Back to the Future: Neomedievalism and the Postmodern Digital World Economy

Abstract

We are entering a period of turbulent, systemic change in organization of world economic and political order--a period comparable to transition from feudal to modern era in 16th and 17th centuries. As Hobsbawm observes, late 20th century world economy appears temporally confused, involving a curious combination of technology of late twentieth century, free trade of 19th and rebirth of sort of interstitial centres characteristic of world trade in Middle Ages.(1) I have argued elsewhere that globalization represents a systemic transformation of world economy that will result in new structures and new modes of functioning.(2) Globalization entails two interrelated, technologically driven phenomena. First, dramatic increases in cost, risk and complexity of technology in many industries render even largest national markets too small to serve as meaningful economic units. Second, and more important here, emerging global world economy is electronic, integrated through information systems and technology rather than organizational hierarchies. We are in midst of what Cerney and others have called third industrial revolution, characterized by intensive application of information and communications technology, flexible production systems and organizational structures, market segmentation and globalization.(3) The digital revolution has dematerialized manufacturing and commerce; all firms, regardless of sector, have become information processors.(4) One result of information revolution is deintegration of large, vertically integrated Fordist firms which organize a significant portion of international economic transactions within their administrative hierarchies.(5) In their place, a complex system of networks and alliances is emerging in which information technology facilitates integration and coordination of geographically dispersed operations. An international system of production is being replaced by a complex web of interlaced global electronic networks.(6) The scale and complexity of technology and emergence of electronically integrated global networks render geographic borders and, more fundamentally, basic construct of territorial sovereignty problematic. A critical issue raised by globalization is lack of meaning of geographically rooted jurisdiction when markets are constructed in electronic space. There is a basic disconnect between geographic space and cyberspace. THE NEOMEDIEVAL ANALOGY The Peace of Westphalia (1648) is taken conventionally as marking end of medieval universalism and origin of modern state system. The medieval to modern transition entailed territorialization of politics, replacement of overlapping, vertical hierarchies by horizontal, geographically defined sovereign states.(7) The modern state system is organized in terms of territorial sovereignty: division of globe's surface into fixed, mutually exclusive, geographically defined jurisdictions enclosed by discrete and meaningful borders.(8) Nation states and national markets are defined spatially. Geographic jurisdiction implies that each state's laws, rules and regulations apply within its territory--within space encompassed by its borders.(9) As Carr noted many years ago, it is difficult for contemporaries to even imagine a world in which political power is organized on a basis other than territory.(10) Geographically rooted, sovereign nation states and international state system, however, are relatively recent creations which comprise but one of a number of historical modes of organizing political activity.(11) Furthermore, current state system may well be unique, a product of a very specific historical context. Agnew reminds us that the spatial scope of political organization has not been set for all time in a particular mode. …

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