Martin Albrow's concept of the Global Age accommodates the need of a narrative theory for division into phases amid unfinished sequences. It proposes that the era of globalization – in our terminology, terrestrial globalization – must be considered finished, and is now in an indefinitely long period of added time appended to history proper, an added time that constitutes an era in its own right. As noted above, some authors have described this expired epoch as the ‘millennium of Europe’,1 or even the ‘world history of Europe’ – formulations that, however anachronistic and questionable they may be, have the merit of highlighting the asymmetry between the activities of European agents and those of non-Europeans.
What one calls ‘asymmetry’ in systemic terms means domination from a political perspective. The term ‘colonialism’ is a catch-all for the procedures and results of ‘European expansion’, which are now universally deplored.2 Though this label discards the methods of the period, it cannot ignore their result: the establishment of the world context. Colonialist practice was based on the conviction of the European ‘great nations’ – and every one of them felt entitled to be great during its times of attack – that unilateralism was their birthright. But what to do if the time of one-sidedness is over and a period of numerous other sides has begun? The recent efforts towards a symmetrical worldview as articulated in post-colonial studies presuppose not only the endogenous expiry of European central power, but also the transition to a different understanding of strike and counter-strike. The concern for symmetry results in alterity being given precedence. One is now even free to conclude that Europeans were discovered by Caribbean natives in October 1492. For the sorrowful discoverers, it subsequently proved wise to collect data about their visitors; today, these archives are open to analysis.
The consequence of the age of European offensives was (one has to repeat it like a postmodern mantra) the development and consolidation of the world system. This implies the interconnection of the global players on several levels: states, business enterprises, banks and stock exchanges, academic life, the art scene, the world of sport, prostitution, the drug trade, arms dealing, and so on. This repercussion-infested system, as unstable as it may seem, for now constitutes the final working level of countless routines that have enabled consideration for spatially distant, but materially close opponents to become the dominant style of being-in-the-world. In its present definition, then, the concept of ‘civilization’ amounts to tele-realism.
‘Terrestrial globalization is finished’ – this means that we now know once and for all that one is never the first to reach any place in the world; and one must also explicitly take into account that one cannot speak on any subject in the world independently of the respective discourse. Wherever one looks, the traces of discoverers and previous voices are present in compact forms. The most convincing argument against the ambition to attempt new things in spite of all lies in the conditions themselves – although innovation (or, more precisely, climbing ever higher up the tower of improbabilities) is demanded pro forma incessantly and on all sides. Constantly used routes show the transformation of earlier expeditions into regular traffic; ingrained disciplines ensure that ideas and hypotheses are embedded in academia. If the age of globalization was defined by explorations and pioneering, the Global Age was defined by travel schedules and increasing traffic density – including density of chatter. Adventuring belongs to globalization, and reservation to globality. The discoverers in the age of globalization boarded departing ships with muskets, machetes and vague maps, while the lecturers of the Global Age board aeroplanes with reservation cards and finished scripts.
One can best explain the continuous and the novel aspects of the globalization era and the Global Age by drawing an analogy with the saturation of urban cultures. Most contemporary metropolises have grown through several centuries of settlement, planning and building; nonetheless, thanks to regional booms, some major cities like Kuala Lumpur, Shanghai or Berlin are currently experiencing architectural fevers whose results will influence the silhouettes of tomorrow. The constitutive phases of urban formation, however, ended some time ago for most traditional metropolises; what follows is a crystallization phase in which buildings are modified through remodellings, extensions and superstructures – the key terms here are interconnection, optimization and aestheticization. Where only very little can be newly erected, one must make more intensive use of what is already standing. The alliance of traffic policy and culture-city marketing becomes characteristic of this phase; the cities of the successful want to be event locations, ‘life quality providers’ and nodal points in metropolitan corridors, which is why the construction of high-speed roads between capital cities expresses the ambitions of crystallized city culture as strikingly as the building of such indispensable urban collectors as exhibition centres, sports arenas, museums of modern art and branches of international hotel chains.3
Just as one meanwhile finds crystallized urban cultures at all focal points in the world, there is also a routine internationality and interculturality developing in the world system, embodied in diplomacies, markets, academic organizations and providers of tour-compatible music. Similarly, one finds medical institutions, police forces, museums and secret services striving for transnational hook-up. Viewed from areas of affluence, the world, generally speaking, gives the impression of a thoroughly colonized space – or, as the word ‘colony’ is frowned upon in common parlance today: a web of spaces that have imposed a self-determined civil order on themselves, usually the respective nation-state constitution, which has already ceded certain responsibilities to supra-national authorities (UN, IMF, EU), over ethnic substrates. With the establishment of this political-cultural network, the age of globalization has reached its immanent conclusion.
