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The Meaning of New Medievalism

This article is an exercise in theoretical reconstruction. As a point of departure, the apparent contradictions between globalization, fragmentation and sovereign statehood are analysed. Neither conventional International Relations theory nor the discourse about globalization seem able to account for these contradictions. As a conceptual alternative, the notion of `new medievalism' is introduced. For the present purpose, medievalism is defined as a system of overlapping authority and multiple loyalty, held together by a duality of competing universalistic claims. Thus, the Middle Ages were characterized by a highly fragmented and decentralized network of sociopolitical relationships, held together by the competing universalistic claims of the Empire and the Church. In an analogous way, the post-international world is characterized by a complicated web of societal identities, held together by the antagonistic organizational claims of the nation-state system and the transnational market economy. New medievalism provides a conceptual synthesis which hopefully transcends some of the current deadlocks of IR theory and, at the same time, goes beyond the fundamental limitations of the globalization discourse.