The Medieval Contribution to Modern International Relations

Medieval Foundations of International Relations; edited by William BainFormat: Royal (156 × 234mm); Style: A; Font: Times New Roman;Dir: P:/Frontlist Production Teams/eProduction/Live Projects/9781138795792/dtp/9781138795792_text.3d;Created: 03/05/2016 @ 14:08:18

Medieval Foundations of InternationalRelations

This edited volume explores the medieval inheritance of modern internationalrelations. Most international political thought focuses on the early modernand modern periods, leaving continuities with medieval experience largelyignored. Evidence of continuity is obscured when the word ‘medieval’amounts to little more than a synonym for backwardness or cruelty. To bemedieval is to be ignorant and regressive, the remedy of which is modernenlightenment and progress. This volume corrects this common misconcep-tion by showing that modern international thought is deeply entangled inmedieval ways of thinking.

Questions addressed include:

! What is the medieval influence on modern conceptions of sovereignty,law, and rights?

! How is the ‘medieval’ important for thinking through aspects of moderninternational relations?

! Is international relations a reflection of a modern Middle Ages?! To what extent is modern international relations genuinely secular?! Does medieval experience provide suitable models for the organisation of

modern international political life?

Medieval and modern are certainly different in crucial ways; however, thisvolume proceeds from the conviction that cardinal institutions and practicesof modern international relations are bound up in a medieval inheritance thathas been put to new uses. It is an inheritance that has been adapted to thechanged circumstances of the modern world. This volume will be of greatinterest to students of International Relations, international political theory,and the history of political thought.

William Bain is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science,National University of Singapore. His research engages questions of interna-tional political theory and International Relations theory, with a specific focuson the theological foundations of international relations.



Medieval Foundations ofInternational Relations

Edited byWilliam Bain


First published 2017by Routledge2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

© 2017 selection and editorial material, William Bain; individual chapters,the contributors

The right of William Bain to be identified as author of the editorialmaterial, and of the individual authors as authors of their contributions, hasbeen asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of theCopyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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ISBN: 978-1-138-79579-2 (hbk)ISBN: 978-1-315-75821-3 (ebk)

Typeset in Times New Romanby Taylor & Francis Books


For R. W. Dyson



Contents

List of contributors 000Acknowledgement 000

1 The medieval contribution to modern international relations 000WILLIAM BAIN

2 The medieval and the international: A strange case ofmutual neglect 000NICHOLAS RENGGER

3 Metaphysics and the problem of international order 000C. J. C. PICKSTOCK

4 Secularism in question: Hugo Grotius’s ‘impioushypothesis’ again 000FRANCIS OAKLEY

5 Between false-universalism and radical-particularism: Thoughtson Thomas Hobbes and international relations 000JOSHUA MITCHELL

6 The medieval Roman and canon law origins ofinternational law 000JOSEPH CANNING

7 Then and now: The medieval conception of just war versus recentportrayals of the just war idea 000JAMES TURNER JOHNSON

8 Humanitarian intervention in a world of sovereign states: TheGrotian dilemma 000JAMES MULDOON


9 The medieval and early modern legacy of rights: The rights topunish and to property 000CAMILLA BOISEN AND DAVID BOUCHER

10 International relations and the ‘modern’ Middle Ages: Rivaltheological theorisations of international order 000ADRIAN PABST

viii Contents


Contributors

William Bain is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science,National University of Singapore. He has published widely in the areas ofinternational political theory, international relations theory, and the historyof political thought. He is the author of Between Anarchy and Society:Trusteeship and the Obligations of Power (2003) and editor of and con-tributor to The Empire of Security and the Safety of the People (2006). Heis currently working on a research monograph, Political Theology ofInternational Order, which is a part of a larger project that explores themedieval influence on modern international relations.

Camilla Boisen is Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Political Theory at theUniversity of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Herresearch focuses on colonial political thought, particularly the developmentof ideas of rights and trusteeship, and their influence on contemporaryproblems such as post-colonial restitution. She has published in History ofEuropean Ideas and Grotiana; and she is co-editor of Distributive JusticeDebates in Political and Social Thought: Perspectives on Finding a FairShare (2015), with Matthew C. Murray.

David Boucher is Professor of Politics and International Relations at CardiffUniversity, and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University ofJohannesburg. He is a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales, the Acad-emy of Social Sciences, and the Royal Historical Society. He has held fel-lowships at Oxford University; Sun Yat Sen University, Taiwan;Canterbury University, New Zealand; and Australian National University.He has published numerous books and articles in a wide range of areas,including history of thought in international relations, political theory,British Idealism, and popular culture. Among his publications are PoliticalTheories of International Relations (1998); British Idealism and PoliticalTheory (with Andrew Vincent, 2000); and The Limits of Ethics in Interna-tional Relations (2009). He has just completed a book on the legacy ofHobbes in Politics, Law and International Relations.


Joseph Canning is Affiliated Lecturer in the History Faculty, University ofCambridge. Previously, having been Lecturer in History at the University ofQueensland, Australia, he was Reader in History at Bangor University andDirector of the British Centre at the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Geschichtein Goettingen. His publications include The Political Thought of Baldus deUbaldis (1987),AHistory ofMedieval Political Thought, 300–1450 (1996), Ideasof Power in the Late Middle Ages, 1294–1417 (2011), and four edited volumes.He is writing a bookon the construction of ideas of authority, c. 1350–c. 1650.

James Turner Johnson is Distinguished Professor of Religion at RutgersUniversity. His research and teaching focuses principally on the historicaldevelopment and application of the Western and Islamic moral traditionson war, peace, and statecraft. His books include Ethics and the Use ofForce (2011), The War to Oust Saddam Hussein (2005), Morality andContemporary Warfare (1999), Just War Tradition and the Restraint ofWar (1981), and most recently, Sovereignty: Moral and Historical Per-spectives (2014). He is also co-editor (with Eric Patterson) of The AshgateResearch Companion to Military Ethics (2015).

Joshua Mitchell is Professor of Political Theory at Georgetown University.His research interest lies in the relationship between political thought andtheology in the West. He is the author of Not by Reason Alone: Religion,History and Identity in Early Modern Thought (1993), The Fragility ofFreedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American Future(1995), Plato’s Fable: On the Mortal Condition in Shadowy Times (2006),and most recently, Tocqueville in Arabia: Dilemmas in a Democratic Age(2013). He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled ReinholdNiebuhr and the Politics of Hope.

James Muldoon is a medieval legal and ecclesiastical historian. He is ProfessorEmeritus at Rutgers, and a Researcher-in-Residence at the John CarterBrown Library. He has written or edited a number of books and articlesdealing with the interaction between Christians and non-Christians. His booksinclude Popes, Lawyers, and Infidels: The Church and the Non-ChristianWorld 1250–1550 (1979), Empire and Order: The Concept of Empire, 800–1800 (1999), and The Spiritual Conversion of the Americas (2004).

Francis Oakley is the Edward Dorr Griffin Professor of the History of Ideasat Williams College in Massachusetts. He is also President Emeritus of theCollege and of the American Council of Learned Societies, Fellow of theMedieval Academy of America, and Fellow of the American Academy ofArts and Sciences. He has written extensively on medieval and earlymodern political and religious thought, including Omnipotence, Covenant,and Order (1984) and Natural Law, Laws of Nature, Natural Rights (2005).His most recent work, winner of the Medieval Academy’s Haskins Medalfor 2015, is The Emergence of Western Political thought in the LatinMiddle Ages, 3 vols. (2010–2015).

x List of contributors


Adrian Pabst is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Kent, UK, andVisiting Professor at the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Lille (Science Po),France. He is author of Metaphysics: The Creation of Hierarchy (2012),co-editor (with Ian Geary) of Blue Labour: Forging a New Politics (2015),and editor of The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Pope Benedict XVI’s SocialEncyclical and the Future of Political Economy (2011). Most recently hehas published (together with John Milbank) The Politics of Virtue: Post-Liberalism and the Human Future (2016).

C. J. C. Pickstock is Professor of Metaphysics and Poetics at the Universityof Cambridge, where she researches and teaches in the area of philosophi-cal theology. She is the author of After Writing: The Liturgical Con-summation of Philosophy (1997) and co-author (with John Milbank) ofTruth in Aquinas (2000). Her most recent book is Repetition and Identity(2013). She is currently finishing a book on Plato for Oxford UniversityPress, and a shorter book entitled Truth and Event.

Nicholas Rengger is Professor of Political Theory and International Relationsat the University of St Andrews and a fellow of the Academia Europaea.He publishes on many different aspects of political theory, internationalrelations, philosophy, and theology. His most recent monograph, Just Warand International Order, was published by Cambridge University Press(2013). A collection of essays, titled Dealing in Darkness: The Anti-Pela-gian Imagination in Political Theory and International Relations, will bepublished by Routledge in 2016.

List of contributors xi


Acknowledgement

The origin of this volume can be traced to a speculative purchase in a usedbook shop somewhere on the West Side of Vancouver, British Columbia,where I acquired a copy of A. P. D’Entreves’ lectures on the Medieval Con-tribution to Political Thought for the modest sum of CAD $2.95. Althoughrather dated by the time I eventually read them in the summer of 2004, I wasstruck by his portrayal of a world that is routinely disparaged in populardiscourse for its blindness and irrationality. But I soon came to realise thatthe so-called Dark Ages were not nearly as dark as I had imagined. D’En-treves spoke, not of religious superstition and fanaticism, moral turpitude,and rampant violence, but of law and reason, as well as the source ofauthority, the conditions of political obligation, and the nature and extent ofthe political community. All of the sudden the Middle Ages were a great dealless alien than I ever thought possible. And with that realisation, opinionsborn of ridicule and contempt quickly dissipated, as it became clear that thewhole of medieval experience could not be reduced to a Whiggish Age ofFaith that had been progressively left behind, and not a moment too soon, byfar-sighted modern thinkers who stirred Europe from its medieval slumber.

One of the most intriguing of D’Entreves’ claims, for me at the time, washis suggestion that the influence of some medieval ideas far outstretch theboundaries of conventional historical periodization, and that more than oneideational thread links ‘medieval’ political thought to ‘modern’ political con-sciousness. Like most students of international relations, I had been taughtthat the system of territorially defined, sovereign states was a distinctivelymodern achievement. Therefore, the story that the discipline of InternationalRelations tells about its historical development is one of change, rather thancontinuity. I struggled to reconcile that story with the work of historians ofmedieval political thought who operated with an entirely different historicalperiodization. Whereas theorists of international relations treated the Renais-sance and Reformation as events that sharply separate medieval and modern,many medievalists rejected the narrative of crisis and rupture, while pointinginstead to evidence of continuity that had been obscured by contrived andultimately unhelpful historical categories. This contrast underpins a questionthat has guided my research interests since reading D’Entreves’ lectures, and


then the work of others who reject the sharp break thesis: what would thediscipline of International Relations and our understanding of internationalrelations look like if we take this alternative historical periodization seriously?This collection of essays represents a modest and, obviously, partial attemptto work toward an answer.

