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Neo-Medievalism and the New World Order - Geopoliticus > .23-9-1 Rise of economic nationalism | Business Beyond - DW > .
Sociopolitical Conflict
Globalization ⇔ Decoupling ..
The theory of Neomedievalism proposes that the international system is rapidly transforming into a world order similar to that which existed in Medieval Europe, with overlapping structures of authority and multiple loyalties of international actors, which is gradually eroding the power and agency of nation states.
There are two imagined futures in a Neomedieval worldview: one, of a coming anarchy, an era of systemic breakdown and perpetual wars; the second of a New Universalism in which new transnational regimes, which are secular version of the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire, will be constructed to bring order to the world.
Neo-medievalism (or neomedievalism, new medievalism) is a term with a long history that has acquired specific technical senses in two branches of scholarship. In political theory about modern international relations, where the term is originally associated with Hedley Bull, it sees the political order of a globalized world as analogous to high-medieval Europe, where neither states nor the Church, nor other territorial powers, exercised full sovereignty, but instead participated in complex, overlapping and incomplete sovereignties.
The concept comes from the Japanese word dochakuka, which means global localization. It had referred to the adaptation of farming techniques to local conditions. It became a buzzword when Japanese business adopted it in the 1980s. The word stems from Manfred Lange, head of the German National Global Change Secretariat, who used "glocal" in reference to Heiner Benking's exhibit Blackbox Nature: Rubik's Cube of Ecology at an international science and policy conference.
"Glocalization" first appeared in a late 1980s publication of the Harvard Business Review. At a 1997 conference on "Globalization and Indigenous Culture", sociologist Roland Robertson stated that glocalization "means the simultaneity – the co-presence – of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies."
"Glocalization" entered use in the English-speaking world via Robertson in the 1990s, Canadian sociologists Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman in the late 1990s and Zygmunt Bauman. Erik Swyngedouw was another early adopter.
Although the Westphalian system developed in early modern Europe, its staunchest defenders [users] can now be found in the non-Western world. The presidents of China and Russia issued a joint statement in 2001 vowing to "counter attempts to undermine the fundamental norms of the international law with the help of concepts such as 'humanitarian intervention' and 'limited sovereignty'". China and Russia have used their United Nations Security Council veto power to block what they see as [claim is] American violations of state sovereignty in Syria. Russia was left out of the original Westphalian system in 1648, but post-Soviet Russia has seen Westphalian sovereignty as a means to balance [oppose] American power by encouraging a multipolar world order [A pseudo-principle diametrically opposed to the military Sovietization of nations occupied and forcefully subsumed into the USSR.].
Some in the West also speak favorably of the Westphalian state. American political scientist Stephen Walt urged U.S. UNpresident Wanna-Be-Autocrat to return to Westphalian principles, calling it a "sensible course" for American foreign policy. American political commentator Pat Buchanan has also spoken in favor of the traditional nation-state.
New World Order - End of Liberal International System? - https://youtu.be/90rjypFSLVg .
Spheres of Influence in the Cold War - https://youtu.be/tGKnwFNWmQ8 .
Podcast: Theatres of the New Cold War - https://youtu.be/cve8XyTxjiI .
Podcast: Outer Space and Fourth Dimension of Geopolitics - https://youtu.be/Ri3ag1wRIZA .
Americanization .
Cultural homogenization .
There are two imagined futures in a Neomedieval worldview: one, of a coming anarchy, an era of systemic breakdown and perpetual wars; the second of a New Universalism in which new transnational regimes, which are secular version of the Catholic Church and the Holy Roman Empire, will be constructed to bring order to the world.
Neo-medievalism (or neomedievalism, new medievalism) is a term with a long history that has acquired specific technical senses in two branches of scholarship. In political theory about modern international relations, where the term is originally associated with Hedley Bull, it sees the political order of a globalized world as analogous to high-medieval Europe, where neither states nor the Church, nor other territorial powers, exercised full sovereignty, but instead participated in complex, overlapping and incomplete sovereignties.
The idea of neomedievalism in political theory was first discussed in 1977 by theorist Hedley Bull in The Anarchical Society: A Study of Order in World Politics to describe the erosion of state sovereignty in the contemporary globalized world:
In this reading, globalization has resulted in an international system which resembles the medieval one, where political authority was exercised by a range of non-territorial and overlapping agents, such as religious bodies, principalities, empires and city-states, instead of by a single political authority in the form of a state which has complete sovereignty over its territory. Comparable processes characterising Bull's "new medievalism" include the increasing powers held by regional organisations such as the European Union, as well as the spread of sub-national and devolved governments, such as those of Scotland and Catalonia. These challenge the exclusive authority of the state. Private military companies, multinational corporations and the resurgence of worldwide religious movements (e.g. political Islam) similarly indicate a reduction in the role of the state and a decentralisation of power and authority.
