Even if the various political orders of late medieval Europe are not viable models for our world, certain features of these older forms of political organization represent alternatives. Hedley Bull speculates that it is "conceivable that sovereign states might disappear and be replaced not by world government but by a modern and secular equivalent of the kind of universal political organization that existed in Western Christendom in the middle Ages' (1997: 254). It is hard to say, however, what forms a viable alternative to the state system may take. Presumably the growth and development of international law will figure prominently in a new world order. But it is too soon to tell what alterations the state system may undergo. In the last decade of the twentieth century there was considerable enthusiasm about globalization and a new world order, ore which limited the sovereign powers of states. But the security fears caused by inter- national terrorism at the start of the new century may serve only to reinforce the old state system. It may be too early for Minerva's owl to take flight.