The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order by Sean McFate Page A

translated Plato’s
Meno
and the
Phaedo
, brought from Constantinople, into Latin.
    The king himself, though a Norman, spoke fluent Arabic and was fond of Arabic culture. He employed Muslim scholars, poets, and scientists and used Arab troops and siege engines in his campaigns for southern Italy. His chief enemy was not a rival state but the pope, who hired mercenaries to raid Roger’s lands in southern Italy. However, Pope Innocent II was not the only nonstate actor with power in Roger’s world; he also had to contend with societies such as the Templar knights, semiautonomous cities such as Bari, and families with great reach such as the Bavarian houses of Welf and Babenberg.
    This medieval world order, though perhaps more chaotic than our own, did not collapse into anarchy for want of a strong state-centric system. In fact, it was relatively stable, lasting for about a thousand years. Unlike the Westphalian order, medieval sovereignty was fragmented, as different political actors—church, emperor, king, princes, city-states, monasteries, and so on—made overlappingclaims of authority over people, places, and things. In the Middle Ages, rulers rarely retained absolute authority within a large territory.
    This created divided loyalties. Under the Westphalian order, states demanded that people be patriots first and everything else second; in the Middle Ages, individuals had dueling loyalties to church, kingdom, region, family lineage, ethnic group, monastic order, knightly order, and so forth. For example, a person might self-identify as a Templar knight first, Catholic second, Auvergnese third, and Frenchman fourth. There was no state monopoly of identity and loyalty.
    These overlapping authorities and allegiances within the medieval world created a durable disorder, in which a single authority can neither impose greater stability nor cause the system to collapse. A similar situation is developing today. A hundred years ago, “great power politics” in international relations meant interactions between states and states alone. Today states share the world stage with a multitude of nonstate actors: organizations such as the United Nations, nonprofit groups such as Amnesty International, companies such as ExxonMobil, and drug cartels and terrorist organizations. Many of these nonstate actors wield international clout on par with states, making a state-centric system impossible.
    The world order may be slowly returning to the status quo ante of the Middle Ages. If so, it would best be described as
neomedievalism
: a non-state-centric, multipolar international system of overlapping authorities and allegiances within the same territory. Do we live in such a world already?
The Neomedieval Imagination
    The idea of a “new” Middle Ages might make some instinctively recoil, as it connotes ignorance, stagnation, and barbarism on a continental scale. However, this is unfair; in reality, the medieval era was complex, rich, and vivacious. Part of this misconception stems from the Enlightenment’s branding it the
Dark Ages
in a propagandist’s ploy to distinguish its ideas from those of the past. Even the term
Middle Ages
is unfortunate, coined well after the age had passed. Certainly, its denizens would not think they were living in the “middle” and believed, as we all do, that they resided at the summit of history. Despite this abuse, the Middle Ages has fueled popular fantasy for centuries, from Arthurian legend to Wagnerian opera to the
Harry Potter
books.
    The Middle Ages has also made an appearance in international relations thinking, starting after World War II to the present day. For some,
neomedievalism
means anarchy, as seen in the writings of Leo Gross, Francis Wormuth, Arnold Wolfers, Martin van Creveld, Robert Kaplan, and Alain Minc. These tend to be apocalyptic and ahistorical readings of the past that do not serve the present and would better be dubbed “neobarbarism” or the “New Dark Ages.” Yet for