A ‘New Medievalism’?

Abstract

Putting forward a metaphor that offers to help us grasp the totality of international political life increasingly engenders debate. For decades the essential quality of world order seemed to rest upon a structure of anarchy that had been formalized in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 at the conclusion of the Thirty Years’ War, which had such a draining, and apparently traumatizing, effect on the European powers of the day. Continuing to rely upon ‘Westphalia’ or ‘the state system’ seems less and less satisfactory. It over-stresses the Western heritage of the territorial sovereign state and the modern era of demarcated borders. At the same time it neglects the welter of transnational, supranational and intranational actors and their interdependent activities, as well as the resulting diffusion of authority and the relevance of non-Western international experience. Yet finding a substitute for Westphalia is no simple matter. Contemporary patterns of adherence to divergent world pictures complicate the quest, perhaps making it futile to seek a consensus metaphor at this stage.