Wide Angle. Printable Pages

18 with a Bullet
Briefing

The New Middle Ages
by John Rapley
Reprinted by permission of FOREIGN AFFAIRS, (May/June 2006). ©2006 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc.

GANGSTERS' PARADISE
... Suspicious stares alert you that you have entered Kingston's gangland. But if the local don -- or "area leader," in the polite lexicon of official Jamaica -- has granted you permission to enter, you are safe. ...

The local gang maintains its own system of law and order. ... It "taxes" local businesses in return for protecting them. ... It provides a rudimentary welfare safety net by helping locals with school fees, lunch money, and employment -- a function that the Jamaican government used to perform. But over the last couple of decades, keen to reduce spending, it has scaled back many of its operations, leaving a vacuum. ... As one kind of authority has withdrawn, another has advanced.

Jamaica's gangs -- each a fluid but cohesive organization with a clearly demarcated territory -- fund their activities partly through their participation in one of the industries in the vanguard of globalization: the transshipment of illegal drugs. ... The local police frequently cooperate with the dons, whose ruthlessly efficient rule can make the cops' jobs easier. ... Even when the police capture dons or their gunmen, convictions are next to impossible to obtain because potential witnesses remain silent out of loyalty or fear. ... Kingston's gang-controlled neighborhoods are just one result of a growing worldwide phenomenon: the rise of private "statelets" that coexist in a delicate, often symbiotic relationship with a larger state. ...

The performance of traditional state functions in such communities may actually have improved as the official government has receded. Often what takes place is not so much collapse as reconfiguration -- what some scholars have described as the emergence of a new Middle Ages.

RISE AND FALL

Historians invented the term "Middle Ages" to describe the period between the fall of the Roman Empire in the late fifth century and the rise of modern monarchies with their own new empires in the sixteenth. ...

Roads and seaways grew more dangerous. Trade declined, cities emptied, and economic activity retreated to the countryside. In the provinces, nobles who had previously collected taxes for Rome found themselves adrift. Some disappeared from history. Others negotiated power-sharing arrangements with the leaders of nomadic tribes, collecting taxes for the new overlords in return for protection. Still others, commanding their own armed forces, simply created their own political domains. ...

Legacies of the Roman Empire's unity persisted, the most significant of which was the Catholic Church.... Latin disappeared as a language of commerce and administration as it evolved into the various Romance languages or was absorbed into Germanic languages such as English. ...

All this fragmentation yielded the medieval world's complex structure: highly localized economies, social systems founded on plural identities, and a political system composed of multiple and overlapping authorities, each drawing on an autonomous resource base. ...

What killed off the European Middle Ages was capitalism. ...National economies gradually developed and centralized governments supplanted the plethora of medieval authorities over the next couple of centuries. The growth of cities and the advent of overseas exploration boosted tax revenues from trade and enriched the urban middle classes. ...The coffers of royal treasuries filled; the nobility, which depended on revenues from agriculture, began an irreversible economic slide. ... The rising business class began to eclipse the lords politically by filling the emergent states' bureaucracies, in which offices were often sold to the highest bidders. ...

The need to protect sea lanes for trade drove the expansion of centrally controlled navies, and "patriotic" armies appeared on land. ... Financing these militaries required raising new revenues, which led to the rise of increasingly centralized governments. These governments in turn established secure borders and customs posts and sought greater control over their (taxable) citizens. To spur continued economic growth, these governments also ended up regulating commerce, policing cities, expanding education, improving public health, and building and standardizing domestic infrastructure. ...

BACK TO THE FUTURE

In the last decades of the twentieth century, as capitalism began to operate on an increasingly global scale, the nation-state and the other structures and institutions of the modern era started to fray around the edges, leading scholars to talk of a new medievalism. ...

With the demise of European colonialism, the governments of many newly independent countries in the developing world tried to bring the fruits of modernity to -- and thereby win the loyalty of -- their people. ... They cracked down on ethnic and regional movements that contested the state's legitimacy. ... Simultaneously, they sought to seduce their citizens by providing them with employment, patronage, education, and health care. ...

...This model...was expensive and ultimately unsustainable. From the 1970s onward, the globalization of capital markets forced all governments to compete internationally for investment, pressuring them to reduce their deficits, taxes, and expenditures. ... And in developing countries, change often came simply as a result of fiscal necessity: governments ran out of resources. ... Developing states are constantly struggling to catch up. In some places, they succeed, barely. In others, they are losing control of chunks of their territory.

Many of Rio de Janeiro's favelas, for example, are now so dangerous that politicians enter only with the local gang leader's permission. The gangs deliver votes in exchange for patronage. Beyond that, politicians and the state remain largely invisible and irrelevant. The gangs do not wish to secede from Brazil, but they can compel its government to negotiate the terms of its sovereignty. ...

Today's postmodern economy comprises ... small, fragmented, and increasingly autonomous economic units that are increasingly capable of evading state control ... what some theorists have called "global cities" -- major urban centers that are connected less to their hinterlands and more to their counterparts elsewhere. ...

As the more prosperous players plug into a global economy and their production relies ever less on local labor, they retreat into secure enclaves protected by private security forces. ... Marginalized communities have essentially done the same thing, using a different kind of private security force -- the gang -- to maintain order in the global cities' multiplying and expanding ghettos.

MIND THE GAP

... What is unusual about the income gap today is that it has widened just as dramatic improvements in communications technology have filtered down to even the most impoverished villages. The world's poorest citizens are thus more exposed than ever before to images of how the richest people live, creating an expectations gap ... filled by private agents. In the cities of the developing world, groups ranging from criminal gangs to Islamist civil-society networks have assumed many of the functions that states have abandoned, funding their operations through informal taxes as well as with proceeds from the drug trade, human trafficking, and money laundering.

Violence, too, has been increasingly privatized. ... Demobilized soldiers and fighters who once served in the proxy armies maintained by the superpowers ... have gravitated toward mercenary armies, militias, and gangs and now provide security forces for the "new nobility," such as Kingston's dons and the residents of gated communities.

The new medievalism, it should be noted, is not always malignant or violent. In many sub-Saharan African countries ... the state's retreat has led to the reactivation of "traditional" political actors such as ethnic communities and religious brotherhoods. ...

People everywhere, finally, are leaving behind national symbols and cultures and turning to local and global hybrids. ... And so the coexistence of local and transnational identities that typified the European Middle Ages has reappeared.

John Rapley is Foreign Affairs Columnist for the JAMAICA GLEANER and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Government at the University of the West Indies, Mona.