Ladies and Gentlemen,
Before such an eminent audience, I would like to contribute a few thoughts to serve as a basis for reflection – reflection that is here concerned with the autonomy of a branch or sector of the economy. I will try to speak with the necessary and unavoidable indirectness that a philosophical contribution must assume when treating a topic such as this.
In essence, I would like to call upon us all to think more deeply about the process of globalization, in both cultural and historical terms, than we usually do in the hustle and bustle of the contemporary business world and its representation in the media. In fact, whoever claims that globalization is nothing new is absolutely right. We only obtain a proper view of the present situation when we realize that Europeans have been continuously involved in the adventure of globalization for the last five hundred years. But this also requires noting that terrestrial globalization and the flight from its consequences are of the same age – namely, half a millennium old, insofar as we interpret Columbus’ first voyage in 1492 as the beginning of the age of genuine globalization. The fear of older Europeans confronted with the newly discovered extent of the world was expressed as the fear of agrarian and physiocratic mentalities confronted by emerging industries and the global maritime economy. The leading anti-globalists of past centuries were oceanophobic in character. In contrast, today we are more phobic about globalized stock exchanges, which to some degree represents the continuation of the oceanic game on another level.
I begin my inquiry by taking the etymology of the term “globalization” more seriously than has been typical in public discussions. Germans, along with Americans, prefer in this situation to use the correct term – that is, “globalization,” as distinguished from the French, who speak of mondialisation, which is misleading. As a matter of fact, the globe as such is at issue here. But what is a globe? To begin with, a globe is nothing more than a mathematical construction, and is thus initially the province of geometers and philosophers, and only afterwards that of globographers, cosmographers, and, last of all, that of economists and tourists. The globe is certainly not a German patent, even if the first extant example of a globe was made in Germany, as you may perhaps know. It is located in the German National Museum in Nuremberg – a globe made according to Portuguese models by the Nuremberg merchant Martin Behaim in the fateful year 1492. It features a pre-Columbian outline of the continents and thus still presents us with the old Ptolemaic image of the world with three continents, and yet already has the proper form, namely that of a spherical planet. Hence one can say that Behaim got it just as right as Columbus did. To discover America and depict the globe are, analogously, the same action in two distinct media.
In short, I would like to point out that globalization was initially a concern of ancient mathematics. In this regard, the meaning of globalization is entirely different from our perception of it today. The fundamental thesis of all ancient discussions of globalization, familiar to us under the title of metaphysics, can be encapsulated in the following statement: “The form of the circle and the sphere is of the utmost importance.” The sphere is the most serious thing that human beings can ponder. Why? Because the shape of the sphere allows us to discover a way of ascertaining the world’s form. In addition, the sphere is the only shape that successfully provides us with a convincing rational representation of the cosmos. The classical treatment of this view is to be found in Plato’s later dialogue Timaeus, a work of natural philosophy, which was concerned with the creation of the world by a perfect and wise creator. This creator of all things, because he was the best, could do nothing but give the best of all forms to his first work – which is why the cosmos inevitably ended up spherical.
The cosmos is a sphere containing everything: the real beginning of globalization is to be found in this insight of natural philosophy. Hence philosophers are ultimately to blame for globalization. Ladies and gentlemen, if you are ever at a loss for where to find culprits, and should Mr. Martin and Mr. Schumann, and Frau Forrester, who have been most effective in indicting economic globalization for its horrors, one day wish to turn to the real culprits, then you should send them this philosophical address and explain to them that national economies were only partly responsible for the situation. Complete responsibility is to be attributed to ancient metaphysics and its modern heirs, if anywhere at all.
Broadly speaking, the significance of this philosophico-geometrical construction clearly consisted in the fact that it provided human beings with a representation of where they are when they are in the world, and it did so in a novel and engaging manner. The advantages of such a representation are obvious: we feel lost in the world, and would like to know our location. The answer of ancient metaphysicians was the first convincing, indeed perhaps even the most convincing, system of orientation that was ever offered to human beings in the Western world. It provided details to those in search of answers: “Wherever you may be, you are in a sphere out of which you cannot fall. You are in an ordered structure that simply cannot be left behind, because the sphere is precisely what encompasses everything. You are in the right place, wherever you are.” This information amounts to a morphological gospel that was heralded by early philosophers in order to reassure human beings in troubled times, as were antiquity and late antiquity. Cosmic-philosophical consolation conveyed a kind of good news from that world of order that we half share in, insofar as we ascend to the intelligible sphere with the enlightened part of our intellect, while we are otherwise engulfed by empirical turbulence.
