John Rapley
IN RECENT years, some political theorists have begun speaking of a new medievalism. In the Middle Ages, power in Europe was decentralised. There was no concept of sovereignty as we know it today, in which governments claim ultimate authority over the lives of their citizens and the lands they occupy. In medieval Europe, by contrast, authority was divided among monarchs, noblemen and the Church, each retaining specific jurisdictions. Often they overlapped, and frequently nobles competed with one another, and with kings, for power. If the king was meant to be the highest ruler of the land, he nonetheless depended on a measure of consent from his nobility.
That changed in the modern period, beginning around the seventeenth century. The early development of capitalism brought money flowing into the treasuries of kings, who enjoyed rights to tax trade. They translated their growing economic power into political weight. Monarchs secured the borders and created bureaucracies to enhance revenue-collection. They then built up large standing armies and navies to police the sea lanes and seize the lands that would bring them the riches of the growing overseas trade.
The nobility declined, seldom able to compete with the new class of merchants and industrialists. The latter used their wealth to worm their way into the emergent states, which increasingly claimed sovereignty for themselves. Henceforth, all other institutions and organisations in society would defer to the power of the central government, which ate away at the powers of noblemen and bishops.
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
This transformation reached its zenith in the nineteenth century, at the time of the Industrial Revolution. Then, the emergence of 'nationalist' movements, allied to governments, demanded that people direct their ultimate loyalty to the government. The invention of national anthems, flags and patriotic myths; the enshrinement of national heroes; and the standardisation and codification of national languages; all cemented the loyalties of peoples to their governments.
By the twentieth century, the idea of the sovereign nation-state was so well-entrenched that when independence movements in the Third World struggled for decolonisation, they seldom questioned that the nation-state was the form to which they should aspire.
PATRONAGE NETWORKS
And so, with the end of the age of empires, the age of the nation-state reached its high-water mark. All over the world, nation-states secured the loyalty of their citizens by creating vast patronage networks that won them adherents. In rich and poor countries alike, education, health care and security were provided for all. Roads were built and policed, electricity and water delivered. Loyalty to the nation-state, which claimed the sole right to control the movements of its citizens hence the importance of passports to nation-building projects seemed beyond question. The state was real and immediate in the lives of its citizens.
In the last generation, though, some scholars have begun to detect changes in this arrangement. In the age of free markets and globalisation, governments have had to cut their expenditure to retain their international creditworthiness. As they have reduced their patronage, new agents have sometimes stepped into the breach to deliver the goods. Especially in Third World cities, new groups, from drug gangs to Islamist networks, have taken over many of the functions from security to school fees abandoned by imploding states.
Changes in communication technologies have also enabled new forms of corporate networking. This, in turn, has reduced the control of governments over the economic activities in their countries. Transnational crime, which is fast becoming one of the world's biggest industries, operates through global networks that easily evade national governments.
Meanwhile, economic integration has required governments to cede many powers to transnational bodies, like the EU or NAFTA. Thus, as governments lose power to rivals below, they also lose it to institutions above. And so, some say, we are going back to the future. The 'king' is losing his power. New barons are asserting theirs. The central government cannot control its cities without the cooperation of its barons. And people shift their loyalty to these new lords, turning their backs on the agents of the state, like the police.
The new Middle Ages? For some, it would be an era of real democracy as local communities take control over themselves. For others, though, it might herald a return to an era of violence and instability.
John Rapley is a senior lecturer in the Department of Government, UWI, Mona.