Of course, in the course of my journey through the world of medievalpolitical thought I have incurred several debts that I wish to acknowledge.Some of the essays contained in this collection were initially presented at aworkshop held in 2010 at Aberystwyth University. The Aberystwyth Uni-versity Research Fund and the Contemporary Research on InternationalPolitical Theory working group, which is affiliated with the British Interna-tional Studies Association, provided funding this workshop. Others were pre-sented at a second workshop, held in 2013 at the National University ofSingapore, with generous funding provided by the NUS Faculty of Arts andSocial Sciences. I am grateful to each of these institutions for supporting twomost enjoyable and stimulating events. I also want to convey my gratitude toseveral individuals who contributed to the success of these workshops:Antony Black, Janet Coleman, Peter Fitzpatrick, Knud Haakonssen, TedHopf, Janice Bially Mattern, John Milbank, Luke O’Sullivan, and EthanPutterman. For their unfailing patience and expertise in helping organisethese workshops I want to thank Elaine Lowe, Noor Sham Binte AbdulHamid, Vijayalakshmi Rehunathan, and Aloysius Tan.

Projects of this kind are notorious for being late, and this one more so thanmost. I want to express my thanks to each of the contributors to this volume.I am especially grateful for their forbearance as I underwent cancer treatment,an ordeal that brought the project to a standstill for nearly two years. I amalso indebted to a number of individuals who at various stages offered valu-able criticism and advice on this project, and beyond. Andreja Zevnik, aremarkably talented and creative PhD student, and now colleague, played acrucial role in helping conceptualize the project and push it forward. It is noexaggeration to say that this project would not have happened had it not beenfor her vision and expertise. To her I offer a special vote of thanks. I am thebeneficiary of a conversation with David Boucher that has taken place overseveral years on three continents. David has shaped my thinking in a numberof ways, and for that I am thankful. Nicholas Rengger, a long-time friend andintellectual companion, has very generously engaged me in conversation onthese topics, again over a period of several years. I am enormously grateful forhis encouragement and guidance. I am grateful, also, to Terry Nardin,another respected friend and intellectual companion, who has provided valu-able intellectual support for the project, and as Head of the Department ofPolitical Science at NUS, indispensable financial support.

I am also very much indebted to R. W. Dyson. Very early on, when med-ieval thought first captured my imagination, Bob provided much neededencouragement and inspiration as I often found myself groping in the dark.He is a gifted teacher and an outstanding scholar of medieval political

Acknowledgement xiii


thought. Indeed, when I first heard Bob deliver a paper I was truly captivated,while regretting only that I had not had the opportunity to attend his lecturesas a student. This project is a small way of registering my debt to Bob andexpressing my profound admiration of his contribution to the study of med-ieval political thought.

Nicola Parkin and Lydia de Cruz, my editors at Routledge, have offeredmuch appreciated guidance in bringing the project to fruition. My thanks arealso due to Peter Finn, a PhD student at the National University of Singa-pore, who provided valuable assistance in the preparation of the final manu-script. Finally, I want to thank my parents and siblings for their continuedsupport, as well as my immediate family. My wife, Diana, has been the con-stant in my life that keeps me grounded and helps me keep things in per-spective. Sixteen years later she still makes me better than I am. I will beforever in her debt for her perseverance, generosity, and love. I am immenselygrateful, too, to my children, Callum and Kenna, for the joy they bring to mylife. Together, with Diana, they make my life complete.

W. B.Singapore

xiv Acknowledgement


1 The medieval contribution to moderninternational relations

William Bain

The essays contained in this collection explore some of the medieval founda-tions of modern international relations. The belief that there are such foun-dations, and that scholarship can uncover these foundations, runs up againstthe deeply entrenched opinion that ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ name discretehistorical epochs, and that the latter decisively displaced the former. Histor-ical antecedents are scarce, if not absent altogether, because the grammar thatgoverns the vocabulary of modern international relations is peculiar to aworld that smashed the once grand institutions of medieval Christendom.International relations, properly understood, is concerned with distinctivelymodern set of ideas, institutions, and practices. Niccolò Machiavelli andMartin Luther are counted among the heroes of this new world, while thevillains, a long procession of now forgotten popes and emperors, are recalledmainly to illustrate the absurdity of government conducted by two coordinateheads, presiding over a single body. The dualism of separate spiritual andtemporal governments could only result in an on-going struggle for supre-macy that defied lasting resolution. As Marsilius of Padua argues, expressingwhat would come to be accepted as the cardinal conviction of modern inter-national relations, the cause of political disharmony demands that ‘thesupreme government in a city or kingdom must be only one in number’.1 Intime those claiming universal rule passed from the scene and the reins ofpower passed to a multitude of princes, some great and others less so; yet theyall asserted a superior authority, over and above all internal rivals, and anindependence that excluded all external rivals from their jurisdictions.

With this development, the familiar grammar of modern internationalrelations begins to take shape, leaving behind the wreckage of a discreditedway of life. Notions of separateness take the place of unity, and equality isemphasised at the expense of hierarchy.2 The modern world of states is onto-logically flat; it is a horizontal arrangement characterised by political divi-sion, overlaid by a veneer of cultural similarity, as opposed to a verticalarrangement that gathers up a multitude of political and spiritual authoritiesin an order of concord that culminates in God – the only true sovereign.3

Only then is it possible to comprehend the ubiquitous distinction betweendomestic and international, or the idea of a states-system organised in terms


of discrete territorial units, governed by a law, not of peoples or nations, butbetween states. The grammar that renders this world intelligible is an histor-ical achievement, peculiar to time and place; it is an achievement that facil-itates utterance and expression of a particular kind while barring other kindsof expression because they amount to linguistic nonsense. It makes no moresense to speak of sovereignty as entailing a condition of inferiority than it doesto speak of the weight of an inch. The possible meanings and interpretationsin modern international relations are historically situated, and they arereflected in established usage and practice. There is, then, a vast gulf separat-ing modern usage and practice from that of the Middle Ages, so much so thatit is, as Martin Wight puts it, ‘impossible to use the word “international” inspeaking of medieval politics without serious anachronism and distortion’.4

These essays challenge the vastness of this gulf and the extent to which‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ stand for truly separate ideational and material con-tinents. Taken together, they do so by making three principal claims. First,they show that the contrast between a religious medieval outlook and asecular modern outlook cannot be sustained. The wars of religion may havedimmed the light of the papacy, but they did not loosen the grip of religionentirely. The modern states-system is, in significant ways, founded on latemedieval theological and philosophical commitments that prefigure a worldcomposed of individual and contingent things, and that privilege a voluntaristvocabulary of command, decision, and contract. Independent states, sover-eignty, and a legislative conception of law are political translations of thisvocabulary, and they are given aworld of will and artifice – aworld that is madeand unmade rather than discovered. Second, these commitments underminethe conventional historical periodization that posits a sharp break betweenmedieval and modern, thereby excluding medieval thought and practice frommeaningful engagement with the ‘international’. Because sovereignty andstatehood are not proprietary possessions of modern international relations,employing the word ‘international’ in a medieval context does not necessarilylead to anachronism and distortion. Once these reified historical boundariesare unsettled, it is possible to think coherently in terms of the modern MiddleAges; that is, in terms of a modernity that is in some ways still workingthrough medieval problems related to the conditions of freedom and order,and therefore the nature of sovereign power and the relation of political units.Third, these essays suggest that there might be ‘medieval’ answers to ‘modern’questions. Exposing the medieval foundations of modern international rela-tions also exposes thought and practice that has been discarded. Therefore,recovering what has been left behind might be put to use in theorising differ-ent conceptions of international community or providing more compellingjustifications for protecting civilians against atrocities.

In excavating these foundations, the essays in this volume do not supposethat medieval and modern are indistinguishable. It is a mistake to see the modernas a simple and unproblematic reflection of medieval experience. Medieval waysof thinking and doing cannot be applied as equally unproblematic answers to

2 William Bain


whatever ails the modern world because they are different in some respects.However, the essays proceed from the conviction that the modern world wasnot built on a new plot and constructed entirely out of new materials; instead,it was constructed from the rubble of the Middle Ages.5 The value of thisenterprise is found at least in part in the reminder it provides of the danger ofbecoming bewitched by modern achievements and the attractiveness ofmodern values.6 Inquiry of this kind denies that we have answered the bigconceptual or philosophical questions of our world; that these questions areno longer contentious and, therefore, have little substantive bearing on whatactually goes on in the world. These essays evince sympathy with QuentinSkinner’s view that engaging the past offers a sense of perspective on our ownsystems of belief. They illuminate what we have inherited from the past andwhat has been discarded, and to that extent they point to what we believe andto our reasons for holding such beliefs. And in this sense, too, we arereminded that ‘the values embodied in our present way of life, and our pre-sent ways of thinking about those values, reflect a series of choices made atdifferent times between different possible worlds’.7

Foundations and perspectives

David Armitage’s Foundations of Modern International Thought exemplifiesthe importance of foundations in attaining a proper understanding of con-temporary international relations. Overcoming the bias cultivated by thetheory of the state is a critical part of this agenda. For Armitage, the centralpuzzle that has guided historians of political thought is the genesis of the ideaof the state. Skinner explains the nature of this project as one of illuminatingthe process by which the modern state came to be formed. The process beginsin the late Middle Ages, and it is complete when it is possible to imagine thestate ‘as the sole source of law and legitimate force within its own territory’.8

Establishing the state as the most important unit of analysis has had no lessan impact on the way in which international relations have been imaginedand theorised. Theory about the state, Wight famously argued, is concernedwith the conditions of the good life; conversely, theory about the relations ofstates is concerned with questions of life and death – that is, national exis-tence and national extinction. This distinction follows from the pervasivebelief that sovereign state is ‘the consummation of political experience andactivity which has marked Western political thought since the Renaissance’.9