I propose here that the era of terrestrial globalization is the only one that can be termed ‘world history’ or ‘history’ without adding any epithets. Its content is the drama of the earth's disclosure as the carrier of local cultures and its compression into an interconnected and foamed world context. If one takes this definition of ‘history’ seriously, it follows that only the sequence of events between 1492 and 1945 can be characterized thus, while the existence of peoples and cultures before and after this does not display ‘historical’ qualities – though the exact dates remain open for debate. Naturally all groups, institutions and practices are always subject to the laws of becoming; they go through their periods at the quiet pace of varying repetition, and experience the leaps and catastrophes that interrupt longer series. This waiting and drifting have nothing to do with the things that happened in ‘history’, however. Only history gives narrative answers to the ontological questions: how did we arrive at the conditions of the Global Age? What enabled the disclosure of the earth as the carrier of the connection between cultures? How were Europeans able to draw their maps and spread their networks over the inhabited world? And what part did modern money play, in its threefold guise as trading capital, industrial capital and financial capital?
‘History’ is the myth of the birth of the world system.4 The only rightful way to tell it would be as the heroic epic of terrestrial globalization – the novel of successful one-sidedness dictated by the European actors to their chroniclers. This heroic song goes far beyond the usual complicity between the heroes and their singers; in the course of being sung, it unfolds as the untellably long grand narrative of the self-provocation of ‘mankind’. As often as one might vary it, no version will ever quite reach the level of the event.
This hubristic epic, often attempted but never rendered adequately in all its details, forms an eminent section of the universal history of the coincidental, which, despite its contingency, seems infused with an internal sense of purpose. The globalization account is not only a history in the strict sense of the word because, as is proper, it has a beginning, a middle and an end; it is also history in the teleological sense, as it holds the criterion for its conclusion within itself.
We have symbolically laden scenes to mark its beginning: Columbus's three caravels left the ‘bar of Saltés’ near Palos at 8 a.m. on Friday 3 August 1492,5 heading for the Canary Islands – with consequences that will be discussed here. Land was sighted after sixty-nine days, and on the seventieth, another Friday, the men set foot in the New World.6 In the autumn of the same year, Martin Behaim presented his ‘earth apple’ to the councillors of Nuremberg; he brought the terrestrial truth to the Franconian trading town. The end is marked by equally clear images: during the Nuremberg Rally of 1937, Hitler had the Behaim Globe brought to his hotel, Deutscher Hof – firstly to cast an occasional glance at the restoration work on the heavily blackened piece, which he had financed, and secondly to draw motivation for his imperial plans from the sight of that venerable object. At the Bretton Woods conference in July 1944, the agreement on the gold exchange standard of the dollar and the pound sterling established the first binding world currency of the Global Age; in 1969, American astronauts brought back photographs of the rising earth from their moon voyage. Between these dates lie millions of scenes that all reinforce the same point: life punishes those who do not take the globe seriously.
Towards the end of the Middle Ages, the hypothesis that the earth is spherical, and can thus be adequately represented by an earth globe with two-dimensional images of landmasses and seas, did not occupy more than a handful of theologians, cartographers and merchants stimulated by long-distance appetites. For the vast majority of Europeans from the sixteenth century to the American Declaration of Independence, it was merely a tentative speculation without notable effects on their own lives, even after the voyages of Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Magellan had brought about a clear empirical vote in favour of this onetime assumption. Certainly the maps gradually became more precise, atlases, globes and planispheres appeared in princely libraries, and the new media of earth knowledge found their way into the studies of bourgeois households – and yet the reality content of the globe-image continued, for the great majority of Europeans, to be an uncertain and more or less trivial factor. The roundness of the earth was one of those truths that was only caught up by its providential recipients centuries after being made public.
For some actors, however, the hypothesis quickly became a faith strong enough to stake their lives on. In the cases of Columbus, Magellan and del Cano, faith went in search of intellect. For this faith to declare itself, it required seaworthy ships and crews who could be induced by money and good words to accept the madness of the captains. Thanks to a happy coincidence, the payroll of the 1492 crews has survived; it states that the piloto Sancho Ruiz de Gama received twenty ducats for participating in the journey, the marinero Juan de Moguer four thousand maravedís, and so on.7 The implicit creed of the early circumnavigators can only be reconstructed from the acts and legacies of these men, however. It might have resembled the following:
Credo in unam terram rotundam, vitae matrem, fontem divitiarum, populorum domum, et in marem universalem, fecundam navigabilemque, palatium ventorum, amicam gubernatoris vectorisque, et in aerem liberam, ubique respirabilem, velivolantium motricem velorum, libertatum omnium aulam.