It is also conceivable that sovereign states might disappear and be replaced not by a world government but by a modern and secular equivalent of the kind of universal political organisation that existed in Western Christendom in the Middle Ages. In that system no ruler or state was sovereign in the sense of being supreme over a given territory and a given segment of the Christian population; each had to share authority with vassals beneath, and with the Pope and (in Germany and Italy) the Holy Roman Emperor above. The universal political order of Western Christendom represents an alternative to the system of states which does not yet embody universal government.Thus Bull suggested society might move towards "a new mediaevalism" or a "neo-mediaeval form of universal political order", in which individual notions of rights and a growing sense of a "world common good" were undermining national sovereignty. He proposed that such a system might help "avoid the classic dangers of the system of sovereign states by a structure of overlapping structures and cross-cutting loyalties that hold all peoples together in a universal society while at the same time avoiding the concentration inherent in a world government", though "if it were anything like the precedent of Western Christendom, it would contain more ubiquitous and continuous violence and insecurity than does the modern states system".
In this reading, globalization has resulted in an international system which resembles the medieval one, where political authority was exercised by a range of non-territorial and overlapping agents, such as religious bodies, principalities, empires and city-states, instead of by a single political authority in the form of a state which has complete sovereignty over its territory. Comparable processes characterising Bull's "new medievalism" include the increasing powers held by regional organisations such as the European Union, as well as the spread of sub-national and devolved governments, such as those of Scotland and Catalonia. These challenge the exclusive authority of the state. Private military companies, multinational corporations and the resurgence of worldwide religious movements (e.g. political Islam) similarly indicate a reduction in the role of the state and a decentralisation of power and authority.
Westphalian sovereignty, or state sovereignty, is a principle in international law that each state has exclusive sovereignty over its territory. The principle underlies the modern international system of sovereign states and is enshrined in the United Nations Charter, which states that "nothing ... shall authorize the United Nations to intervene in matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state." According to the idea, every state, no matter how large or small, has an equal right to sovereignty. Political scientists have traced the concept to the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years' War. The principle of non-interference was further developed in the 18th century. The Westphalian system reached its peak in the 19th and 20th centuries, but it has faced recent challenges from advocates of humanitarian intervention.
Stephen J. Kobrin in 1998 added the forces of the digital world economy to the picture of neomedievalism. In an article entitled "Back to the Future: Neomedievalism and the Postmodern Digital World Economy" in the Journal of International Affairs, he argued that the sovereign state as we know it – defined within certain territorial borders – is about to change profoundly, if not to wither away, due in part to the digital world economy created by the Internet, suggesting that cyberspace is a trans-territorial domain operating outside of the jurisdiction of national law.
Anthony Clark Arend also argued in his 1999 book Legal Rules and International Society that the international system is moving toward a "neo-medieval" system. He claimed that the trends that Bull noted in 1977 had become even more pronounced by the end of the twentieth century. Arend argues that the emergence of a "neo-medieval" system would have profound implications for the creation and operation of international law.
Although Bull originally envisioned neomedievalism as a positive trend, it has its critics. Bruce Holsinger in Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror argues that neoconservatives "have exploited neomedievalism's conceptual slipperiness for their own tactical ends." Similarly, Philip G. Cerny's "Neomedievalism, Civil War and the New Security Dilemma" (1998) also sees neomedievalism as a negative development and claims that the forces of globalization increasingly undermine nation-states and interstate forms of governance "by cross-cutting linkages among different economic sectors and social bonds," calling globalization a "durable disorder" which eventually leads to the emergence of the new security dilemmas that had analogies in the Middle Ages. Cerny identifies six characteristics of a neomedieval world that contribute to this disorder: multiple competing institutions; lack of exogenous territorializing pressures both on sub-national and international levels; uneven consolidation of new spaces, cleavages, conflicts and inequalities; fragmented loyalties and identities; extensive entrenchment of property rights; and spread of the "grey zones" outside the law as well as black economy.
Glocalization (a portmanteau of globalization and localization) is the "simultaneous occurrence of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies in contemporary social, political, and economic systems." The notion of glocalization "represents a challenge to simplistic conceptions of globalization processes as linear expansions of territorial scales. Glocalization indicates that the growing importance of continental and global levels is occurring together with the increasing salience of local and regional levels."
Glocal, an adjective, by definition, is "reflecting or characterized by both local and global considerations." The term “glocal management” in a sense of “think globally, act locally” is used in the business strategies of companies, in particular, by Japanese companies that are expanding overseas.
Stephen J. Kobrin in 1998 added the forces of the digital world economy to the picture of neomedievalism. In an article entitled "Back to the Future: Neomedievalism and the Postmodern Digital World Economy" in the Journal of International Affairs, he argued that the sovereign state as we know it – defined within certain territorial borders – is about to change profoundly, if not to wither away, due in part to the digital world economy created by the Internet, suggesting that cyberspace is a trans-territorial domain operating outside of the jurisdiction of national law.