Political theory is susceptible to progressivist interpretation. Within states it ispossible to observe growing social cohesion and interdependence, increasedwealth and better distribution, and the softening of manners and the diffusionof culture. But to say the same of the international realm is to put convictionbefore evidence. International theory is resistant to progressivist interpreta-tion, because relations between states are distinguished by ‘recurrence andrepetition; it is the field in which political action is most regularlynecessitous’.10

Contribution to international relations 3


This enormously influential distinction is premised on a contrast betweenan ordered internal realm and a precarious external realm, perhaps notentirely devoid of order, which nonetheless is threatening in an existential way.Indeed, it is this imagery that succeeded the imagery of medieval hierarchy,universalism, and religiosity. For beyond the confines of the state lays anuncertain international anarchy that privileges power and interest beforeauthority and obligation. States dominate, over and above individuals, andthe law that governs their relations is not much more than a concrete recordof what states do as a matter of fact. The problem, according to Armitage, isthat the distinction between inside and outside, that is, the scaffolding thatupholds the dominant imagery of international relations, ‘remains perhaps theleast investigated of all the fundamental divisions in our political lives’.11

What is more, this distinction is a product of nineteenth and twentieth cen-tury historical and legal thought that has been projected retrospectively on to‘canonical’ thinkers, such as Hugo Grotius and Thomas Hobbes, who are saidto be bearers of the distinctive standard of modernity. It is in this sense thatJames Brown Scott, editor of a famous canon of texts in international law,portrays Francisco de Vitoria as a practically minded statesman, more sothan a theologian, who anticipated the shape of the international communityof the future – a community larger than the parochial confines of Christen-dom.12 Uncovering the foundations of modern international thought exposesthe mythography that has grown-up around such opportunistic appropria-tions. As Armitage puts it, stories accounting for the origins of moderninternational relations are often little more than ‘foundation myths retailed bylater communities of historians and diplomats, international lawyers andproto-political scientists, seeking historical validation for their ideologicalprojects and infant professions’.13

The foundations that concern Armitage are located in a period spanningthe seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, beginning roughly with Hobbes andending with Jeremy Bentham.14 He does not presume to uncover all of thefoundations that might be of interest. And the claims he makes are sympto-matic rather than systematic. Yet these symptoms invite a root-and-branch re-evaluation of canonical thinkers, Hobbes15 foremost among them, as well asmomentous events, such as the transition from medieval empire to a world ofindependent states. Only then is it possible to make headway in addressing thequestion that guides investigations in the foundations of internationalthought; indeed, a question that signifies a profound shift in political con-sciousness: ‘How did we – all of us in the world – come to imagine that weinhabit a world of states?’16 Of course, foundations are in a fundamental senseconditional; they provide platforms of understanding that enable evaluationas well as analysis. A foundation is the platform on which propositions areerected, courses of action articulated, and ideas made intelligible. Founda-tions are conditional because they are historical. It is in this context thatArmitage sets out to expose foundational myths, and so invest internationalrelations with meaning that is stripped of presentist ideology which is meant

4 William Bain


to ratify or condemn a particular state of affairs. This collection of essaysevinces sympathy with this project, while looking in a different direction forfoundations that remain unexplored or obscured by reifications that have notyet been de-mythologised.

Here, too, the objective is qualified by the modesty that infuses Armitage’sproject. These essays do not purport, either singly or collectively, to uncoverthe medieval foundations of international relations. What they do aim toprovide is insight into the medieval influence on some of the fundamentalideas and practices that are taken to exemplify the spirit of modern interna-tional relations. For instance, they question the idea that Grotius furnished asecular theory of natural law and, therefore, the basis of modern internationallegal order.17 They also question Hobbes’s credentials as an unalloyedmodern thinker by showing how his epistemology accords with his theology.18

History is like the index of a book: it holds out multiple points of entry thatare suited to a variety of projects and purposes.19 Each of these points ofentry affords a vantage point from which to engage in a continuous process ofobservation, argumentation, and revision. And, as a platform of under-standing, a foundation is useful in isolating a part of international relationsfor further study. But a vantage point is nothing more than a vantage point.There is no panopticon of history, in international relations or any otherdomain of historical inquiry, which affords a single vantage point from whichit is possible to view everything that can be seen from every other vantagepoint. Interpretations, and the foundations on which they rest, are conditionalbecause they emanate from a point of view. They are qualified by the experi-ence of the interpreter, which is to say that meaning inevitably depends onhow the material is examined.20 Theorists of international relations haveinterpreted their material with a view to accounting for the emergence of themodern states-system, yet, too often, they end by reifying the distinctionbetween inside and outside, in part by dispensing with medieval experiencethat clutters an otherwise tidy picture, so that only the modern remains.

It is certainly true to say that medieval experience, and whatever bearing itmight have on modern international relations, consists in a great deal morethan what these essays address. The transition from medieval hierarchy tomodern anarchy is usually discussed in the context of certain core problems,the most important being the relation of spiritual and secular authority, andthe implications of fragmented feudal society. But taking these core problemsas a starting point frequently results in one-sided narratives that exaggeratethe significance of change. They are, in other words, complicit in the con-struction of a triumphalist story in which the absurdity of divided authorityand the rapid demise of feudalism resolved the most important questions ofpolitics in favour of the sovereign state. It is then said that medieval andmodern demarcate distinct and incommensurable epochs, and the emergenceof the modern state is the watershed that directs the flow of ideas in mani-festly different directions. The incommensurability thesis is buttressed by thecommon invocation of ‘medieval’ as a byword for backwardness or cruelty, or



some combination of both. Medieval decay and ignorance are set againstmodern progress and enlightenment. To be medieval is to be ignorant, irra-tional, and regressive; it is to be inured by stagnation and habituated by akind of unflinching obedience that stifles free inquiry and expression. It is alsoto be resistant to knowledge furnished by natural science and to prefer thesecurity of subjection to the indeterminacy of freedom.

Of course, searing images of the smouldering ruins of the World TradeCenter in September 2001 re-capitalised the word ‘medieval’ as a preferredterm of abuse. Commentators of all sorts rushed to denounce an especiallyvirulent form of barbarism that could be nothing other than ‘medieval’. Withthe help of modern technology, al Qaeda transported the religious fanaticismof the Crusades and the Inquisition to the living rooms of the once comfor-table and secure middle classes of the West. But the calculating rationality ofCold War-era nuclear deterrence, though macabre in its threat of globalannihilation, could no longer be relied upon the ward off the likes of MullahMohammed Omar, the ‘one-eyed peasant’ and ‘thug’ who once presided overthe Taliban’s ‘medieval theocracy’ in Afghanistan. The perversity of it all, soargues Thomas Friedman, is that America found itself at war with ‘Islamo-fascists, who are nurtured by mosques, charities and madrasas preaching anintolerant brand of Islam and financed by medieval regimes sustained by ouroil purchases’.21 The menace posed by this ‘medieval mindset’ left no less alasting impression on some of the architects of America’s ‘war against terror’.For instance, Paul Wolfowitz warns that the defence of universal values –freedom, democracy, and free enterprise – must begin with the sober recog-nition that terrorists ‘aim to impose a medieval, intolerant and tyrannical wayof life’.22 Donald Rumsfeld sounds a similar alarm, warning of an enemy thatcombines ‘medieval views and modern tools and technology’ to wreak havocon the innocent; an enemy that shows no care for any kind of legal or moralrestraint, the personification of which is Abu Musab al Zarqawi and his‘dark, sadistic and medieval vision of the future of beheadings, suicidebombings and indiscriminate killings’.23

The trope of medieval backwardness and cruelty survived the Bushadministration and the death of Osama bin Laden. Theatrical videos pro-duced by ISIS, portraying grisly executions by beheading, drowning, andimmolation, are condemned for their medieval brutality; they depict a pre-modern penal ethic, un-evolved to be sure, which revels in pain, suffering, andspectacle.24 Some commentators, including Barack Obama, have tried topresent a more nuanced picture, noting for example, that such ritualised vio-lence is not peculiar to Islam. What separates ISIS from the Inquisition is asavvy technological sophistication that the Dominicans lacked. But for thosewho reject this picture, the real problem is that the likes of Obama do notgrasp that some societies have evolved to a higher, more enlightened andhumane plane of existence. Offended by Obama’s suggestion that terribledeeds had been committed in the name of Jesus Christ, Bobby Jindal, gover-nor of the American state of Louisiana and Republican presidential

6 William Bain


candidate, complains: ‘It would be nice if he would face the reality of thesituation today. The Medieval Christian threat is under control, Mr. Pre-sident. Please deal with the Radical Islamic threat today’.25 Charles Krau-thammer echoes this sentiment, arguing that Obama does not understand thenature or the ambition of extreme jihadism:

This is a fanatical religious sect dedicated to establishing the mostoppressive medieval theocracy and therefore committed to unending warwith America not just because it is infidel but because it represents mod-ernity with its individual liberty, social equality (especially for women)and profound tolerance (religious, sexual, philosophical).26

The world is seemingly torn between the forces of light and the forces ofdarkness, as Krauthammer and others would have it; between a civilisationworthy of the name and a sinister medieval outlook that provides clear andunobstructed sight into the heart of darkness.

It is difficult to imagine medieval foundations of modern internationalrelations when medieval experience is reduced to a pejorative discourse ofbackwardness and cruelty. There is no sense that contract theories of gov-ernment, natural rights, parliaments, constitutionalism, and universities allhave roots thrust deeply in medieval soil. Instead, the Middle Ages are ima-gined as a long and sometimes destructive detour, the traces of which must beexcised as obstacles to progress. By challenging this common but grossly dis-torted narrative, these essays recover and illuminate some of the medievalfoundations of modern international relations. Ghastly violence is certainly apart of medieval experience, as is gratuitous cruelty, but violence and crueltyare pervasive in every period of history. Taking foundations seriously does notmean that medieval and modern are joined by a straight and unambiguousline, so that the problem of interpreting change poses no real problem. Nordoes it commit oneself to a narrative that privileges continuity, and so rever-ses the far more common error of over-emphasising change. Uncovering themedieval foundations of modern international relations recognises the diffi-culties of speaking of medieval international relations. But it recognises aswell the unhelpful and problematic exclusion of medieval experience in aneffort to define the historical and analytical autonomy of a discrete domain ofacademic inquiry.

