. They will not regain their
multifunctional character and will increasingly lose their ability to make
side-payments to disaffected actors and groups, increasing the benefits of
exit to the detriment of voice and loyalty and undermining the sense of the
public interest and therefore of their own legitimacy. It can only be hoped
that in the much longer run, the global order will prove to be structurally
adaptable enough, as was its medieval predecessor, to leave open the
possibility of its eventual evolution into something more structurally
cohesive and normatively acceptable.
NOTES
1. For an exploration of the notion o f 'international order', as distinct from the concept of
'international system', see Robert Latham, 'History, Theory and International Order: Some
Lessons from the Nineteenth Century', Review of International Studies, 23/4 (October 1997),
pp.419-43.
2. Ian R. Douglas, 'Globalisation as Governance: Political Technology and the Assembly of
Forces', in Aseem Prakash and Jeffrey A. Hart (eds), Globalisation and Governance
(forthcoming).
3. Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1962).
4. Peter J. Dombrowski, 'Fragmenting Identities, Shifting Loyalties: The Influence of
Individualisation on Global Systems Change', Global Society (forthcoming, September
1998).
5. Florian Znaniecki, Modern Nationalities: A Sociological Study (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1973; originally published 1952).
6. Reinhard Bendi, Nation-Building and Citizenship (New York: Anchor Books, 1969;
originally published 1964).
7. P.G. Cerny, 'Globalisation and the Erosion of Democracy', European Journal of Political
Research (forthcoming).
8. Often this micro-level is referred to as the 'local', as in the environmentalist slogan: 'Think
globally, act locally'. However, this usage of 'local' implies that the phenomena concerned
are intrinsically micro-territorial, whereas the argument here concerns a range of
micropolitical, microcultural, microsocial and microeconomic phenomena which are not
based exclusively on some clearly indentifiable territorial base but also rooted in
geographically cross-cutting structural linkages. This is even more true for meso-level
phenomena such as industrial sectors.
9. See, e.g., P.G. Cerny, 'Globalisation, Governance and Complexity', in Prakash and Hart (see
note 2).
10. See, e.g., Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society (London: Macmillan, 1977), pp.254-5.
11. E.g., Henry A. Kissinger, A World Restored: Metternich, Castlereagh, and the Problems of
Peace 1812-1822 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957).
12. Kenneth Waltz, Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1979).
13. See P.G. Cerny, The Politics of Grandeur: Ideological Aspects of de Gaulle's Foreign Policy
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980).
14. James N. Rosenau, Along the Domestic-Foreign Frontier: Exploring Governance in a
Turbulent World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
15. Hendrik Spruyt, 'Institutional Selection in International Relations: State Anarchy as Order',
International Organization, 48/4 (Autumn 1994), pp. 527-57.
16. Alain Minc, Le nouveau Moyen Age (Paris: Gallimard, 1993).
17. Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalisation in Question? The International Economy
and the Possibilities of Governance (Oxford: Polity Press, 1996); cf. John Zysman, 'The
Myth of the Global Economy: Enduring National Foundations and Emerging Regional
Reality', New Political Economy, 1/1 (Summer 1996), pp. 157-84. Such critics then present
the presence of differences in state/societal arrangements, government policies, value
systems, forms of corporate governance 'architectures of supply', technological formations,
patterns of productivity, regional systems, etc., as evidence that 'globalisation', in their
terms, is not really happening.
18. P.G. Cerny, 'Globalisation, Governance and Complexity' (see note 9). On complexity and
circularity in the industrial economics literature, see Herbert Kitschelt, 'Industrial
Governance Structures, Innovation Strategies, and the Case of Japan: Sectoral or Cross-
National Comparative Analysis?', International Organization, 45/4 (Autumn 1991),
pp.453-93. See also Mark Granovetter, 'Economic Action and Social Structure: The
Problem of Embeddedness', American Journal of Sociology, 91/4 (November 1985),
pp.481-510 and Granovetter, Economic Institutions as Social Constructions: A Framework
62 CIVIL WARS
for Analysis', Acta Sociologica, 35 (1992), pp.3-11 on multiple equilibria and path
development, and Peter M. Blau, (ed)., Approaches to the Study of Social Structure (New
York: Free Press, 1975) on the concept of structure in the traditional sociological literature.
19. P.G. Cerny, The Changing Architecture of Politics: Structure, Agency and the Future of the
State (London and Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990), pp.4-9.

