The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (11 page)

Despite this debate, the Westphalian paradigm continues to dominate international relations ideas. All major theories—realism and neorealism, liberalism and neoliberalism, constructivism, the English School, critical theory, and so on—still revolve around the primacy of the state. Yet states are no longer the sole authorities in international relations as once conceived under the Westphalian system. Nonstate actors are now also political actors on the world stage, making an international state-centric system impossible. At the same time, alternative and often older conceptions of political order along ethnic, cultural, tribal, and religious lines of identification are reemerging and even eclipsing identity based on nationality. Twentieth-century state-centric theories of international relations can no longer satisfactorily account for these changes, which may explain some of the theoretical incoherence and cognitive dissonance experienced in the post–Cold War era.

An alternative model is needed to comprehend the shifting world we inhabit, one that is not constrained by the state-centric bias we have inherited. As the world reverts to the status quo ante of the Middle Ages, when states did not dominate international politics, it is sensible to adjust with it and adopt a perspective that encompasses this reality. That perspective is termed
neomedievalism
.

There’s never a new fashion but it’s old.

—Geoffrey Chaucer

Life at the court of King Roger II of Sicily (1095–1154) might prove surprising to modern readers, who perhaps associate the Middle Ages with ignorance, violence, and suffering—the proverbial “Dark Ages.” Life in medieval Sicily was comparatively safe, urbane, and globalized. The architecture of the king’s Palazzo Reale in Palermo, like the society surrounding it, was infused with Norman, Arab, and Byzantine influences. Upon entering its doors, a time traveler would hear French, Latin, Greek, Arab, and Hebrew freely spoken on topics ranging from the international silk trade, to the latest news from the distant Levant of the Second Crusade, to the protection of minorities under Roger’s laws, which blended Christian Norman law, sharia, and Justinian Roman code. Courtiers swapping scuttlebutt at the portcullis might include Arab geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi, Greek historian Nilus Doxopatrius, and the archdeacon of Catania, who translated Plato’s
Meno
and the
Phaedo
, brought from Constantinople, into Latin.

The king himself, though a Norman, spoke fluent Arabic and was fond of Arabic culture. He employed Muslim scholars, poets, and scientists and used Arab troops and siege engines in his campaigns for southern Italy. His chief enemy was not a rival state but the pope, who hired mercenaries to raid Roger’s lands in southern Italy. However, Pope Innocent II was not the only nonstate actor with power in Roger’s world; he also had to contend with societies such as the Templar knights, semiautonomous cities such as Bari, and families with great reach such as the Bavarian houses of Welf and Babenberg.

This medieval world order, though perhaps more chaotic than our own, did not collapse into anarchy for want of a strong state-centric system. In fact, it was relatively stable, lasting for about a thousand years. Unlike the Westphalian order, medieval sovereignty was fragmented, as different political actors—church, emperor, king, princes, city-states, monasteries, and so on—made overlapping
claims of authority over people, places, and things. In the Middle Ages, rulers rarely retained absolute authority within a large territory.

This created divided loyalties. Under the Westphalian order, states demanded that people be patriots first and everything else second; in the Middle Ages, individuals had dueling loyalties to church, kingdom, region, family lineage, ethnic group, monastic order, knightly order, and so forth. For example, a person might self-identify as a Templar knight first, Catholic second, Auvergnese third, and Frenchman fourth. There was no state monopoly of identity and loyalty.

These overlapping authorities and allegiances within the medieval world created a durable disorder, in which a single authority can neither impose greater stability nor cause the system to collapse. A similar situation is developing today. A hundred years ago, “great power politics” in international relations meant interactions between states and states alone. Today states share the world stage with a multitude of nonstate actors: organizations such as the United Nations, nonprofit groups such as Amnesty International, companies such as ExxonMobil, and drug cartels and terrorist organizations. Many of these nonstate actors wield international clout on par with states, making a state-centric system impossible.

The world order may be slowly returning to the status quo ante of the Middle Ages. If so, it would best be described as
neomedievalism
: a non-state-centric, multipolar international system of overlapping authorities and allegiances within the same territory. Do we live in such a world already?

