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But what about such modern experiences as total warfare and mutual assured destruction? It is a sad truism that disorder and violence have walked along with history, and there are no signs that violence and disorder are going to pass away. The conventional understanding of new medievalism as the world going back to the Dark Ages implies the ontological prejudice of taking the modern system of sovereign nation states for the only possible guarantor of world political order. In the face of this prejudice, one should remember that in the Middle Ages, in addition to the centrifugal forces, there were strong countervailing forces of ecclesiastical and secular universalism that generated a considerable degree of cohesiveness.

6 the later trivialization of the concept. I will return to this point, after a digression about the phenomenological aspects of new medievalism. In order to establish whether the state system of the 1970s was moving towards new medievalism, Bull proposed the following five criteria of evaluation: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. The The The The The regional integration of states. disintegration of states. restoration of private international violence. increased importance of transnational organizations. technological unification of the world.

29 At present, the creation of international society law is clearly a desideratum rather than a fait accompli. But even if one assumes that international society law is already in the making, its advent will probably turn out to be an ambivalent issue. On the one hand, international society law will contribute to the marginalization, and eventually even to the criminalization, of those societal actors who do not subscribe to liberal principles. That will be deplored by radical communitarians and by leftist transnational social activists, who will have a hard time in developing an agreedupon standard for organizational statutes.