Modern times: half a millennium after the four voyages of Columbus, the circumnavigated, uncovered, depicted, occupied and used earth presents itself as a body wrapped in dense fabrics of traffic movements and telecommunication routines. Virtual shells have replaced the imagined ethereal sky; thanks to radio-electronic systems, the meaning of distances has effectively been negated in the centres of power and consumption. The global players live in a world without gaps. In aeronautical terms, the earth has been reduced to a flying route of fifty hours at most; for the orbits of satellites and the Mir station, and recently the International Space Station (ISS), units of ninety minutes became the norm. For radio and light messages, the earth has virtually shrunk to a single point – it rotates, as a temporally compact orb, in an electronic layer that surrounds it like a second atmosphere.
Terrestrial globalization, then, has advanced so far that it would seem bizarre to demand now that it justify itself. Just as the actual occupation of a country had become the final argument of European nation-states for the realization of colonial claims until the nineteenth century, the effective consummation of terrestrial globalization has become the self-supporting argument for the process itself. After a start-up phase of several centuries, the world system is increasingly stabilizing itself as a complex of rotating and oscillating movements that maintain themselves on their own power. In the realm of circulating capital, momentum has overtaken reasons. Execution replaces legitimation, and facts have become forces majeures. Anyone speaking of globalization could just as easily refer to ‘destiny’.
What the sixteenth century set in motion was perfected by the twentieth: no point on the earth's surface, once money had stopped off there, could escape the fate of becoming a location – and a location is not a blind spot in a field, but rather a place in which one sees that one is seen. The liquefaction ‘revolution’ rolls on, the tides rise. All cities have meanwhile become ports, as explained above; for where cities have not gone to the sea, the sea comes to them. For the super-commodity of information in particular does not reach its investors via highways – as an incorrect metaphor from the early days of the network discourse suggested – but rather through currents flowing into the more aptly named data oceans. Through its old and new media, ‘globalization’ constantly conveys the message that it is occurring and advancing, with disregard for any alternatives. Hence its peculiar independence from philosophy and other manifestations of reflective theory; now it talks only to itself, celebrating itself as the dominant subject of its soliloquies. Briefings have replaced critique. At most, the course of the world can read itself as the most comprehensive form of an act of God, realized through human actions – and no will to desist, however widespread, could prevent their continuation. No theoretical or practical engagement with the present can undo the fact that the earth has been circumnavigated and its peoples and cultures forced into mediation. The worldwide ‘anti-globalization’ movement proves the ineluctable nature of the new status quo through its mere existence: by pointing to dysfunctions in the world system, the critics bear witness to its functioning. It would be equally impossible for opponents of the earth's rotation to escape the fate of participating in the daily circulation of the ground beneath their feet.
That is why terrestrial globalization, like an axiom, is the first and only precondition for a theory of the present age. Even though the scattered peoples of the world have, until recently, existed in their endospheres as if on separate stars, concealed from the outside in their linguistic retreats, immunized through their ignorance of others and enchanted through their own misery and fame – they are forced by the distance-destroying ‘revolution’ of modernity to admit that from now on, because they are reachable by mobile others, they live on one and the same planet: the planet of the unconcealed.
Because terrestrial globalization is a mere fact that came into effect late on, and under singular circumstances, it cannot be interpreted as the manifestation of an eternal truth or an inescapable necessity. It would be far-fetched to see it as an expression of the biological theorem that all people on earth form a single species. Nor does it support the metaphysical idea that the human race shares in one and the same store of unrevisable truths – even if some believe that, or purport to. And least of all does it mirror a moral law that all people should think of all others in their species as considerately and compassionately as possible. The naïve supposition of a potential openness of all to all is taken ad absurdum by the facts of globalization. On the contrary: the inevitable finitude of human interest in other humans becomes ever clearer as global interconnection progresses – it is only the moral accent that changes, tending towards expectations of greater capacity despite an increasing nervous strain. It should come as no surprise if it transpires that the symptoms of misanthropy increase with the progressive interconnection of the world. If fear of humans is a primal response to unwelcome neighbours, an unprecedented misanthropic epidemic would be a foreseeable result of the imposed long-distance vicinity between most people and most others. This should only amaze those who have forgotten that the words ‘neighbour’ and ‘enemy’ were traditionally almost synonymous. Viewed in this light, such terms as ‘education’ or ‘cosmopolitanism’ take on a different meaning: in future, they will indicate the horizon of misanthropy-inhibiting measures.
What characterized ‘all people’, without exception, ‘by nature’ until very recently was their shared inclination to ignore the vast majority of people outside of their own ethnic container. This inter-ignorant constitution of ‘mankind’ should initially be understood as a guiltless state. As members of a scattered species – whose factual diaspora remained insurmountable even after the ‘revolution’ of global traffic – humans in their clans, their ethnicities, their districts, their clubs and their interest groups turn naturally and quietly away from those who belong to other units of identity or mixture scenes, and even the club of universalists makes no exceptions to this rule. To put it anthropologically, one could say that of all creatures, Homo sapiens has the broadest back; he needs it to turn on those around him. Being-in-the-world has always had elements of an overwhelmingly extended non-consideration-of-whatever-cannot-be-integrated. One of the outstanding mental effects of ‘globalization’ is the fact that it has made the greatest anthropological improbability – constantly taking into account the distant other, the invisible rival, the stranger to one's container – the norm.
The globalized world is the synchronized world; its form is produced simultaneity, and it finds its convergence in things that are current.1 Where it is night, countries and people will still lie in the earth's shadow; but the world as such has become shadowless, and will remain bound by a pervasive diurnal imperative for the foreseeable future. There are no more time-outs in the disclosed and depicted global space. In addition, the mindsets of the global market and of burgeoning world-domestic politics besiege the habitual ignorance towards distant and foreign people, pushing together those involved in an arena of real chances for encounter and chronic necessities of contact. The result of globalization, namely the logical synthesis of humanity in a powerful concept of species and its joining in a compact world of traffic, is a product of compelling abstractions and compulsion-creating expeditions.
What was said above concerning the precedence of the outward journey in the history of world traffic now becomes the crux of the matter: ‘man’ and ‘mankind’ have only existed since, after centuries of European one-way journeys to others, the anthropological horizon has been explored as a plenum of peoples and cultures – a movement that has recently begun to be balanced out and complicated by growing two-way traffic. This two-way traffic mingles with the gestures of Europeans returning to themselves; the result of the mixture is multiculturalism, its modus operandi the hybridization of symbolic worlds.2 ‘Mankind’ – it enters the stage of contemporary thought in a state of progressive self-discovery and interconnection as the vague and splintered para-subject in a universal history of the coincidental,3 a latecomer whose emergence, if not its character, remains entirely determined by the chance circumstances of its discovery.