[I believe in one round earth, the mother of life, the source of riches, the house of peoples, and in the universal sea, fertile and navigable, the palace of winds, the friend of the helmsmen and the passenger, and in the free air, breathable everywhere, mover of fast-sailing sails, hall of all freedoms.]
Columbus, as we know, was driven by the hope of finding enough gold in the West to finance a crusade to liberate the Holy Sepulchre from Muslim rule – and in this sense too, the westward route would open up the eastward one: this Christophorus was not the last to place the Modern Age in the service of the Middle Ages.8 And yet: after Magellan and del Cano, after Francis Drake and Henry Hudson, allegiance to the globality of the earth became stronger each decade, culminating in a doctrine whose catholicity was a match for any church orthodoxy. Like the Christian faith, belief in the orb on which we live and move and have our being had not only to be recited, but also tested in practice. The statement that the earth was spherical ceased to be an esoteric hypothesis, and began to merge with the central convictions of modern humans. Faith includes the ontological function of ‘being serious about an idea’; it means taking the step from imagining to being.
Thus the account of the discovery and interconnection of the earth tells a story that is a history of faith from start to finish. It tells of the faith of the discoverers who did not doubt that they would find new things, of the conquerors who looked at the horizon until their prey appeared, and of the seafarers who clung in all seriousness to the claim that one could travel around the earth and still return home. The impossible became a reality: they found the new things, the prey appeared on the horizons, and the ships returned – those that had not smashed on reefs and come to rest at the bottom of the sea. For the actors in these events, there was ultimately only one possible explanation for this finding, appearing and returning: God had called them to be discoverers, conquerors and homecomers.
In retrospect, the successes of the European globonauts take on a different complexion. We understand today that the belief in the spherical shape of the earth was not a belief in the reality of fantasies. The faith of the marineros was rewarded by the goodwill of the real – it gave ontological weight to the hypotheses, maps, images, stories, perceptions and feelings concerning the world, to the point where the object itself gained the support of the believers. From that point, the increasing conviction of the earth's being-round, being-whole and being-navigable determined the taste of the real. Just as there are paranoids who are actually persecuted, there are seafarers who fancy there is a water-covered, round earth and genuinely sail around it.
At this point in our deliberations, the curtain rises for the appearance of a great word: the faith of the geomanic on the eve of the sixteenth century was a faith in the truth – initially concealed but then uncovered, once distant but then brought closer. Because the uncovering, approaching and disclosure of the spherical earth and its treasures took centuries, world history existed as action, as a transcript and postscript of the great adventure; because the uncovering and approaching of the earth were relatively finite tasks, the history that tells of them needed – taken with a grain of salt – a beginning, a middle and an end. In fact, the goal-directedness of its course is so suggestive that an enlightened reader would be more likely to suspect some distortion through the retrospective view than a real event. Are we not dealing with one of the usual teleological insinuations, hinting to us that we can draw conclusions about original intentions from coincidental later results?
With the history examined here, the case is different: for half a millennium, the notion of the round earth settled in the consciousnesses of Western people and their media like a self-fulfilling prophecy. It drew a very small, active minority of these into an unprecedented departure – a pragmatic mixture of a conquering expedition, apostolic history and research process. But the idea of the earth's spherical shape did not remain merely a symbolic figure; monogeism was more than a postulation of beautiful physics. The carriers of this true, as yet unproved idea – tough seafarers, patient cartographers, metal-addicted monarchs and noble-minded spice merchants – piled proof upon proof until the last deniers, ignoramuses and indifferents had to yield before the advancing evidence. The story of the Modern Age reads like a long commentary on the statement In hoc signo vinces9 – but now the signum globi is meant, not the signum crucis. The sign of the orb trumps that of the cross: it is this observation that contains ‘history’. As long as the cross and the orb were even, the outcome of ‘history’ still seemed open. The conclusion of the overtaking manoeuvre, which relegated the cross to second place, closed the field on which the phenomenon of ‘history’ could proceed as the success story of belief in the orb.
The globe mission was only resolved for the people of today through its all-pervading success. Since no remotely sensible person would dream of questioning the validity of the belief in the round earth, the new sign paled in a similar fashion to the old; it perished through its own redundancy. Possible doubters of monogeism must tolerate being labelled revisionists. The faith of the seafarers changed into knowledge, and that knowledge became trivial and specialized; the earth-believers of the sixteenth century are now postmodern geoscientists – eleven thousand of them gathered in Nice in April 2003 for a Euro-American working conference.10 On the flight, most of them would only have cast a brief glance from the air at the strange object of their theoretical desire.