Medieval pasts, medieval futures

These stories, and the way in which they are constructed, raise searchingquestions about the place of medieval experience in international relationsscholarship. Medieval experience provides a backdrop against which to illu-minate the novelty of the modern states-system and its attendant institutionsand practices. And it provides a collection of evocative tropes that areemployed in an engagement of speculative futurology. Demonstrations of



novelty normally take the form of contrasting medieval political structureswith those of modern political life. Take, for example, J. L. Holzgrefe’s con-tention that there is a ‘vast difference’ between centralised modern authorityand decentralised medieval authority. The former developed out of the latterin a process of consolidation driven by technological advances and, in con-temporary parlance, monopolisation of key state competences: legal author-ity, warfare, diplomacy, and treaty-making.27 Medieval Europe ischaracterised, above all else, by an overarching unity defined in terms of theChristian religion, within which operated a bewildering array of overlappingfeudal authorities. Profoundly fractured identities, allegiances, and jurisdic-tions precluded the development of anything like a system of sovereign states.Indeed, the differences are so great that Holzgrefe struggles to make mean-ingful connections between medieval and modern. It is difficult to speak ofinternational relations, he argues, when the rights of embassy and treaty-making pertain to anyone of political importance; when law applies to indi-viduals, and so blurs the distinction between public and private; and when,because of the conflation of politics and personal ties, office is indistinguish-able from office holder. Therefore, international relations in medieval life isthe opposite of international relations properly so-called: there is no mono-poly on the rights of war and peace, no public international law, and nodelineation of exclusive jurisdiction.28

In comparing medieval and modern experience Holzgrefe stresses theenormous distance that separates theory and practice. The gap is indeed ‘sogreat that changes in international relations theory were seldom more thanpost facto rationalizations of actual historical developments’.29 Those whowitnessed the transition from medieval fragmentation to modern territorialitycould not fully grasp the enormity of what was passing before their eyes. Thecollapse of feudal political structures and the concomitant rise of sovereignstates, sovereign both politically and religiously, simply did not fit medievalcategories. And because the new did not fit the old, theorists of early-moderninternational relations had to make sense of it all, somehow, in terms of whatthey did know. Philosophers and jurists alike rejected most of the worldaround them; and in its place that sought refuge in the wisdom of antiquity, abequest that had been rescued by the learned sons of Renaissance humanism.Knowledge recovered from the ancient world helped to assuage the dis-sonance caused by the collapse of medieval Christendom. In time, however,and with the help of perspective afforded by historical distance, these philo-sophers and jurists worked through the fog to theorise modern internationalrelations as they appeared and transpired in actual practice.30 The storyHolzgrefe tells is broadly consistent with the narrative that guides mostinternational relations scholarship. It is a story of fundamental and irrevoc-able change, of revolution more so than evolution. The modern states-system,and all that goes with it, is an invention rather than an adaptation. Conse-quently, medieval experience functions as less a hammer or screwdriver, thatis, productive tools of the trade, than as a roll of tape that a decorator uses to

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mark off areas that should benefit from the application of fresh paint. In otherwords, medieval experience is used to demonstrate, albeit in a negative way,the novelty of the invention.

The approach that engages medieval experience as part of a speculativeenterprise is concerned to describe and evaluate the character of politicalstructures as they might take shape at some point in the future. Medievalexperience is no longer a part of an archaic past that has been left behind; itprovides a way of assessing the transformation of international political life. Inthis context, medieval experience is cast as a destination rather than a point ofdeparture. The spirit of this enterprise is explained by Jorg Friedrichs, whoargues that medieval experience, now rebranded as ‘new medievalism’, offers‘a background for the diagnostic of macro-historical in the present’.31 Newmedievalism provides a framework and vocabulary to explain change; it promisesto make sense of the dual forces of globalisation and fragmentation by com-paring the pre-international world with a nascent post-international world.32

One of the most influential and enduring statements of this kind is JohnRuggie’s account of neomedievalism. Ruggie, noting the failure to theorisediscontinuity in the states-system, plays a back-to-the-future game by appeal-ing to medieval experience in order to theorise a fundamental reorganisationof political space. The ‘unbundling’ of territory, he argues, signalled by a shiftfrom uniperspectival polity to multiperspectival polity, is reminiscent of thefragmented pattern of medieval political life.33 Symptomatic of this post-modern condition is non-exclusive territorial rule. Patterns of authority aretangled; and, being shot through with plural allegiances and multiple identities,boundaries are stratified, geographically and functionally, in heteronomouslayers. Here, medieval experience explains, by way of analogy, the characterof fundamental change. Thus, for Ruggie, neomedievalism marks the end ofone historical project and the beginning of another.34

Richard Falk also reaches for the medieval analogy in the search for a newmetaphor to describe a world experiencing fundamental change. The domi-nant metaphor of Westphalia, premised on an anarchical system populated byterritorial states, is, he argues, increasingly unsatisfactory. Among otherthings, it neglects transnational and supranational relations, as well as thediffusion of authority to intersecting and overlapping economic, social, andcultural forces. Moreover, this statist Westphalian international order is con-founded by contradictory logics of juridical equality and hegemonic inequal-ity, the result of which is persistent global insecurity and acute humanvulnerability, especially at the hands of oppressive governments.35 The appealof the medieval analogy, Falk contends, is that it diminishes the role of thestate and the centrality of war. It embraces a much broader range of politicalactors and therefore fractures a framework that is defined in terms of statesand fixes attention on the problem of war between states. Once the statistblinders are removed, it is possible to imagine a different kind of internationalrelations. Postmodern international relations recognise actors above andbelow the state. Interconnectedness rather than separateness defines their



underlying condition.36 Yet Falk carefully hedges his normative orientationand the extent to which the medieval analogy can be used to promote change.If the medieval analogy points to the obsolescence of the state, it also calls tomind the tight control of information, which gets at the ‘essence’ of mediev-alism: the Dark Ages. He is also wary of totalising medieval religious com-mitments that he associates with some of the worst forms of Westernisation.Therefore, Falk accepts that the medieval analogy provides an apt descriptionof postmodern political transformation, but he also acknowledges that anyattempt to harness its normative potential to realise a more humane worldmust be tempered by the reality that it stands opposed to fundamental values,not least democratic openness and plurality.37

Falk’s caution provides a timely reminder that the medieval analogy canlead to dystopian conclusions. Hedley Bull considered the possibility thatneomedieval arrangements of overlapping authorities and identities mightavoid the dangers posed by a system of sovereign states. Sovereignty, as tra-ditionally understood, would be replaced by the disaggregation of authority.But, he warned, recalling historical precedent, such arrangements mightunleash ‘more ubiquitous and continuous violence and insecurity than doesthe modern states system’.38 It is this abiding fear that provides a dark andforeboding premonition of the future. The world of the cartographer impliesdiscrete territories, delineated by clear boundaries, with governments thatexercise effective control over defined populations. But, as Robert Kaplanargues, the reality beyond the cartographer’s lines and colours is often some-thing quite different: ‘A pre-modern formlessness governs the battlefield,evoking the wars in medieval Europe prior to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia,which ushered in the era of organized nation-states’.39 This toxic aspect ofpostmodernity is told as a story of states in retreat, suggesting that neome-dievalism is best understood as a kind of political development in reverse.Gangs and warlords compete for power and territory, blurring the linebetween public and private authority. Parallel institutions operate alongsidethose of the state, which maintain law and order, collect taxes, and providepublic services. And private statelets usurp the traditional role of the state,controlling territory, people, and wealth, while exercising a self-authorisedwrit that is essentially independent of formal authority. This process, JohnRapley submits, ‘is not so much collapse as reconfiguration – what somescholars have described as the emergence of a new Middle Ages’.40

Modern distortion, medieval exclusion

When medieval experience is employed as a backdrop, it is used to demon-strate the uniqueness of an egalitarian, territorially defined, secular states-system. Alternatively, when this view is put under pressure, because it is dif-ficult to reconcile concrete practice with established theoretical frames ofreference, medieval experience is used to describe and to evaluate the char-acter of political transformation. This Whiggish orientation, by which I mean

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the emphasising of certain ideas and practices to ratify the present or to illuminatewhat obfuscates the path of progress, is an unfortunate source of distortionand exclusion.41 The result is a problematic historical narrative, organised interms of epoch defining breaks, which excludes (medieval) religion whileaffirming a narrative of (modern) progressive secularisation. The historicalperiodization that marks off modern international relations, and that affirmsits purported sui generis character, is not a given, presented unambiguously bythe facts of the case. Yet many scholars would have it otherwise, suggestingthat the medieval mind – the attitudes, values, and concerns that define itscharacter – is so radically at odds with its modern counterpart that it inhabitsa different world. Jacob Burckhardt’s celebration of the Italian Renaissance asthe cradle of the modern world is an outstanding case in point. The spirit ofmodern politics, he argues, can be traced to those political units that emergedout of the struggles between Papacy and Empire. Unbridled egoism definestheir character and indifference to the scruples of right and wrong describetheir behaviour. They are artefacts of cold, and often vicious, calculation,because honesty and fair dealing provide flimsy insurance against intrigue andambition. Self-interest trumps honour, because the existence of these units isunderwritten by a currency denominated in the facts of hard power.42

But the coarseness of interest and intrigue, most famously related byMachiavelli’s ‘objective’ yet (sometimes) ‘appalling’ political judgements, isameliorated by the potent spirit of modern individuality. This, in addition tothe emergence of independent states, pierced what Burckhardt describes as theveil behind which the Middle Ages lay either dreaming or half awake, a veil‘woven of faith, illusion, and childish prepossession, through which the worldand history were seen clad in strange hues’.43 The ‘many-sided man’ of theRenaissance towered over his immediate predecessors; and emancipated bythe learning of antiquity, the source of true culture and the ideal of emula-tion, he cast off the ‘fantastic bonds of the Middle Ages’.44 The ‘completevictory of humanism’ sparked interest in the affairs of the world; an ethic offree inquiry loosed the shackles of dogma; and nature ceased to evoke dreadas the yoke of superstition fell by the wayside.45 And, with the obstacles sweptaway, a peculiarly modern outlook takes shape: ‘[t]he worldliness, throughwhich the Renaissance seems to offer so striking a contrast to the MiddleAges, owed its first origin to the flood of new thoughts, purposes, and views,which transformed the medieval conception of nature and man’.46 In thisdrama a special place is reserved for religion. When Burckhardt addresses thedecline of morality, he looks first to a corrupt religious establishment: ‘historydoes not record a heavier responsibility than that which rests upon thedecaying Church’.47 Principles of faith, perverted by corruption and extra-vagance, call to mind oppressive hierarchies supported by tradition; assertionsof infallible truth, often by means of violence; and strange rites and ritualsthat offend common standards of decency. However, a progressive civilisation,inculcated in reason, science, and worldliness, stemmed and then rolled back,the flood of ignorance and barbarism that had washed over medieval Europe.