20. On entropy, see Cerny, 'Political Entropy and American Decline', Millennium: Journal of
International Studies, 22/1 (Spring 1989), pp.27-51.
21. For example, those posited by Williamson concerning specific and non-specific assets or by
Olson regarding public and private goods: Oliver E. Williamson, Markets and Hierarchies
(New York: Free Press, 1975) and The Economic Institutions of Capitalism (New York: Free
Press, 1985); Mancur Olson, The Logic of Collective Action (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1971).
22. The notion of the 'centrality' of state structures is examined in Cerny, Changing Architecture
(see note 19).
23. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation:
The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (New York: Rinehart, 1944); Cerny,
Changing Architecture, op. cit.; P.G. Cerny, 'Globalization and the Changing Logic of
Collective Action', International Organization, 19/4 (Autumn 1995), pp.595-625.
24. Spruyt (note 15); cf. Cerny, 'Globalization and the Changing Logic of Collective Action',
(note 23). Also see Cerny, 'Globalisation and the Erosion of Democracy', (note 7)., and
Cerny, 'Communication', Political Studies, 45/1 (March 1997), pp. 1-2.
25. The argument both for Lake and for myself is not so much that the state is being
fundamentally 'undermined' by globalisation, but rather that its functions are being
disarticulated — unevenly broken up and partly eroded — in a context of increased cross-
cutting affiliations and conflicts, transnational pressures, 'third-level games', etc. David
A. Lake, 'Global Governance: A Relational Contracting Approach', in Prakash and Hart
(note 2).
26. Vipond makes a distinction between 'operational capacity' and 'design capacity' in financial
regulation: Peter A. Vipond, 'The European Financial Area in the 1990s: Europe and the
Transnationalisation of Finance', in P.G. Cerny, ed., Finance and World Politics: Markets,
Regimes and States in the Post-Hegemonic Era (Cheltenham, Glos., and Brookfield, VT:
Edward Elgar, 1993), p. 187.
27. David Osborne and Ted Gaebler, Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit
is Transforming the Public Sector, from Schoolhouse to Statehouse, City Hall to the Pentagon
(Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1992).
28. P.G. Cerny and Mark Evans, 'New Labour, Globalisation and the Competition State', paper
to be presented to the annual conference of the Political Studies Association of the U.K.,
University of Keele, 7-9 April 1998.
29. Grahame Thompson, 'Some Observations on the "International Competitiveness Debate"
and International Economic Relations', unpublished paper, the Open University (September
1996).
30. Or the 'global' level - as I prefer to use the word 'global' to mean the level at which the
processes and practices of both internationalisation and transnationalisation interact and
overlap.
31. P.G. Cerny, 'Plurilateralism: Structural Differentiation and Functional Conflict in the Post-
Cold War World Order', Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 22/1 (1993),
pp.27-51.
32. David Held, Democracy and the Global Order: From the Modern State to Democratic
Governance (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995).
33. Cerny, 'Globalisation and the Erosion of Democracy' (note 7).
34. For example, see François Prkic, 'End of the Cold War and Democratisation in Sub-Saharan
Africa: The Emergence of Transnational Rebel Territories in Today's Conflicts', paper
presented to the Workshop on Democratisation and the Changing Global Order, Annual Joint
Sessions of Workshops, European Consortium for Political Research, Bern, Switzerland, 27