Globalization starts out as a geometrical revolution of thought or, more precisely, as an uranometric revolution. This requires careful elaboration: “geometry” here does not refer to what our mathematics teachers have done with the term. As a rule, we are told the edifying story of how the Egyptians, attempting to survey fields of arable land flooded by the Nile, discovered the art of working with angles and radii. This is not entirely false and yet only a small part of the truth. More significant is the fact that Greek philosophers made a discovery in the sky above, whose feedback still influences our lives today. They discovered something in the sky that we do not find on Earth: namely, the pure point, the pure point of light on a dark background. There are no points on Earth, but looking up to the sky lends empirical plausibility to the quasi-mathematical idea that there are points whose only use, in practical terms, is to serve to construct geometrical figures. The Greek approach to geometry begins with the insight that we can mentally visualize drawing a line between two points – which is completely different from what motivated Egyptians toiling in the mud. The Greeks are not geometers in the strict sense of the word (that is, earth-surveyors), but actually uranometers, surveyors of the sky, who with their passion for the sky’s structure set us Europeans on the path to a science of the whole, under the auspices of the sphere, or circular cosmos. Incidentally, the Greeks would not have spoken of globalization, but of spherization, which in fact amounts to the same thing, since what the Greeks consider a sphere is a globe to the Romans.
How do we get from this starting point to our current questions in the present context? I have already shown us one way, when I indicated that the ancient metaphysical knowledge of globalization was intended as a response to human questions about our location: wherever you may be, you are in the right place when you exist in a massive sphere. Whoever is truly wise has understood that he or she can only function anywhere as a local function of the cosmos. Wherever you are, you are a worker of the whole. You are a relay, a switch point for the totality. You cannot extricate yourself from the whole. Incidentally, for the precursors of globalized everyday culture in antiquity, for intellectuals, for itinerant philosophers, for business people, for officers in the field, for far-flung officials of the empire, this entails having to learn how to function outside of their homeland, too – an ability that is not self-evident, as is well known. Whoever has been abroad knows that the capacity for exile is something quite valuable, which must be instilled through training. In the modern age, the Jesuits, in my view, were the first group of Europeans who systematically cultivated human beings to be sent abroad – and indeed with a quite harsh psychological training. Graduates of such training would not be much impressed by the altogether soft and spoiled ways of contemporary human beings. These days, when we are abroad, we demand that the same Hilton we find in Munich or Vienna should be waiting for us in Sydney and Singapore. The Jesuit of former times could not expect this on his trip abroad, which required him to adapt to outside circumstances under the harshest of conditions.
The problematic of globalization in the modern age begins the moment it becomes clear that it’s not just the sky that has a spherical shape; the Earth does too. The Christian Middle Ages, as you know, led to a relative slowdown of the cosmological enlightenment and professed the remarkable worldview that, whether round or flat, the Earth is surrounded by a system of spherical layers.
The historical caesura at the dawn of the modern era, associated with the name of Columbus, is an essential part of the history of our present-day concerns. When Columbus found the way to America, to the Indies, strictly speaking, which to his surprise turned out to be an unexpected double continent named America (something only realized after his death), he showed Europeans the way west and opened up the Atlantic as their new Mediterranean sea, as a modern mare nostrum. His surge westward across the sea had world-historical consequences, fifteen years after his death – I am referring to Magellan’s voyage to the Maluku Islands, which supposedly resulted in the first complete circumnavigation of the globe. The story whose sequel we are still writing begins in the year 1519: the Spanish crown outfitted a small fleet of five ships, with a crew of between 240 and 280 men on board, under the command of a renegade Portuguese captain.
The trip that set out from Seville in August 1519 still presents us with a problem today. What happened? Magellan, in accordance with the designs of the Spanish crown, wanted to be the first to find a way to the fabled Spice Islands by traveling westward. Spanish rulers were just as capable at that time as are the rulers of Bavaria, Saxony, and Schleswig-Holstein today. They sought to corner the market in spices, the most lucrative market at that time. Europeans, as you know, traveled the wide world over primarily because they were hooked on spices. They were addicted to the luxury drugs of their age and were trying to find a way out of this dependence – admittedly not by quitting such tasty drugs, but rather a way out of their dependence on the Venetian monopoly in this most lucrative of all markets. We may even go so far as to claim that, at the end of the Middle Ages, the spice trade was the drug trade – and it is no wonder that not only spices themselves but the legendary profit margins at stake in trading them particularly aroused the appetites of people at that time. Thus the Iberian rulers began to dream of fleets whose outfitting, despite all the risks and costs, made for ideal business if they could just reach the mysterious Spice Islands on which the most coveted goods were to be found at this time: pepper, clove, ginger – the aphrodisiacs of the era’s business class.