In the wake of the new state of knowledge, all pre-Columbian and pre-Copernican notions of the earth's form and location in the cosmos have had to undergo demotion to obsolete ‘world pictures’. With his interpretation of the Modern Age as the ‘Time of the World Picture’, then, Heidegger did not quite hit the mark. He would only have been right toto genere if Europeans had never been bold enough to sail around the earth in their ships. Because the earth was circumnavigated, however, and because there has consequently been valid new knowledge of the earth since then – even if all we see of it at home are the pale maps and their echoes in the ranting of imperialists – all statements about the world made by non-circumnavigators, rooted rhapsodists and shamans must be declared ‘world pictures’ in their visible and invisible landscapes. They are indeed no more than past world-figments, figures with no real knowledge or idea of what to do next, regional poetries from the time before encompassing seafaring. Although the knowledge of the moderns about the world is bound to visual representations to an unknown extent, it does not – as Heidegger failed to recognize – ultimately constitute a picture, but rather the roaring of the oceans in the bodies of seafarers. Anyone who places their ear against an earth globe should hear the breaking of the waves in it.
Schopenhauer noted the following in the introduction to The World as Will and Representation concerning the philosophically sound human being after the transcendental-philosophical turn: ‘It immediately becomes clear and certain to him that he is not acquainted with either the sun or the earth, but rather only with an eye that sees a sun, with a hand that feels an earth, and that the surrounding world exists only as representation […].’11 From the perspective of seafarers and all others active in globalization, one would have to add that in future there will not only be an earth for the feeling hand. After Magellan and Mercator, it became clear and certain that we only know the ships that have sailed around the earth, and only the maps and globes in which the truth of these great voyages is represented. Now we are also familiar with the telephones and monitors that provide us with notions of voices and pictures from the other side of the world.
The success of the earth-sphere mission was so overwhelming that it is no longer even perceived as such by its heirs. The Christians of the post-Constantine era, faced with the wondrous spread of their faith from the Sea of Galilee to the Milvian Bridge, had felt compelled to call upon the Holy Spirit, which had decided that the church would triumph over the empire. The people of the postmodern era content themselves with the view that the earth was always round, and the truth had to come out sooner or later. When it comes to stable triviality, not even a Holy Spirit can achieve anything. Maybe help from such powers would be dispensable if we could call to mind with sufficient intensity how the world finally became the terrestrial orb. Such a narrative would prove en passant that every single scene could have taken place quite differently, whereas all the episodes together, with any number of changes to their content and sequence, could still not have failed to arrive at a state of realized globality. When the time was ripe, the FACT revealed itself in the lives of the seamen and the logbooks of the pilots.
Some ‘anti-globalization activists’ in recent times have openly stated their belief that it would have been better if humans had never reached the global stage – or, having informed themselves, had avoided the high seas and remained in their villages and small towns. But what is that if not a belated form of disbelief in the message that the earth constitutes a navigable unity – accompanied by the doubt that people can react productively to the truth about the orb beneath their feet? The unbelievers would evidently have preferred to remain Ptolemaians. They favour the provincial, plant-like mode of being for humans because they believe the price of the truth is too high; who can find sufficient arguments against them? Speaking of the willingness among Europeans to suffer (and make others suffer) for the new to become, Immanuel Wallerstein declared: ‘It was to Europe's credit that it was done, since without the thrust of the sixteenth century the modern world would not have been born and, for all its cruelties, it was better that it was born than that it had not been.’12 If philosophy too were able to make declarations of belief, this would be one of them. If all that exists is essentially good, then its goodness must also extend to what is becoming. Could the world-becoming of the earth be an exception to this?
The logical consequence of these reflections is, as hinted above, to demand that the concept of ‘history’, in the sense of world history, should in future be limited to a relatively short sequence of events: those between 1492 – the date of Columbus's first voyage – and 1945, or 1974, the year in which the last Portuguese colonies separated from the motherland in the wake of the Carnation Revolution. There are two attractive merits to this reduction: firstly, it can be used to contain the normative excesses of evolutionism, which sought to impose the capitalist path of development in its European variety on all peoples and cultures – in keeping with the dogma ‘as in the West, so on earth’. Secondly, this restriction can preserve the productive elements of earlier theorems about the ‘end of history’ in a minimalist version. The ‘end’ in this case is a state in which, for the vast majority of earth-dwellers, the geographical image of the earth globe speaks the truth about their situation. The ‘end of history’ can be expressed in a near-tautology: the history of the ‘world’ reaches its end when the picture of the world as earth is more or less complete and has been universally disseminated. Once this picture has established itself, it is no longer especially important who drew it first; the decisive point is that most have accepted it as the valid representation of their situation in the terrestrial context.