"The future structure and exercise of political power will resemble the medieval model more than the Westphalian one. The latter is about concentration of power, sovereignty and clear-cut identity. Neo-medievalism, on the other hand, means overlapping authorities, divided sovereignty, multiple identities and governing institutions, and fuzzy borders."
- Professor Jan Zielonka of the University of Oxford
Discuss.
I have long harboured (or at least seriously entertained) the wild notion that nation-states are a barrier in the way of both devolution in favour of local, municipal, direct democracy or self-determination of communities and transnational institutions tailored to solve pressing global issues that no single government can adequately address. As such, I am neither a 'globalist' nor a 'nationalist' but a global-localist or local-gloablist.
With climate change, this crisis is becoming more acute.
As I see it, we have roughly two fundamental choices before us as a species: (1) progress towards some dual global-local order of some kind or (2) stick with nation-states and face ultimate collapse.
I am partial to Murray Bookchin's communalism, otherwise known as libertarian-socialist municipalism; although, while I admire its advocacy of local and direct democracy (we need more of that today than ever we did), I also think we are sorely in need of supranational institutions like the EU, in a globalized world where finance and international business knows no borders. (i.e. huge, faceless and unaccountable corporations like Facebook and Google see no borders and lack representative, popular institutions; yet they store reams of private information concerning us and are increasingly invasive of our privacy, as well as disregarding domestic legislation by simply relocating offices to more propitious overseas regulatory environments).
It is my personal belief that the “nation-state” will find - and already is finding - itself weakened by the centrifugal forces of, on the one hand, globalization chipping away at it from ‘above’ and on the other hand, a renewed “localism” and “regionalism” chipping away at it from ‘below’. Think of it like a kind of pincer-movement with localists prodding the soft underbelly of the beast while globalists take it by the horns. Nationalist-populists will continue to rail against these overarching currents (tooth, claw and nail) and rally masses of 'left-behind' people to their cause but I fear that they are romantic fantasists with their heads in the sand, pissing into the wind and trying to hold back the inevitable.
They will lose, in the end (but the 'fight' to the finish line will be increasingly nasty and divisive, I fear, and we're only at the beginning of it at the moment with Trump, Brexit, the National Front in France etc.).
And from where I'm standing, that's a good thing.
That's why scholars bring up the "neo-medieval" paradigm as an interpretative tool.
During much of the Medieval period there were not “nation states”, for the most part, in Europe.
Quite simply, the future post-Westphalian and post-national order - which one can see already developing in a germinal state - is more “medieval,” or rather “neo-medieval”, in character; in the sense that while the “national” sphere of authority will continue to exist, it will no longer be the sole or chief locus and plenipoteniary of power.
What say you?
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