Spice merchants stand out among the pioneers of early terrestrial globalization. These long-distance traders believed in the European palate’s potential for development and set up shop confident that the modernization of the palate had just begun. In this regard, the spirit of utopia and entrepreneurship are one and the same: because both are oral functions, both cater to the same appetite, which clearly reveals its insatiability. Magellan himself died in a needless skirmish in the Philippines. Most of the ships in his small fleet were lost to storm and mutiny, and only a single damaged frigate, the small Victoria, returned to Spain in September 1522 with eighteen of the previously mentioned sailors on board, who had almost starved to death. They landed in the seaport of Sanlúcar de Barrameda and, simply by physically returning, bore witness to the facts that form the basis of the entire modern era: first, that the Earth can be circumnavigated in a single direction, and thus that the so-called Seven Seas are connected and globally navigable, and ultimately that the entire planet is enveloped by an atmosphere that can be breathed by European sailors – which, before it was proved through experience was by no means as self-evident as it seems in hindsight. The sailors returning from the Magellan voyage brought back evidence with them, no longer possible to ignore, of the atmospheric unity of the Earth’s surface and of global wind patterns and the climate system, which within certain limits operate in a predictable manner. We now know that not only can we venture to make outbound voyages, but that the return home is just as possible. In fact, globalization precisely means that we increasingly come to see Europe through the eyes of those returning.
This is the exact moment when the question of location becomes world-historically significant for the first time. A location [Standort] – as anyone who uses the word knows, without needing it to be philosophically clarified – is a familiar place [Ort], which in a typically modern, indeed revolutionary way has been drawn into the comparison and competition between places. What is special about a location is not the fact that we live in it because we were born there – location signifies the opposite of an original homeland. Rather, it is a way of viewing a place that we have claimed after having been uprooted from it – a place that we have left behind to go around the world and that we reach again after looping around the whole.
The key word that lurks behind the question of location is reachability [Erreichbarkeit]. This term allows one to explain why so many people in Europe, the Germans in particular, debate location so intensely and with such concern: reachability is in fact the latent and manifest underlying theme of the present epoch. Its hallmark is the fact that those who reach outwards are no longer merely others, but we ourselves. It is thus evident that we have entered the second phase in the history of reachability: for 450 years we have only discussed the theme of reachability from the perspective of the outbound journey and thus acted as though globalization were a European privilege. In the process of globalization, Europeans have been outbound voyagers par excellence, they have held the capacity for preemptive strikes in matters pertaining to globalization and have very much relished the primacy of the outbound voyage, often to the bitter end, for others who were adversely affected. They have reaped profits and felt themselves to be the legitimate masters of the globe. But they have now entered a phase where others have learned how to travel there and back again just as well as they do. From this point on, Europeans are no longer only discoverers, but also the discovered, no longer those who reach distant shores, but also those who are reached across distances.
We have thus entered the age of counter-discoveries and must come to terms with the fact that perspectives have become reversible. To be sure, we discovered others first, but in the meantime they have discovered us, and not only as individual tourists, but as massive waves of refugees seeking asylum. It becomes clearer every day that the others have nothing more for us than we do for them – and this is true for persons, goods, and information. Our experiences involving two-way traffic with others results in a new, particularly bewildering wariness about globalization. We sense that epochal privileges are a thing of the past and that a new reality principle is issuing its demands. All things considered, Europeans have gained very valuable experience through their outbound voyages, with globalization in its active phase, and they are now asking themselves whether they will be able to keep their customary globalizing privileges in the future. A period of self-critical reflection has dawned upon Europeans, ever since they had to recognize the injustice of their imperialist and colonialist one-sidedness. They have to put up with two-way traffic now more than ever, something that they unleashed and incited.
A bird’s-eye view of the process of globalization reveals a situation that we must face more resolutely now than ever before, not merely for economic reasons, but even in terms of our overall moral responsibility for the world’s course. A reflection on much more than the usual five-hundred-year history of globalization has now become unavoidable for Europeans. It is time for them to recall their own project, precisely in the age of two-way traffic and counter-reachability – and thus of migration into their traditional spaces. And this is best facilitated by admitting to a problem that began in Seville in the year 1522.
At that time, when the Earth had just been circumnavigated and the homecoming sailors entered their town, the hometown was for the first time transformed into a location. The basic kinetic pattern of the age of globalization is capital departing from its location on a voyage around the Earth and returning with a surplus on its ledgers. Karl Marx described the movement of capital perhaps a little too one-sidedly, in depicting it as a classical metamorphosis of commodities in which capital shifts from having the form of gold to that of commodities and then back to the form of gold. On his account, the touristic portion of the transmigration of value, so to speak, receives short shrift. Today we see more clearly that capital’s long-distance travel constitutes the secret internal connection between the realization of capital and globalization. The spice trade of the early modern era is a paradigmatic instance of this. In fact, in order to realize commercial capital in the spice trade, in order for gold to metamorphosize into commodities on the Maluku Islands (that is, in the land where pepper grows), the entire globe must be circumnavigated.