February-4 March 1997; see also Robert D. Kaplan, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the
Dawn of the 21st Century (London: Macmillan, 1997).
35. On the relevant characteristics of the medieval era and its application to understanding
contemporary issues, see: Minc, Le nouveau Moyen Âge (note 16); Robert D. Kaplan, 'The
Coming Anarchy', The Atlantic Monthly (February 1994), pp.44-76; Bruce Cronin and
Joseph Lepgold, 'A New Medievalism? Conflicting International Authorities and Competing
Loyalties in the Twenty-First Century', paper presented to the annual meeting of the
International Studies Association, Chicago, 23-27 February 1995; and Stephen Kobrin,
'Back to the Future: Neomedievalism and the Post-Modern World Economy', paper
presented to the annual meeting of the International Studies Association, San Diego, 17-21
April 1996.
36. See also Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism (London, New Left Books,
1974).
37. Roland Robertson, Globalisation: Social Theory and Global Culture (London and Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage, 1992), p. 102.
38. Consider Kenneth Waltz's application of Durkheim's notion of 'simple structures': Waltz,
(note 12), p.72, and Waltz, 'Reflections on "Theory of International Politics": A Response to
My Critics', in Robert 0. Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and Its Critics (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986), esp. pp.323-6. For a critique of Waltz's usage of Durkheim, see
Cerny, 'Plurilateralism' (note 31), pp.28-31.
39. Lake (note 25).
40. E.g., Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State (Stanford, CA: Stanford
41. See Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military
Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1988), esp. pp. 16-30; Perry Anderson,
Lineages of the Absolutist State (London: New Left Books, 1974); R.J. Holton, The
Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London: Macmillan, 1985); and Charles Tilly
(ed.), The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
42. Arno J. Mayer, The Persistence of the Old Regime: Europe to the Great War (London:
Croom Helm, 1981).
43. P.G. Cerny, 'Paradoxes of the Competition State: The Dynamics of Political Globalisation',
Government and Opposition, 32/2 (Spring 1997), pp.251-74.
44 Karsten Ronit and Volker Schneider, 'Private Organisations in Global Governance', paper
presented to the conference on the Problem Solving Capacity of Transnational Governance
Systems, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Cologne, 8-9 November 1996;
Timothy J. Sinclair, 'Reinventing Authority: Embedded Knowledge Networks and the New
Global Finance', paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science
Association, Washington, DC, 28-31 August 1997; Virginia Haufler.'Private Regimes:
Theory and Evidence', paper presented to the annual meeting of the American Political
Science Association, Washington, DC, 28-31 August 1997; Miroslava Filipovic, 'A Global
Private Regime for Capital Flows', paper presented to the annual conference of the British
International Studies Association, University of York, 18-21 December 1994; and A. Claire
Cutler, 'Locating "Authority" in the Global Political Economy', paper presented to the
annual conference of the British International Studies Association, University of Leeds,
15-17 December 1997.
45. On the spread of complex transnational strategic alliances and the 'new competition', see
Brian Portnoy, 'Transnational Networks and Industrial Order', paper presented to the annual
meeting of the American Political Science Association, Washington, DC, 27-31 August
1997.
46. Kennedy (note 41).
47. Prkic (note 34).
48. Richard Higgott, 'Mondialisation et gouvernance: L'émergence du niveau régional',
64 CIVIL WARS
Politique Étrangère, 66/2 (Summer 1997), pp. 277-92.
49. Christopher May, Knowing, Owning, Enclosing: A Global Political Economy of Intellectual
Property Rights, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Nottingham Trent University (June 1997).
50. E.J. Hobsbawm, Bandits (Harmondsworth, Middx.: Penguin, revised edn. 1972).
51. The notion of 'system affect', which is said to mean 'rain or shine' loyalty to the political
system, is explored in Gabriel A. Almond and Sidney Verba (eds.), The Civic Culture:
Political Attitudes in Five Nations (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), pp. 192ff.
52. May (note 49).
53. Max Singer and Aaron Wildavsky, The Real World Order: Zones of Peace/Zones of Turmoil
(Chatam, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1993).
54. According to Grahame Thompson, however, the medieval order as I have set it out is not
actually 'medieval' per se. He regards the medieval order as characterised by a more
'antagonistic pluralism' even a 'radical disorder'. The kind of durable disorder described
here ismore akin to the system of the Holy Roman Empire (HRE).
The HRE is ... interesting and important because it was the first truly international
governance system. ... [Its] plurality of organised political forces and institutions was
held together in relative social peace and relative harmony by the constitutional order of
the HRE. The complexity of those estates and domains that existed under the umbrella
of the HRE ... [consisted of a] vast array of religious groupings, principalities, guilds,
city states, free cities, leagues, and so on [which] existed as definite political entities ...
exercising their own political business, as at the same time they owed some allegiance
to the constitutional order of the HRE.
(Thompson, 'The "New Medievalism" and the International System', unpublished paper,
The Open University [1996)], p. 5.) My own view is that the HRE represented a high point
of the later medieval period rather than constituting a separate model, and that the HRE itself
was still characterised by frequent systemic turbulence and disorder.
55. Arthur. F. Bentley, The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures (Chicago, IL:
University of Chicago Press, 1908) and David A. Truman, The Governmental Process:
Political Interests and Public Opinion (New York: Knopf, 1951).