Anthony Clark Arend also argued in his 1999 book Legal Rules and International Society that the international system is moving toward a "neo-medieval" system. He claimed that the trends that Bull noted in 1977 had become even more pronounced by the end of the twentieth century. Arend argues that the emergence of a "neo-medieval" system would have profound implications for the creation and operation of international law.
Although Bull originally envisioned neomedievalism as a positive trend, it has its critics. Bruce Holsinger in Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror argues that neoconservatives "have exploited neomedievalism's conceptual slipperiness for their own tactical ends." Similarly, Philip G. Cerny's "Neomedievalism, Civil War and the New Security Dilemma" (1998) also sees neomedievalism as a negative development and claims that the forces of globalization increasingly undermine nation-states and interstate forms of governance "by cross-cutting linkages among different economic sectors and social bonds," calling globalization a "durable disorder" which eventually leads to the emergence of the new security dilemmas that had analogies in the Middle Ages. Cerny identifies six characteristics of a neomedieval world that contribute to this disorder: multiple competing institutions; lack of exogenous territorializing pressures both on sub-national and international levels; uneven consolidation of new spaces, cleavages, conflicts and inequalities; fragmented loyalties and identities; extensive entrenchment of property rights; and spread of the "grey zones" outside the law as well as black economy.
Glocalization (a portmanteau of globalization and localization) is the "simultaneous occurrence of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies in contemporary social, political, and economic systems." The notion of glocalization "represents a challenge to simplistic conceptions of globalization processes as linear expansions of territorial scales. Glocalization indicates that the growing importance of continental and global levels is occurring together with the increasing salience of local and regional levels."
Glocal, an adjective, by definition, is "reflecting or characterized by both local and global considerations." The term “glocal management” in a sense of “think globally, act locally” is used in the business strategies of companies, in particular, by Japanese companies that are expanding overseas.
"Glocalization" first appeared in a late 1980s publication of the Harvard Business Review. At a 1997 conference on "Globalization and Indigenous Culture", sociologist Roland Robertson stated that glocalization "means the simultaneity – the co-presence – of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies."
"Glocalization" entered use in the English-speaking world via Robertson in the 1990s, Canadian sociologists Keith Hampton and Barry Wellman in the late 1990s and Zygmunt Bauman. Erik Swyngedouw was another early adopter.
In literary theory regarding the use and abuse of texts and tropes from the Middle Ages in postmodernity, the term "neomedieval" was popularized by the Italian medievalist Umberto Eco in his 1986 essay "Dreaming of the Middle Ages".
Since the 1990s, "glocalization" has been productively theorized by several sociologists and other social scientists, and may be understood as a process that combines the concerns of localism with the forces of globalization, or a local adaptation and interpretation of global forces. As a theoretical framework, it is compatible with many of the concerns of postcolonial theory, and its impact is particularly recognizable in the digitization of music and other forms of cultural heritage. The concept has since been used in the fields of geography, sociology, and anthropology. It is also a prominent concept in business studies, particularly in the area of marketing goods and services to a heterogenous set of consumers.
Since the 1990s, "glocalization" has been productively theorized by several sociologists and other social scientists, and may be understood as a process that combines the concerns of localism with the forces of globalization, or a local adaptation and interpretation of global forces. As a theoretical framework, it is compatible with many of the concerns of postcolonial theory, and its impact is particularly recognizable in the digitization of music and other forms of cultural heritage. The concept has since been used in the fields of geography, sociology, and anthropology. It is also a prominent concept in business studies, particularly in the area of marketing goods and services to a heterogenous set of consumers.
Some in the West also speak favorably of the Westphalian state. American political scientist Stephen Walt urged U.S. UNpresident Wanna-Be-Autocrat to return to Westphalian principles, calling it a "sensible course" for American foreign policy. American political commentator Pat Buchanan has also spoken in favor of the traditional nation-state.
Addendum to the video presentation -- emergence of Cyberspace as a realm where we might already be seeing Neomedieval structures of power developing and influencing the trajectory of global politics.
New World Order - End of Liberal International System? - https://youtu.be/90rjypFSLVg .
Spheres of Influence in the Cold War - https://youtu.be/tGKnwFNWmQ8 .
Podcast: Theatres of the New Cold War - https://youtu.be/cve8XyTxjiI .
Podcast: Outer Space and Fourth Dimension of Geopolitics - https://youtu.be/Ri3ag1wRIZA .
Cultural homogenization .
Japan's Economy
24-5-13 Japan's Lost Decade - An Economic Disaster [Doc] - Cold Fusion > .