The tenor of Burckhardt’s narrative, though an icon of late nineteenthcentury historiography, is still audible in contemporary international relationsscholarship. Epochal change is typically explained with reference to theRenaissance and the Reformation, mediated by the language of crisis andrupture. The identity of the modern state is in a number of ways heavilyindebted to the aesthetic, historical, and political commitments of theRenaissance.48 Laureates of Renaissance humanism are praised for dissolvingthe universalising tendency of spiritual authority by emphasising worldlyconcerns, thereby situating questions of politics within the domain of history.The result, as Richard Devetak argues, is that history was transformed into aweapon in the battle against scholastic philosophy and theology. Civil historytook root, and with it territory came to be interpreted in secular terms, sev-ered from the providential outlook of the Schoolmen. Questions of right orjustice receded in the face of practical concerns related to interest and coun-sel, and to the conditions of political success. In short, the humanist quest tolegitimise the modern state necessitated the subordination of religion and itsscholastic apologists to the authority of the prince.49 Laureates of the Refor-mation happily obliged in aiding the cause. The revolution that swept awaythe overbearing universalism of ecclesiastical polity also emanated, perhapsironically, from within the walls of faith. Martin Luther and his reformingcontemporaries deprived the Church in Rome of all temporal authority.Priests, he insists, are no more than pastors; that is, teachers who announceGod’s word rather than enforce God’s law.50 Consequently, the reformersimposed dramatic restrictions on the scope of spiritual universalism, and socreated a space in which a plural and secular conception of politics flourished.They pushed the spiritual and temporal realms apart, enough so, DanielPhilpott argues, that modern sovereignty is correctly viewed as a direct con-sequence of Protestant theology.51

Such thinking implicates an end and a beginning that is well expressed byAdam Watson: ‘The Renaissance turned men’s minds towards classicalmodels of independent statehood. The Reformation broke the authority of theuniversal church, which came to depend on the lay power of the new rulerseven where it remained Catholic’.52 Modern conceptions of sovereignty andstatehood are theorised within this frame, supported by exclusionary binariesthat privilege the modern at the expense of the medieval. Humanism excludesscholasticism; secularity excludes religion; and territorialism excludes feudal-ism. And, with the boundaries of the historical playing field secured, it ispossible to argue, as does Ruggie, that the shift from medieval to modern is‘the most important contextual change in international politics in this mil-lennium’.53 But, on closer inspection, these tidy boundaries conceal a problemthat is rarely (if ever) acknowledged by those who theorise this momentouschange. To theorise modern international relations presupposes knowledge ofthe object of inquiry, and so presupposes the identity of time and place. Inother words, thinking about modern international relations begins with anunderstanding or a definition of ‘modern’ and of ‘international relations’.

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And once these concepts are defined, what fits must be disentangled fromwhat does not fit a stipulated ideal. There is, however, considerable danger inattempting to explain the transition from medieval to modern in this way. Thedefinition of historical identity, as Michael Oakeshott explains, ‘cannot bedetermined by inspecting pieces of writing unless we know already what weare looking for’.54 The only relevant postulates of identity in such anengagement are those that render identity intelligible; all others must fall bythe wayside. Theorists of international relations mistakenly accept the iden-tities of medieval and modern as unproblematic givens without giving muchthought to the fact that historical periodization is itself an outcome of his-torical enquiry.

It is no incidental point that historians of medieval political thought oftenoperate with a rather different historical periodization. In 1927 C. H. Haskinsmade the pregnant suggestion that the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenthcentury is perhaps not as novel or decisive as Burkhardt and others suppose.Setting chronological limits, he argues, is at best a matter of convenience, theimplication being the Middle Ages are less dark and less static than oftenimagined, and the Renaissance less bright and less sudden.55 The generalthrust of this view is now widely accepted. For example, J. H. Burns arguesthat the political thought of early-modern Europe is not as innovative assometimes suggested. He observes that the collapse of medieval universalism,signified by a transnational ecclesiastical polity over which the papacy pre-sides, is normally understood as signalling the end of the Middle Ages. But,claims of novelty notwithstanding, the plurality of states that displaced thisuniversalism cannot be coherently described as secular in the modern sense.The idea of a christianitas, coextensive with a universal community of believ-ers, survived the partition of the world into discrete, territorially organisedpolitical communities. Rather, for Burns, the late fifteenth to the end of theseventeenth centuries mark a period when medieval ideas and practicesachieve full maturity.56 Brian Tierney says much the same. Speaking of thedevelopment of modern constitutionalism, he maintains that the twelfth- tothe seventeenth centuries designate an essentially continuous period of poli-tical thought; hence ‘[s]eventeenth-century writers were often thinking medie-val thoughts even when they clothed them in classical dress’.57 Yet thelanguage or crisis and rupture tends to blot out these connections, at whichpoint the standard narrative begins to look like an ideological project con-cerned less with understanding than with lionising the triumph of reason andfreedom as against the crushing weight of religion and domination.

When the veil of ideology is torn away, unproblematic givens invite rein-terpretation. As Burns argues, softening the boundary between medieval andmodern to allow expressions of continuity does not mean that modern poli-tical life – international relations included – is an uncomplicated survival ofmedieval experience.58 Movements such as the Renaissance and Reformationare less immigration checkpoints, which facilitate passage from one jurisdic-tion to another, than symbolic representations of several long and



intermingled paths. Hence Renaissance worldliness, manifest as an interest inman that displaced a God-centred medieval outlook, is a simple and unhelp-ful abridgement of this complexity. True, the humanist movement evinces aspecial interest in the affairs of man, an interest more secular in orientationand more exclusive in character.59 It is true as well that the humanists have notruck with scholastic theology or philosophy. They criticised scholasticism forseeming triviality, arguing that logical subtly and metaphysical speculationstood before practical problems of common interest.60 But it is a mistake tothink that these commitments fatally weakened medieval ways of thinkingand doing, and so assured the birth of the modern secular world. Interest inthe dignity of man is not peculiar to humanist thinking. Therefore, it is naïveto reduce humanism to an idea that is also prominent in ancient and medievalthought.61 It is no less naïve to equate opposition to scholastic method andcurriculum with irreligion. Scholasticism coexisted with humanism for themost part, not least because the humanists failed to make a positive con-tribution to the philosophical and scientific disciplines that organised scho-lastic concerns. Moreover, criticism of scholastic theology did not precludeprofessing religious conviction: the humanist movement embraced the clas-sics, Christian no less than pagan.62

Similar abridgements are at work when the Reformation is used to pushreligion further into the background. When it comes to explaining the recon-figuration of political space in early-modern Europe, the religious civil war setoff by the Reformation is seen as perhaps the single most important cause inexplaining political plurality and the birth of the modern states-system.63 Butbeyond events on the battlefield, ideational fissures also helped to prise apartthe medieval notion of coordinated spiritual and temporal realms so that themodern regnum stood alone. Protestant theology, exemplified by Luther’s twokingdoms, separates the languages of faith and politics. Whereas the heavenlykingdom is a purely spiritual realm ruled by love and the Word, the earthlykingdom is a coercive order ruled by law and the sword. This separation, sothe argument goes, dislodged politics from a hierarchical conception ofcosmic order, emanating from God and embracing subordinate layers of rea-lity, to clear the way for a truly secular expression of politics. Thus, as RobertJackson suggests, the Reformation signals ‘a move away from religion, bothProtestant and Catholic, in the creation of a secular political world’.64 Andthis move readies the myth of Westphalia for flight: ‘an international politicsmorally autonomous from the realm of religion did not become firmly estab-lished until the Peace of Westphalia’.65 But Luther does not secularise politicsas much as he sacralises it in a different way. His two kingdoms frameworkreflects the dual nature of every Christian as both saint and sinner. It is,therefore, concerned with explaining two kinds of righteousness: obedience tolaw and acceptance of faith. The earthly kingdom is the domain of civic lifeand the heavenly kingdom is the domain of spiritual life. However, thoughdistinct, the two kingdoms operate concurrently; they explain the dual natureof reality that the Christian inhabits simultaneously. Luther’s thinking about

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politics tracks this dualism: ‘political authority was divine in origin, butearthly in operation. It expressed God’s harsh judgment against sin but alsohis tender mercy for sinners’.66

The identity of modern international political order that emerged out of theReformation is stabilised with the help of the category ‘feudalism’. This pro-cess of stabilisation is resolved in the ever-present contrast between medievalfragmentation and modern centralisation. Here, the discourse of feudalismruns parallel to the discourse of secularisation, with both discourses beingused to narrate the progressive modernisation of Europe and, in time, the restof the world.67 Secularisation overcomes religious blindness and fanaticism;feudalism overcomes confusion of authority and jurisdiction. Hence the dis-course of feudalism is as much a strategy for fixing historical identity as acoherent description of a concrete practice. But, as Susan Reynolds argues,there is considerable difficulty in describing medieval society as feudal. The‘feudalism’ that is common to international relations scholarship is largely aretrospective construction of sixteenth and seventeenth legal historiographythat was meant to give shape to an otherwise shapeless Middle Ages. Legalhistorians found in feudal law full blown theories of government and society,but only because they put these theories there themselves. Reynolds calls thisthe Cinderella approach to describing medieval life: fitting one society into aconceptual model derived from a different society.68 The point of concernrelates not merely to the fact of bad history – that the narrative diverges fromwhat the evidence obliges. Distortion born of bad history also has a use thatis not always benign. Kathleen Davis argues that the discovery of ‘feudalism’is deeply entangled in early-modern justifications of sovereignty and politicalfreedom. For example, Jean Bodin theorises sovereignty by aligning feudalismwith slavery so as to fix a medieval past in terms of subjection and to vindi-cate an independent and free modern future. However, Davis goes on to arguethat such exercises in fixing historical boundaries arbitrarily ‘impose homo-geneities that . . . mask the existence of “modern” characteristics in theMiddle Ages and “medieval” characteristics in modernity’.69

De-mythologising the medieval

The essays in this volume aim to de-mythologise the tidy picture of moderninternational relations by uncovering what has been masked. They lookbeyond the straight lines that define this picture in clear-cut temporal terms,where ‘modern’ excludes ‘medieval’, to identify medieval characteristics ofmodern international relations. As R. B. J. Walker argues, the modern world,the modern state and the modern states-system, is put into order with thehelp of these lines. But the process of drawing these lines is more complexthan is normally imagined: establishing origins and influences can just aseasily occlude as illuminate.70 Modern international relations is not so muchan object to be identified and theorised, as a discursive construction that isprojected on an object by a subject. Thus, to paraphrase Constantin Fasolt,



so long as modern international relations is theorised in terms of states andthe states-system, some notion of ‘medieval’ is required to explain change andprogress. The theorist of international relations needs an empire and a papacy,as well as feudalism and religiosity, to articulate and defend a distinctivelymodern state and modern states-system as manifestations of a progressive,secular project. Yet these lines, though necessary, are arbitrary, which is whythe influence of medieval experience on modern international relations cannotbe reduced to a set of core problems.71 Theorists of international relationstypically focus on the relation of spiritual and temporal authorities or therelation of Empire and lesser polities, to the extent that they engage medievalexperience at all; and the all too predictable result is a story that privilegeschange at the expense of continuity. But this story, and the homogenisedvision of political experience that it entails, is increasingly difficult to sustain.

