With the transition to the Global Age – marked by the confirmation of the irreducible diversity of cultures, albeit one that requires taming for civilizatory purposes, in the framework of the crystallized world system – the added time after the official Modern Age has begun. Since 1945, it has been clear that the history-making potency of the carriers of European expansion has expired. The Old World has exhausted its first strike capability in the disclosure of the planet and burned up its surplus energies in two major wars, of which the second was the almost unavoidable consequence of the far more avoidable first. Since then, the agents of the resulting constellation have had to write scripts with a non-European emphasis for their interactions – scripts that perhaps still work on the background assumption that the forming of the world system took place in the known fashion, but otherwise have more important concerns to address.1 Looking to Europe's past has no significance for the projection of the world's future as a whole. The European present, by contrast, has become a model in a different way, as it holds an almost fully matured concept of post-imperial politics – a concept that is also beginning to seduce Americans who have grown weary of America.2 As an example of a gentle world power, it could soon be encouraging others to follow suit, especially in Asia and South America. As far as the utility of history for life is concerned, it consisted after 1945 primarily in gathering together the files for possible damage surveys. Moralized history names addresses for the victims’ return to the scene of the crime – where they hope the perpetrators will also have returned, without taking into account that this only happens in fairy tales. It forms a global Gauck Office that provides access to the files documenting the harassment of humans by humans.3
Otherwise, ‘history’ is precisely what is commonly known as water under the bridge; the decolonization after 1945 and the military stalemate of the Cold War give an idea of just how quickly it flows. In 1947, India and Pakistan broke away from the association of the British empire; after 1953, the French withdrew from Indochina; the majority of African states achieved independence in the course of the 1950s and 1960s; in 1974, as mentioned above, the leftovers of the Portuguese empire evaporated; and in 1990, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the last Old European missionary power left the stage and its disintegration released the world's last tribute states into capitalism or chaos. Regarding the national communism of the Chinese, one can note that it does not hold a world project – but remains significant because it proves the separability of capitalism and democracy on a grand scale – a fact that makes law-and-order politicians all over the world dream. It could, therefore, become the paradigm for a basic line of the twenty-first century that is already becoming visible: the turn of the world system towards authoritarian capitalism.
It would be naïve to think that the view of things proposed here could gain currency among historians and the general public without further ado. The resistance of the profession will ensure that the illusion of still living ‘in history’ remains virulent for a long time. One can easily evade the realization of the world system's post-historical character in the Global Age by continuing, as is customary in the trade, to refer to every sequence of events at both the macro- and micro-level as history. Thanks to this terminological rigidity, any matter can be ‘taken historically’ – in the great night of history, one grey cat more or less is not so important. In this way, none of the things that make a difference between heaven and earth elude the tireless historians. Wherever something occurs, they adjust it to fit the mould of historical material, convinced as they are of the utility of their activities for the common good.
They write the history of menstruation in the Middle Ages; they write the history of projectiles from the Ice Age hunting spear to intercontinental missiles; they write the history of aerosol art and gangsta rap; the history of the ten largest private fortunes in the world; the history of pirate copies since China opened up; and they also write the history of body-oriented psychotherapy in the Sauerland. They write the history of plastic materials, the history of contributions by Afro-Caribbean intellectuals to the critique of Eurocentrism, the history of fatty degeneration among pets in the USA before 9/11, the history of Nobel Prizes and the history of artificial sweeteners. They stop neither at the history of disabled sports nor at the history of seating furniture in Africa and the history of inflations. The members of the profession behave as if they had been treated with the trance-inducing axiom that there is only one science: the science of history. Those with a ‘senior point of view’ write the history of historiography, declaring their conviction that history has not ended yet – notwithstanding theses to the contrary penned by insolent philosophers.
But it would be hasty, at the very least, to take the mass appearance of historians as evidence of the continuation of ‘history’. One of the strongest signs pointing to the post-historical modality of contemporary streams of events can be found precisely in the activities of an internationally scattered guild of historians, whose approach to finding subject matter constantly opens up new fields. Their existence testifies to the crystallization of every kind of past into the plasma for a history of everything. Whether something happened a few weeks or a hundred thousand years ago is of secondary importance for the universal past-worker.
Yet alongside neutralized history, which, like an academic Midas, turns everything it touches into monographs, morally oriented discussion of the past and the future in nations and institutions is thriving as much as it always has. In historical groups and institutes, this form of historical awareness constitutes an effective mythodynamic function that acts as a psychological tool in the struggle of collectives for survival. Thanks to mediological enlightenment, it is increasingly being understood how much the success collectives on the world stage, be they nations, peoples, cultures or businesses, are controlled by autoplastic communications – with self-building histories occupying an especially prominent position. There is no longer any need to prove that the continued survival of mythodynamics in long-term groups tells us nothing whatsoever about the progress of ‘history’ as such.
Against this background, it becomes clear that the European historicism which Nietzsche fought out of an anachronistic, heroic mentality was no more than the twilight of the era of terrestrial globalization. We know today that this twilight lasted for over a century, and entailed the destruction of Old Europe in its last battles for ‘world power’. During that time, the historians in the precise sense of the word were those authors whose writings described the historical complex as such, or local aspects thereof: the five-hundred-year drama of the world system's formation, including the endgame-like ‘age of extremes’. This drama also features the two major attempts at a one-sided breakthrough to post-historical civilization: the USA and the Soviet Union.4 It is hardly surprising in this context that most classical historians are limited to a clearly nationally oriented perspective. The grand narratives of the modern nations and their role in the world were, on the whole, not merely presented as auto-suggestive histories of education and freedom among collective subjects; often enough, they directly supported the imperial pretentions of the narrating nations. Only historians of art, philosophy and economics had freer access to extra- and supra-national views; it was among them that the spirit of academic pacifism had the best chances of shaking off the leash of the noble lie in the service of one's own power collective.
An important fact should be pointed out to critics of Eurocentrism in this context: there has never been a shared plan for European world-taking, so in actu, there has never been a centralized inspirational narrative detailing the actions of a conquering collective either. Aside from the earth globe and cartographical works, the colonial powers did not have any higher coordinating authority – leaving aside certain powerless universal gestures from the Holy See. With this lack of coordination, there was only a loose number of national projections on the grand scale – a world history of Spain, a world history of England, a world history of France, a world history of Portugal, and perhaps also a world history of the Netherlands. As far as the world history of the Germans is concerned, the historian's courtesy encourages silence for the time being. The splintering of political expansions was repeated at the level of the Christian missionary powers. Far from following any ecclesiological master plan, the Jesuits, the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Moravian Church and other agents of faith all worked on their respective neo-apostolic empires.5 Initially, all these histories describing the spread of salvation across the inhabited earth were still written entirely in the heat of actions and their reflexes in the national and ecclesiastical memory. Need it be emphasized that the time has now come to file all of these away in a larger archive? Because there has never been a single actor known as ‘Europe’, only the competing national imperialisms of colonizing countries and the networks of rival missionary orders, the common criticism of Eurocentrism mostly come to nothing. The agent targeted by this criticism is a post-colonial fiction: Europe only exists as a subject of self-criticism and an object of outside criticism post festum. The EU became possible once all member nations had entered their post-imperial situations.