Globalized capital is money that needs to circumnavigate the Earth completely to be realized. This is a striking observation, and it already reflects a truth of the early sixteenth century. The significance of this fact can hardly be overstated. In light of this, I would like to share an anecdote with you that not only expresses the chaotic character of early globalization, but even helps refute the oft-heard thesis that the global economy has only begun to engage in speculative cash flows in the last twenty years. The following story makes clear that this is a half-truth, at best. In 1529, King John III of Portugal and Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, came to a remarkable agreement with each other that has entered the history books as the Treaty of Saragossa. An important part of this treaty was an agreement on the already mentioned Spice Islands. With the help of his legal counselors, Charles applied such pressure on his Portuguese rival that the latter bought the claims to the Spice Islands in perpetuity from the Spanish for the sum of 350,000 gold ducats – which were brought over in a long mule caravan from Lisbon to Madrid. What were the conditions for this payment? Naturally, they were made on condition that neither party knew to whom the islands belonged, because neither had a very clear idea where the islands were. Yet what does “belong” mean in the case of islands that are merely known to be somewhere in the antipodes and that are inhabited by people who cultivate and harvest pepper, the very same pepper that Europeans simply cannot live without? The Treaty of Saragossa is proof positive that even early state capitalism already exhibited a fundamentally speculative character. Two kings spent a long time trying to force each other to fold, like poker players, until one of them lost his nerve and became a businessman. This led to the great speculative coup of the sixteenth century – a coup that becomes even more interesting when one considers that, due to the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 (that is, the division of the world between the Spaniards and the Portuguese), the Maluku Islands would turn out to be found in the Portuguese half of the world, something that could not yet be known with certainty absent precise enough longitudinal measurements on the other side of the globe. Ten years later, the geographical facts were clearly established by improved methods for determining longitude, and Charles V is supposed to have been quite amused by the fits of rage that this provoked in his royal colleague.
Having considered this anecdotal evidence, I return to my main thesis: Europeans cannot argue their way out of responsibility in the questions concerning globalization. Having been so vigorously occupied for the last five hundred years, they might now begin to feel sorry for themselves. Such a defensive and evasive attitude would not only be undignified but also wrong, not merely in historical terms, but also politically and economically.
If I may, I would like to conclude these reflections with a couple of general remarks on the social-psychological consequences of globalization, as they are exhibited, for instance, in migration flows. It would be misguided to not take European nervousness regarding this process very seriously. In fact, we are facing a crisis – a social-psychological crisis and a fairly profound crisis over ways of life. It is not easy to transform national human beings into post-national human beings. By national human beings, I mean a social character that arose in Europe over the last two hundred years and has become second nature for how we live our lives in a nation-state. These are human beings who experience their land and their nation as a fortified container – mostly monolingual, rooted in their native soil, vernacular, as Ivan Illich used to say: at home in their own nook and pledged to the dialect of life that flourishes there and nowhere else. If people with such character types are now suddenly called on to realize overnight that asylum seekers who break through the container are part and parcel of globalization, a certain initial hesitancy is understandable.
Allow me to conclude these reflections and suggestions, ladies and gentlemen, with the thesis that we are today living through a dramatic crisis of reformatting. On a fundamental level, so-called globalization calls upon human beings in nation-states to reorient ourselves from a society fortified by strong walls (one could even say from a society that is tightly contained) to a way of life that may be characterized as “particularly thin-walled.” In other words, we are entering an age in which weak borders and porous shells become the distinguishing feature of social systems. Above all, this means that we have to develop a deeper understanding of the human needs for immunity and identity – needs of individuals who to this point have found their immunological optimum (in terms of their social definitions) in regionalism and nationalism, that is, in relatively tightly sealed container-societies whose members have generally believed that the borders of their own nation-state were part of their own personal immune system. In such social formations, it seems obvious to react to what is foreign with a corresponding selectivity a priori. In the case of immigration into European countries, we are today confronted by situations in which social and political immune systems are thrown into a tumult in unpredictable ways – with the result that the search for identity and immunity must increasingly shift from collective to individual strategies.
We see how population groups respond to this controversial issue in a way that can best be viewed from an allergological or immunological perspective. Such reactions are to be taken seriously, because, broadly speaking, we are today faced with reprogramming the human being’s immune response from its orientation to a state that envelops and protects it to one of self-protection and self-care. While human beings in traditional, well-functioning protective states have tended to expect the latter to provide them with immunity via order and provisioning, it will be more realistic in future to increasingly rely on self-immunization. Human beings are now beginning to understand that no one will do for them what they will not do for themselves. In all likelihood, immunological problems (in the broadest sense of the term, including the biological, social, and spiritual condition of individuals) will in future have to be dealt with more at the individual level than at the collective level. This is what fills present-day society with such anxiety about its future. The more the political sphere succeeds in distancing itself from excessive demands projected onto it from a society tantalized by desires, the better it will function under the changed conditions of the thin-walled world.