The idea of a “new” Middle Ages might make some instinctively recoil, as it connotes ignorance, stagnation, and barbarism on a continental scale. However, this is unfair; in reality, the medieval era was complex, rich, and vivacious. Part of this misconception stems from the Enlightenment’s branding it the
Dark Ages
in a propagandist’s ploy to distinguish its ideas from those of the past. Even the term
Middle Ages
is unfortunate, coined well after the age had passed. Certainly, its denizens would not think they were living in the “middle” and believed, as we all do, that they resided at the summit of history. Despite this abuse, the Middle Ages has fueled popular fantasy for centuries, from Arthurian legend to Wagnerian opera to the
Harry Potter
books.

The Middle Ages has also made an appearance in international relations thinking, starting after World War II to the present day. For some,
neomedievalism
means anarchy, as seen in the writings of Leo Gross, Francis Wormuth, Arnold Wolfers, Martin van Creveld, Robert Kaplan, and Alain Minc. These tend to be apocalyptic and ahistorical readings of the past that do not serve the present and would better be dubbed “neobarbarism” or the “New Dark Ages.” Yet for others,
the Middle Ages represents an alternative model to the Westphalian system, as demonstrated by Philip Cerny, Mark Duffield, Stephen Kobrin, Jörg Friedrichs, and others.
¹
This book expands on this school of thought.

Neomedievalism is important because it offers a conceptual lens for understanding the seemingly dissonant and chaotic world order emerging from the ashes of the Cold War that cannot be easily grasped past the conceptual blinders of state-centrism. Rather than rationalizing the paradox in conventional state-centric international relations theory, neomedievalism instead acknowledges the fundamental reorganization and redistribution of power in the system from state to nonstate actors. It embraces the fragmentation of sovereignty and seeks to reorient international relations ideas away from state-centrism and toward an unstructured system of overlapping authorities and allegiances to better comprehend world affairs.

Neomedievalism is a metaphor loosely based on the world order of the European high Middle Ages, but it does not portend a literal return to the medieval period. Nor does it imply Eurocentrism, since the central features of this neomedievalism can easily be found in historical Asia, India, Africa, and elsewhere. The European Middle Ages is merely an illustrative example of this kind of world order, and the label
neomedievalism
does not connote European exceptionalism. If anything, neomedievalism is non-Eurocentric, since it moves away from the primacy of the state, arguably a European invention exported through colonialism. Neomedievalism does not insinuate worldwide atavism. States will not disappear, but they will matter less than they did a century ago. Nor does neomedievalism suggest chaos and anarchy; the global system will persist in a durable disorder that contains, rather than solves, problems.

One of the greatest interpreters of neomedievalism was Hedley Bull, a seminal scholar of the so-called English School of international relations. Born in 1932, he was a professor at the Australian National University, the London School of Economics, and Oxford University, until his death from cancer in 1985. He addresses neomedievalism in his main work,
The Anarchical Society
, which explores alternative models to the Westphalian system, including what he calls “new medievalism.” For this, he imagines a future where “sovereign states might disappear,” replaced by “a system of overlapping authority and multiple loyalty.”
²

A neomedieval system would seem to invite instability and even anarchy, but it is balanced and centered, according to Bull, by the dueling universal claims of empire and church, or their equivalents today. In such a world order, no single ruler or state is sovereign in the sense of being supreme over a given territory and
its contained population, akin to the modern state. Instead, several authorities—Holy Roman Emperor, pope, prince, city-state, monastic order, guild, and so forth—shared or competed for authority over vassals and resources in a single geographical area. According to Bull, a neomedieval world order could be said to exist “if modern states were to come to share their authority over their citizens, and their ability to command their loyalties, on the one hand with regional and world authorities, and on the other hand with sub-state or sub-national authorities, to such an extent that the concept of sovereignty ceased to be applicable, then a neo-mediaeval form of universal political order might be said to exist.”
³
Such a world order characterized by the multiplicity of authorities and allegiances “represents an alternative to the system of states.”

Bull looked for evidence of neomedievalism in his day. He proposed five criteria to test for its existence: the technological unification of the world, the regional integration of states, the rise of transnational organizations, the disintegration of states, and the restoration of private international violence. After consideration, he concluded that some elements of neomedievalism existed and that a secular “neomedieval order” might be possible, but overall, he dismissed the idea as lacking sufficient “utility and viability” to displace the state system.