Anachronistic interpretations of medieval experience, such as MarkusFischer’s contention that feudal actors behaved as do modern states, and sovalidate the transhistorical logic of structural realism, have given way tointerpretations that recognise palpable change, yet allow space for meaningfulengagement with continuity.72 Space of this kind is created, too, by growingacceptance that the Peace of Westphalia is less the birthday of the modernstates-system than a myth used to legitimise a pseudo-secular world com-posed of sovereign states.73 Thinking beyond this myth enables an account ofsovereignty that is sensitive to continuity while narrating change. Forinstance, Friedrich Kratochwil acknowledges a proposition most theorists ofinternational relations accept: that sovereignty is key to understanding terri-torial statehood and the modern states-system. But his reading of Bodin, thereputed father of modern sovereignty, is far more sophisticated than thecommon conceit that sovereignty is a modern possession, and that in medie-val political life there was ‘manifestly no sovereignty’.74 Kratochwil argues,against this view, that Bodin’s formulation of sovereignty takes its cue, notfrom the secular domain of law, but from a medieval analogy of God assupreme lawgiver. His point is that although sovereignty is fundamental tothe constitution of the social world, politics included, understanding thisworld is unavoidably an historical engagement.75 Therefore, sovereigntycannot be distilled into a transhistorical core; its historical character is intel-ligible in the dialectical relationship of continuity and change that grounds astable concept which is nonetheless tolerant of variation. It is then possible toargue, as does Derek Croxton, that it is not difficult to find a medieval con-ception of sovereignty, but that what is absent in medieval political experienceis a system of equal sovereign states constituted by the practice of mutualrecognition.76 And, accept this much, and one of the pillars that upholds thesharp-break thesis falls to the ground.

These essays continue this process of repositioning in order to illuminatemedieval ideas and practices, and their bearing on the origins and characterof modern international relations. Nicholas Rengger begins by suggesting thatthe search for origins and the interrogation of character must begin with that

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aspect of medieval thought and practice which is most alien to modern sen-sibilities: theology. This might seem strange in an ostensibly secular politicalworld. A narrative of progressive secularisation so dominates the historio-graphy of international relations that contemporary debates about humanrights, for example, have no meaningful referent to a world defined in terms offaith. Rengger challenges this view, suggesting that in this and other mattersmedieval experience cannot be safely ignored: ‘Not only is understanding themedieval central to any real attempt to understand the modern, we cannotreally understand any of the central dilemmas of modern internationalthought without some understanding of the medieval’.77 In this respect heevinces sympathy with Michael Allen Gillespie’s contention that modernityreflects the concrete resolution of a medieval theological dispute about thenature of God. There is, then, for Rengger, a failure to appreciate just howimportant medieval theological commitments are to thinking about moderninternational relations. Theological ideas underpin the voluntarist and instru-mental character of modern international relations; and to that extent thestandard narrative about origins is deeply flawed. The wars of religion are notthe cause of a modern states-system that cast off the yoke of religion andturned away from God; they are symptomatic of the profound dislocationcaused by nominalist theology and what it entailed for modern political andreligious life. Modern international relations, Rengger argues, is intelligible asa hybrid dominated by nominalist will and artifice, but which also appeals, atleast rhetorically, to an older (metaphysical) realist conception of a transcen-dent reality that is most clearly evident in humanitarian discourse. Therefore,the ‘medieval’ is not only implicated in the creation of modern internationalrelations; the modern is shot through with the ‘medieval’ to the extent that‘our problems may still, in some sense, be “medieval” problems’.78

C. J. C. Pickstock uncovers the metaphysical ground of the nominalist shifttoward voluntarism and instrumentalism. A key figure in this regard is thethirteenth-century theologian Duns Scotus, who offers a new way of organis-ing and comprehending reality. Scotus rejects the Thomist notion of being,according to which the unity of God, conceived as being as such, yields aplurality of partial being that participates in the reason of their creator.Scotus separates infinite and finite so that God is no longer intrinsically rela-ted to created things: ‘within the finite realm, each thing fully exists in its ownright’.79 Hence reality is composed of irreducibly unique things that impartno intrinsic connections: everything is what it is, and nothing more. This newway of articulating the constitutive units of reality assigns priority to the willas the impetus of ordered relations. Order, from the standpoint of voluntar-ism, is the result of command and decision, or as Pickstock puts it: ‘Positionsare held in place by sovereign will, by contracts and treaties, by decree or fiator else by the quasi-necessity of the transcendental which concerns only howthings must appear to be in the world as it happens to be constituted’.80 Thepolitical implications of this metaphysical shift are as profound as they areunnoticed by students of international relations. For Pickstock, enthroning



the will as paramount, a will indifferent to the good so that choice is withouta ‘why’, puts politics under the sway of imposed arrangements that areworked out with reference to a pre-political human nature and secured in aconcatenation of wills to express political form, namely the state. Order in aninternational context is similarly imposed on discrete units, in this case, statesrather than individuals, in the form of the balance of power or law between states.Therefore, Pickstock argues that modern order, both domestic and interna-tional, is medieval insofar as it reflects ‘a particular metaphysical framework,rooted in a particular kind of theology’.81

The next two chapters explore how these metaphysical commitments playout in the legal and political thought of two iconic figures: Hugo Grotius andThomas Hobbes. Francis Oakley examines the metaphysical foundation ofGrotius’s theory of natural law in a bid to ascertain his role in laying thefoundation of a secular international society. The point of contention turns onthe interpretation of the so-called impious hypothesis, which Grotius intro-duces in the Prologomena of the Rights of War and Peace. Oakley argues thatmisunderstanding stems from an unhelpful historical periodization that positsa sharp break between medieval and modern. This essentially humanist con-trivance, as he describes it, hinders rather than illuminates. Abandon the sharpbreak and it is very difficult to portray Grotius as ‘the author of some novel,essentially secular, version of natural law theory’.82 Oakley notes that the hypoth-esis which is held out as confirming Grotius’s secular credentials is a commonfeature of late medieval philosophical and theological discourse.83 Indeed, theimpious hypothesis is not about banishing God from the theory of natural law;it is about the metaphysical foundation of natural law. And it is in this contextthat Grotius engages an age-old dialectic between rationalist and voluntaristconceptions of natural law, and their corresponding takes on the nature of jus-tice and goodness. So, to say that norms of natural law are valid and binding,even if God did not exist, is to make statement about what one believes aboutthe nature of God. It is to say that God is omnipotent yet rational, and thatthese norms are necessarily good because they emanate from, rather than acton, God’s reason. It is to say that right and good belong to an eternal orderof truth, ordained by God, as opposed to a radically contingent world thatderives its authority simply from the fact that God willed it into existence.The difference is between arbitrary precepts of natural law – something is justor good because God wills it – and precepts that are just or good in them-selves – God wills what is just and good. Viewed in this way, Grotius is not‘the very demiurge of jurisprudential modernity, an heroic figure responsiblefor breaking the ice after the long, gloomy winter of the Middle Ages’.84

In contrast, Joshua Mitchell argues that the modern does, in a sense, beginwith Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes rejects the analogically ordered world that ischaracteristic of Thomist thought. It is impossible to know anything aboutGod by studying the perfection of the universe; that is, by grasping how lowerorders of creation are related to higher orders, and how they all point upwardin a coordinated manner to God, the rational principle of order as such.

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Hobbes also rejects the Calvinist alternative, which strips away this rationalityso that only God and his direct relationship with man remains. Denying allintermediaries between God and man, most significantly the Church, resultsin a kind of radical particularism: without the Church each man must readScripture for himself, and so becomes a church unto himself.85 It is in thiscontext that Hobbes can be seen as responding to the medieval metaphysicalshift, elaborated by Pickstock, which prioritises the will as against the intel-lect. And his solution, the institution of the sovereign, bridges the medievaland the modern, rather than heralds the invention of something entirely new.Here, we encounter the modern flowering of medieval nominalism. Hobbesdoes not oppose religion: he opposes false religion. Since reason cannotcomprehend the infinite, knowledge of God and religion can be had onlythrough Scripture, as heard through the voice of the sovereign. There is noessential connection between words and things, between formal and materialcauses. Hobbes reduces the world to efficient causes, symbolised by the com-mands of the sovereign. Thus, for Mitchell, Hobbes shows the impossibility ofan ‘intermediate condition between the state of nature and civil associationformed through a covenant between prideful men, bent by their own self-interest, nearly to the point of their self-destruction. And while he thoughtthat nations, from time to time, may and should enter into treaties and lea-gues with one another, he concluded that no higher, durable, transnationalcommunity is possible’.86

Joseph Canning explores the relevance of late medieval jurisprudence to thedevelopment of modern international law. Medieval jurisprudence providescrucial source material for later treatments of the subject, by Grotius,amongst others.87 It is a mistake, therefore, Canning maintains, to think thatsovereignty and territorial states are entirely alien to medieval experience.Medieval jurists operate with various ideas of statehood; what they lack is amodern sense of nationalism.88 Much of their thought is concerned with dis-tinguishing medieval universality and the reality of political plurality. Jurists,most notably Bartolus and Baldus, resolve the tension between universal andparticular by separating what is by right from what is by fact: the emperor isrecognised de iure as lord of the world, while city-republics and kings arerecognised de facto as legitimate sovereigns. Canning argues that this distinc-tion provides the basis of a ‘justification for a plurality of territorially sover-eign states within the context of an overall universal legal order’.89 Of course,this resolution is not a long way off the particularity of the modern states-system and the universal claims of the ‘international community’, the execu-tive of which is the United Nations Security Council. But it is important notto push such parallels too hard, since late medieval jurists focus most of theirattention on the relation between universal and territorial sovereignty. But,granting this much, Canning suggests that employing the category ‘interna-tional’ may not be entirely out-of-place: these same jurists make an importantcontribution to theorising relations between territorial states, especially in thecontext of rules governing the use of force.90