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Globalisation is creating a growing range of complex challenges to

THE CRISIS OF THE OLD SECURITY ORDER

An earlier version of this paper was presented to a Workshop on Globalisation: Critical

border wars are certainly nothing new. Alternative attempts to analyse

much a domestic political process as an international one. But they also

THE NEW SECURITY DILEMMA

configuration of domestic and transnational pressures stemming from

inside/outside distinction - providing a stable internal arena for collective

articulated around and through structurally differentiated states.15 States

The new security dilemma, then, is inextricably intertwined with

the requirements of global capital accumulation) into becoming a

of the expansion and development of social systems, is characterised not by

COMPLEX GLOBALISATION AND THE EVOLUTION OF GOVERNANCE

Even the structural predominance of nation-states and the international

economic and political structures beginning with the transition from

PROBLEMS OF STATE CAPACITY AND AUTONOMY UNDER COMPLEX

credible. Even as nation-building and democratisation processes are

outcomes of globalisation themselves.

of the competition state combine to transform nation-state structures and

continue to grow and certain kinds of state intervention to expand. Indeed,

THREE SCENARIOS OF COMPLEX GLOBALISATION

along with the continuing fragmentation of nation-state-based identities and

'sectoral hegemony' can be situated. Instead of a core state being

to extend extraterritorial jurisdiction, and so on); and seventh, the spread of

international criminal activities).35

THE NEOMEDIEVAL SCENARIO

no longer function effectively in this world of fragmented globalisation, and

THE PREDOMINANCE OF SUBOPTIMAL -MULTILAYERED AND

Nevertheless, in contrast to our modern notions of statehood or governance,

accompanied by locking in suboptimal equilibria (with the partial exception

around and on top of each other in patchwork fashion. The development of

CHARACTERISTICS OF A NEOMEDIEVAL WORLD I: MULTIPLE

focused on the modern transcendance of this aspect of the medieval world

of complex structures of obeisance and vassalage. The early (or pre-)

authority in feudal society therefore revolved around settling questions of

asymmetric institutional system. Wars were essentially what would now be

of nation-states, as in traditional international regimes, or in increasingly

CHARACTERISTICS OF NEOMEDIEVALISM II: THE LACK OF

analysis, stagnated because it experienced no fundamental external threat

consolidation at a transnational level. Indeed, the only analogous

merely 'nested' but often conflicting, with national, transnational and

globalisation processes.48 Will regions in the future reflect the macro-

CHARACTERISTICS OF A NEOMEDIEVAL WORLD III: THE UNEVEN

The poorer residents of such areas will find themselves increasingly

CHARACTERISTICS OF A NEOMEDIEVAL WORLD IV: FRAGMENTED

CHARACTERISTICS OF A NEOMEDIEVAL WORLD V: PROPERTY

Therefore it is still unclear what role property rights, especially

an intellectual property rights regime. The diffusion of scientific and .

CHARACTERISTICS OF A NEOMEDIEVAL WORLD VI: THE SPREAD OF

Finally, although there is little concrete than can be said in generalisable

At another level, however, it is likely that many traditionally mainstream

in many areas during the modern era. A transnationalised black economy

CONCLUSIONS: DURABLE DISORDER AND THE GOVERNANCE GAP

new transnational res publica.

capable of effectively pursuing genuinely collective values on a wider,

equilibrium eventually gets 'locked in' will depend on a kind of uneven -

State (London and Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1990), pp.4-9.

Sessions of Workshops, European Consortium for Political Research, Bern, Switzerland, 27