It is not surprising that Bull found little evidence for neomedievalism, since he was writing in the mid-1970s at the height of the Cold War, when global politics was dominated by two superpowerful states and the Westphalian order was at its peak. However, now that the Cold War has ended, it is time to reconsider Bull’s initial investigation into neomedievalism and assess whether it is slowly replacing the Westphalian order. Already, strong evidence exists that private international violence is making a comeback in international relations. Bull’s other four features of neomedievalism warrant examination.

For thirteenth-century Venetians, the world was “flat” in that it was globally connected across boundaries and borders, both natural and artificial. The geography of their imagination saw a planet of endlessly changing trade routes, networks, and opportunities that extended over land and sea. Venetian merchants such as Marco Polo traveled through the known world and beyond by ship or caravan in search of new markets and merchandise ranging from spices and gems to salt and slaves. The world also came to Venice, as it was a hub of international trade and a clearinghouse of goods from Africa, the Middle East, and Western Europe. Such cosmopolitan bustle moved Shakespeare to exclaim through Antonio in
The Merchant of Venice
that “the trade and profit of the city/Consisteth of all nations.”
⁴

Venetian trade was synonymous with globalization as the city’s traders forged partnerships and complex networks with distant lands that cut across ethnic and religious divisions. Arabs, Jews, Turks, Greeks, and Mongols became trading partners even when they seemed to be political enemies. Cultures, customs, and languages intermingled in ways that endure to this day. For example, the English word
arsenal
comes from the Italian
arzenale
, which can mean a place to store weapons or a dockyard and was the term Venetians used to describe a large wharf in their city renowned as a center of shipbuilding.
Arzenale
, in turn, is derived from the Arabic
dar as-sina’ah
, which literally means “house of manufacture” or “workshop.”

Eight hundred years later, the world is “flat” once more, leveled not by ship and caravan but by jet plane and telecommunication. The contemporary technological unification of the world and subsequent globalization are among the most widely studied phenomena of the post–Cold War era. The ability for information to transcend territorial boundaries has diminished the relevance of national borders and the states that control them in ways unimaginable to Bull’s generation.

Globalization is driving neomedievalism in several ways. Modern technology and the decrease of state-planned economies have created a single world marketplace linking the fortunes of states and nonstates alike. Overall, this has been good for the world’s financial health. According to the World Bank, the gross domestic product (GDP) of the world multiplied by an incredible factor of forty-five over the past four decades, from $1.35 trillion in 1960 to $61.10 trillion in 2008. From 2000 to 2008 alone, world GDP nearly doubled.
⁵
But when there is an economic crisis in one country, it can affect the world, as seen with the financial collapse of Thailand’s currency, which induced the East Asian recession of 1997 or the US subprime mortgage crisis in 2007, which led to a worldwide recession. Nearly everywhere, jobs, production, savings, and investments are connected.

Globalization extends beyond markets and into society itself in what communications theorist Marshall McLuhan labeled the “global village.”
⁶
Modern communications technology is uniting the world and making national borders less relevant and, consequently, states less powerful. For example, the Arab Spring demonstrates that civil dissent in one country can leap to the next in a matter of days, spurred in part by communications technologies. The Internet gives groups such as al-Qaida the ability to recruit terrorists from within the United States, as exemplified by the Washington “DC Five” youth, who traveled to Pakistan to attend a terrorist training camp, or Faisal Shahzad, who attempted to blow up New York City’s Times Square. In an era of globalization, states are increasingly challenged to control their borders, eroding the Westphalian distinction between domestic and foreign spheres and producing a world of overlapping authorities and allegiances.

In the late fourteenth century, Europe had a problem: it had two popes. In 1378, a papal schism over politics rather than theology split the Catholic Church as two men simultaneously claimed to be the true pope, one seated in Rome and the other in Avignon, plunging Europe into strife as kings, princes, priests, abbots, and individuals were forced to choose sides in what became known as the Great Schism. After several decades, a false start at reconciliation at Pisa, and a three-pope schism, resolution was finally achieved at the Council of Constance from 1414 to 1418, which restored the single papacy to Rome in addition to deciding other important church matters.