The question for James Turner Johnson is whether these rules actuallymean the same thing for medieval thinkers as they do for modern thinkers.The test of a tradition, in this case the Just War tradition, is the durability ofa common core that is capable of accommodating historically instantiatedvariation. When this common core is substantially lost, or has been replacedby markedly different principles and concerns, it is no longer intelligible as atradition. It has either collapsed into confusion, or it has been recast as a newtradition.91 Johnson argues that the medieval conception of just war is closelyconnected with the idea of good politics. It assumes no presumption againstwar; rather, war is a remedy of injustice, and to that extent its purpose is therestoration of order and concord. In contrast, the modern conception of justwar emphasises the centrality of self-defence in an attempt to limit the use offorce as an instrument of policy. The core problem is thus transformed: themedieval concern with injustice gives way to the modern view that war itself isthe problem. This divergence leads Johnson to conclude that recent thinkingabout just war is significantly different from that of the Middle Ages, andinferior in some ways.92 Therefore, interrogating medieval experience is con-cerned less with discerning ligaments of continuity than providing a correctiveof the modern approach to just war. The wisdom of the older approach,according to Johnson, is precisely the value it places on well-governed poli-tical communities that attend to the well-being of their populations. The JustWar tradition, in its medieval formulation, is better equipped to respond tocontemporary demands for civilian protection, for example, as envisaged inthe Responsibility to Project. Its focus on injustice provides a powerfulrejoinder to the so-called culture of impunity. And in this wisdom, Johnsonargues, the medieval conception of just war is by ‘no means outmoded orirrelevant’.93

The confluence of law and war suggests to James Muldoon instructiveparallels between the Church’s sense of universal mission and the UnitedNations’ role as custodian of world order. Like Canning, Muldoon sees theideas of sovereignty and statehood as having roots in medieval jur-isprudence.94 But, even as these claims coalesced into a system of legallyequal states, evidence of hierarchy remained. Muldoon observes that thepapal conception of world order assumes the unity of all humankind, a worldcommunity that has its own distinct standards; hence the correspondingtheory of papal responsibility, according to which all human beings are to bebrought to the one true faith. This responsibility includes, paralleling twen-tieth century modernisation theory, the development of barbarian societies bypromoting Christian standards of civility. Muldoon argues that set againstthis backdrop, the notion of a sharp break dividing medieval and moderncannot stand: ‘We continue to operate within a world view created by twelfthand thirteenth century popes and canon lawyers’.95 Humanitarian interven-tion is simply a modern-day version of the Christian duty to promote civilisedways of life, which are the right and true end of all men and women, whereverthey might live. And the United Nations, the Security Council in particular,

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plays the role of the medieval papacy, claiming universal jurisdiction whiledefending a modern Gospel of human rights and fundamental freedoms.Indeed, the underlying assumption is as it was for the papacy: a potentialuniversal community can be made actual with the exertion of enough effort.There is, then, no fundamental break between medieval and modern. On thecontrary, modern doctrines such as the Responsibility to Protect can be readas an attempt ‘to reunite state behavior to moral standards, to restore some-thing like the papal vision of a moral world order in a world of sovereignstates that do not recognize any superior jurisdiction’.96

Camilla Boisen and David Boucher suggest that the parallels to whichMuldoon draws attention, as well as many of those put forward by othercontributors to this volume, must be interpreted in the context of medievalthinking about the rights of punishment and property. The right of punish-ment is properly conceived as having a deterrent effect; it is exacted, not forthe sake of retribution or vengeance, but as a precaution against violations ofthe law of nature that endanger all of humankind. And the right of propertyhas the effect of conferring legal persona on the right holder. Both rights, theyinsist, are fundamental in the making of the modern world, not least becausethey played a crucial role in structuring relations between Europeans andnon-Europeans.97 But, in addition to explaining how modern internationalrelations came to be what it is, understanding the historical character of theserights provides a useful corrective for thinking about contemporary problemsof justice and collective action. The legacy of colonial expropriation helps toexplain the emphasis given to private and public property rights in humanrights various instruments, and to the principle of territorial integrity that liesat the heart of the United Nations Charter. Yet uncovering the medieval rootsof western notions of subjective property rights also helps explain the obsta-cles that impede indigenous demands for land restitution. Similarly, medievalnotions of punishment might prevent humanitarian action of the kind con-templated by the Responsibility to Protect from sliding into self-serving pre-texts for revenge or vengeance, thereby placing such collective action on surerlegal ground. These examples suggest for Boisen and Boucher, as for othercontributors to this volume, that ‘the medieval mind has left an indeliblemark on the journey to what is the landscape of the present’.98

Adrian Pabst gathers several of the threads running through these chaptersin arguing that the modern states-system and transnational markets are pre-dicated on nominalist commitments that translate into subjective rights,sovereign power, and discrete states. Order in such a world is, as it is forPickstock, artificial and contractual in character. Pabst takes as his point ofdeparture the proposition that there are rival modernities, some of which aremore secular or more religious than others. One of these modernities is rootedin Scotist metaphysics and the way in which another medieval theologian,William of Ockham, reinforced the priority of individual over universal andthe concomitant separation of natural and supernatural.99 Crucially for Pabst,these moves carved out, or rather invented, an autonomous secular sphere



that prepared the ground for political and economic activity which dispensedwith any intrinsic connection to the divine. Politics and economics are severedfrom divinely ordained ends that define and determine a pattern of order andconcord; they are, morally speaking, indifferent, and thus intelligible in thelanguage of human freedom and the capacity to make and unmake. Thus,Pabst insists that it is possible to speak of a ‘modern’ Middle Ages, asopposed to an entirely new and undifferentiated historical epoch named‘modern’, which superseded another epoch named ‘medieval’. Modern inter-national relations follows in this Franciscan pattern. But the paradox of it all,he maintains, is that ‘the Franciscan legacy is wedded to an internationalsystem that repeatedly reproduces the very conditions of anarchy and violencewhich it purports to overcome’.100

Notes1 Marsilius of Padua, Defensor Pacis, Alan Gewrith (trans) (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2001), 427.2 Martin Wight, Systems of States, Hedley Bull (ed) (Leicester: Leicester Uni-

versity Press, 1977), 26.3 Later distinctions, such as between great powers and ordinary states, did not

challenge the formal equality of states as at least a starting point for discussingthe rights and responsibilities of governments. See, for example, Emer de Vattel,The Law of Nations, Bela Kapossy and Richard Whatmore (eds) (Indianapolis:Liberty Fund, 2008), 74–5, 281–8.

4 Wight, Systems of States, 26–7.5 See Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 2008), 12.6 Quentin Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1998), 116–17.7 Skinner, Liberty Before Liberalism, 116–17; Skinner, ‘Interpretation and the

Understanding of Speech Acts’, Visions of Politics, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 2002), 124–7. Skinner has expressed reservations aboutattempts to write the history of political thought in terms of origins, evolutions,and foundations, because doing so tends to present the present as the teleologicalculmination of a success of ‘-isms’ or doctrines. The essays in this volume coa-lesce loosely around the view that it is possible to uncover foundations withoutsuch presentism. They attempt, as does Skinner, to identify basic (medieval)concepts that have been assimilated to modern International Relations and whichare used to legitimise some of the discipline’s prevailing concepts and theories.See Petri Koikkalainen and Sami Syrjämäki, ‘Quentin Skinner on Encounteringthe Past’, 6 (2002): 52–3.

8 Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, vol. 1 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1978), ix–x; David Armitage, Foundations ofModern International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013),3–4.

9 Martin Wight, ‘Why Is There No International Theory?’, Diplomatic Investiga-tions: Essays in the Theory of International Politics, Herbert Butterfield andMartin Wight (eds) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), 21.

10 Wight, ‘Why Is There No International Theory?’ 26–7.11 Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought, 10.

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12 James Brown Scott, The Spanish Origin of International Law: Francisco deVitoria and His Law of Nations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1934), 9.

13 Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought, 9.14 Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought, 8.15 See, for example, William Bain, ‘Thomas Hobbes as a Theorist of Anarchy: A

Theological Interpretation’, History of European Ideas, 41 (2014), 13–28.16 Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought, 8–9, 13.17 See Francis Oakley, ‘Secularism in Question: Hugo Grotius’s “Impious Hypoth-

esis” Again’. An influential account of the progressive secularization of interna-tional relations is offered by Hedley Bull. Significantly, Bull credits Grotius forlaying the foundations of an international legal order that is commonly asso-ciated with the Westphalian states-system. See Hedley Bull, ‘The Importance ofGrotius in the Study of International Relations’, Hugo Grotius and InternationalRelations, Hedley Bull, Benedict Kingsbury, Adam Roberts (eds) (Oxford: Clar-endon Press, 1992), 75–8; Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study of Orderin World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), chap. 2.

18 See Joshua Mitchell, ‘Between False-Universalism and Radical-Particularism:Thoughts on Thomas Hobbes and International Relations’.

19 Michael Oakeshott, ‘History is a Fable’, What is History? and Other Essays,Luke O’Sullivan (ed) (Exeter: Imprint, 2004), 35–6.

20 Oakeshott, ‘History is a Fable’, 37.21 See Thomas Friedman, ‘Too Much Pork and Too Little Sugar’, The New York

Times, August 5, 2005 (available at www.nytimes.com); Thomas Friedman,‘Foreign Affairs; Yes, But What?’ The New York Times, October 5, 2001 (avail-able at www.nytimes.com); Nicholas Kristof, ‘Let Mullah Omar Get Away’, TheNew York Times, December 26, 2001 (available at www.nytimes.com).

22 Paul Wolfowitz, ‘Bridging the Dangerous Gap Between the West and the MuslimWorld’, Remarks as Prepared for Delivery by Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz,Monterey, CA, Friday, May 3, 2002 (available at www.defenselink.mil).

23 Donald Rumsfeld, Speech at the World Affairs Council of Philadelphia,Remarks as Prepared for Delivery by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld,Hyatt Regency Hotel, Philadelphia, PA, Wednesday, May 25, 2005 (available atwww.defenselink.mil); and Donald Rumsfeld, News Briefing Following theMeeting of the North Atlantic Council at the Level of Defence Ministers withnon-NATO ISAF Contributors, June 8, 2006.

24 David Ignatius, ‘What the Islamic State Shows Us About Human Nature andTorture’, The Washington Post, July 9, 2015; Walter Pincus, ‘Islamic State’sBloody Message Machine’, The Washington Post, September, 29 2014; KathleenParker, ‘Answering the Atrocities of ISIS’, The Washington Post, February 17,2015 (available at www.washingtonpost.com).

25 Jose A. Del Real and Katie Zezima, ‘Jindal: “The Medieval Christian Threat isUnder Control, Mr. President”’, The Washington Post, February 6, 2015 (avail-able at www.washingtonpost.com). Other Republican presidential candidateshave made similar pronouncements. As Carly Fiorina explains: ‘What ISISwants to do is drive us back to the Middle Ages, literally’. And Donald Trump:‘When you have people that are cutting Christians’ heads off, when you have aworld at the border and at so many places that it’s medieval times’. See BruceHolsinger, ‘Carly Fiorina Goes Medieval’, The New York Times, October 8,2015 (available at www.nytimes.com); Patrick Healy and Jonathan Martin,‘Rivals Jab at Donald Trump as Republican Debate Becomes Testy’, August 6,2015 (available at www.nytimes.com).

26 Charles Krauthammer, ‘Obama’s Guantanamo Obsession’, The WashingtonPost, January 8, 2010 (available at www.washingtonpost.com).



27 J. L. Holzgrefe, ‘The Origins of Modern International Relations Theory’, Reviewof International Studies, 15 (1989), 11–14.

28 Holzgrefe, ‘The Origins of Modern International Relations Theory’, 11–13, 17–19.

29 Holzgrefe, ‘The Origins of Modern International Relations Theory’, 22.30 Holzgrefe, ‘The Origins of Modern International Relations Theory’, 22–3.31 Jorg Friedrichs, ‘The Meaning of New Medievalism’, European Journal of

International Relations, 7 (2001), 476.32 Friedrichs, ‘The Meaning of New Medievalism’, 477.33 John Gerard Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in

International Relations’, International Organization, 47 (1993), 165, 171–4.34 Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and Beyond’, 144, 149–50.35 Richard Falk, ‘A “New Medievalism”?’, Contending Images of World Politics,

Greg Fry and Jacinta O’Hagan (eds) (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 106–9;Richard Falk, ‘Revisiting Westphalia, Discovering Post-Westphalia’, Journal ofEthics, 6 (2002), 337.

36 Falk, ‘A “New Medievalism”?’, 109–11.37 Falk, ‘A “New Medievalism”?’ 112–16.38 Bull, Anarchical Society, 254–5.39 Robert Kaplan, The Coming Anarchy: Shattering the Dreams of the Post-Cold

War (New York: Vintage Books, 2000), 6.40 John Rapley, ‘The New Middle Ages’, Foreign Affairs, 85 (2006), 95–6.41 See Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: W. W.

Norton & Company, 1965), 1–5.42 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, 2nd edn. (Oxford:

Phaidon Press, 1981), 1–7.43 Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, 55, 81.44 Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, 106–745 Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, 106–7, 120–4, 173–8.46 Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, 303–5.47 Burckhardt, Civilization of the Renaissance, 181.48 See R. B. J. Walker, After the Globe, Before the World (Abingdon: Routledge,

2010), 85–6, 98.49 Richard Devetak, ‘Historiographical Foundations of Modern International

Thought: Histories of the European States-System from Florence to Gottingen’,History of European Ideas, 41 (2015), 65–9.

50 See Martin Luther, ‘On Secular Authority’, Luther and Calvin, Harro Hopfl (edand trans) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 33.

51 Daniel Philpott, Revolutions in Sovereignty: How Ideas Shaped Modern Interna-tional Relations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 101, 108.

52 Adam Watson, ‘European International Society and Its Expansion’, TheExpansion of International Society, Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (eds)(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 15.

53 John Ruggie, ‘Continuity and Transformation in the World Polity: Toward aNeorealist Synthesis’, World Politics, 35 (1983), 273 [emphasis in original].

54 Michael Oakeshott, ‘Political Thought as a Subject of Historical Enquiry’, Whatis History? and Other Essays, Luke O’Sullivan (ed) (Exeter: Imprint, 2004), 409,417–18.

55 C. H. Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1933), vii, 8–12, 29.

56 J. H. Burns, ‘Introduction’, The Cambridge History of Medieval Thought, 1450–1700, J. H. Burns (ed) with Mark Goldie (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1991), 2–3. A survey and critique of the continuity thesis is found in CaryNederman, Lineages of European Thought: Explorations Along the Medieval/

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Modern Divide from John of Salisbury to Hegel (Washington, D.C.: CatholicUniversity Press, 2009), Part I.

57 Tierney, Religion, Law, and the Growth of Constitutional Thought, 1150–1650(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 105.

58 Burns, ‘Introduction’, 2–3.59 Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Concepts of Man and Other Essays (New

York: Harper Torchbooks, 1972), 2–6.60 Paul Oskar Kristeller, Medieval Aspects of Renaissance Learning (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1992), 16–17, 25, 57; Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renais-sance Thought and Its Sources, Michael Mooney (ed) (New York: ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1979), 70.

61 Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and Its Sources, 20, 168; Kristeller, RenaissanceConcepts of Man, 2–6.

62 Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and Its Sources, 67; Kristeller, Medieval Aspectsof Renaissance Learning, 57–64.

63 See, for example, Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: EconomicChange and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Vintage Books,1987), 32–3, 36, 70.

64 Robert Jackson, The Global Covenant: Human Conduct in a World of States(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 156, 160–1. See also Philpott, Revolu-tions in Sovereignty, 106–8; Andrew Phillips, War, Religion and Empire: TheTransformation of International Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2011), 86–93.

65 John Ruggie, ‘Territoriality and Beyond: Problematizing Modernity in Interna-tional Relations’, International Organization, 47 (1993), 163.

66 John Witte, Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the LutheranReformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4–7, 102–5, 108–13. See also Joshua Mitchell, ‘Protestant Thought and Republican Spirit: HowLuther Enchanted the World’, The American Political Science Review, 86 (1992),688–95.

67 Kathleen Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism andSecularization Govern the Politics of Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsyl-vania Press, 2008), 11.

68 Susan Reynolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 3–8. The implications of this argument areexplored by Joseph Canning, ‘Medieval Roman and Canon Law Origins ofInternational Law’, 188–9.

69 Davis, Periodization and Sovereignty, 5.70 Walker, After the Globe, Before the World, 65.71 Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

2004), 227–9.72 See Markus Fischer, ‘Feudal Europe, 800–1300: Communal Discourse and

Conflictual Practices’, International Organization, 46 (1992), 427–66; and thereply from Rodney Bruce Hall and Friedrich Kratochwil, ‘Medieval Tales:Neorealist “Science” and the Abuse of History’, International Organization, 47(1993), 479–91.

73 K. J. Holsti, Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order, 1648–1989 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 20–1. This myth of West-phalia is explored by Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics andthe Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2003); AndreasOsiander, ‘Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth’,International Organization, 55 (2001), 251–87; Daniel Nexon, The Struggle forPower in Early Modern Europe: Religious Conflict, Dynastic Empires and



International Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009); Phillips,War, Religion and Empire.

74 See Philpott, Revolutions in Sovereignty, 16–17, 77, 117.75 Friedrich Kratochwil, The Puzzles of Politics: Inquiries into the Genesis of

Transformation of International Relations (London: Routledge, 2011), 65–6, 76.76 Derek Croxton, ‘The Peace of Westphalia of 1648 and the Origins of Sover-

eignty’, The International History Review, 21 (1999), 570–2. A defence of thecontinuity thesis, emanating from within International Relations, is found inAndrew Latham, Theorizing Medieval Geopolitics: War and World Order in theAge of the Crusades, (London: Routledge, 2012), chap. 2.

77 Rengger, ‘The Medieval and the International: A Strange Case of MutualNeglect’, 48; Gillespie, Theological Origins of Modernity, 14–15.

78 Rengger, ‘The Medieval and the International’, 48–50.79 C. J. C. Pickstock, ‘Metaphysics and the Problem of International Order’, 78.80 Pickstock, ‘Metaphysics and the Problem of International Order’, 82.81 Pickstock, ‘Metaphysics and the Problem of International Order’, 81–2, 90–1.82 Francis Oakley, ‘Secularism in Question: Hugo Grotius’s “Impious Hypothesis”

Again’, 114.83 Oakley, ‘Secularism in Question’, 114–5.84 Oakley, ‘Secularism in Question’, 110–11, 130–1.85 Mitchell, ‘Between False-Universalism and Radical-Particularism’, 155–6.86 Mitchell, ‘Between False-Universalism and Radical-Particularism’, 159–62, 168.87 Joseph Canning, ‘The Medieval Roman and Canon Law Origins of International

Law’, 178. See, for example, James Muldoon, ‘A Canonistic Contribution to theFormation of International Law’, The Jurist, 28.3 (1968): 265–279; WilliamBain, ‘Saving the Innocent, Then and Now: Vitoria, Dominion, and WorldOrder’, 34 (2013), 588–613.

88 Joseph Canning, ‘The Medieval Roman and Canon Law Origins of InternationalLaw’, 179–80.

89 Joseph Canning, ‘The Medieval Roman and Canon Law Origins of InternationalLaw’, 185.

90 Joseph Canning, ‘The Medieval Roman and Canon Law Origins of InternationalLaw’, 195–6.

91 James Turner Johnson, ‘Then and Now: The Medieval Conception of Just WarVersus Recent Portrayals of the Just War Idea’, 204–5.

92 Johnson, ‘Then and Now’, 218–24.93 Johnson, ‘Then and Now’, 224.94 James Muldoon, ‘Humanitarian Intervention in a World of Sovereign States:

The Grotian Dilemma’, 232–3.95 James Muldoon, ‘Humanitarian Intervention in a World of Sovereign States’,

233, 249.96 James Muldoon, ‘Humanitarian Intervention in a World of Sovereign States’,

239–40, 245–49.97 Camilla Boisen and David Boucher, ‘The Medieval and Early Modern Legacy of

Rights: The Rights to Punish and to Property’, 261–2, 264–5, 268.98 Boisen and Boucher, ‘The Medieval and Early Modern Legacy of Rights’, 259–

60, 281–2.99 Adrian Pabst, ‘International Relations and the “Modern” Middle Ages: Rival

Theological Theorisations of the International Order’, 290–1, 299–306.100 Pabst, ‘International Relations and the “Modern” Middle Ages’, 312.

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Documents

The Medieval Contribution to Modern International Relations