Is there a pre-history of globalisation?

Abstract

‘If it is now asked whether we at present live in an enlightened age [ aufgeklarten Zeitalter ], the answer is: No, but we do live in an age of enlightenment [ Zeitalter der Aufklarung ].’ Immanuel Kant’s memorable accounting of the unfolding achievements and unfulfilled promises of his own age in his essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ (1784) might stand as the motto for any consideration of globalisation and the writing of history. The difference between ‘an enlightened age’ and ‘an age of enlightenment’ suggests a parallel distinction between a ‘globalised age’ and ‘an age of globalisation’ and hence between globalisation as a process and globalisation as a condition. The process of globalisation would be the gradual thickening of connections across national boundaries, their increasing penetration into previously untouched localities and the emergence of a common set of concerns that define a universal cosmopolitan community. The condition of globalisation would be a state of complete transnational integration, encompassing all the people of the world within a single network of economic and cultural connections informed by a common global consciousness. Humanity is manifestly far from attaining such a condition: further, surely, than even Kant’s Prussia was from enlightenment. That does not mean that there are no processes of globalisation currently under way; equally it does not imply that that process is necessarily the prelude to the achievement of globalisation as a condition. Like the most optimistic promoters of Enlightenment, globalisation’s most enthusiastic advocates assumed both its potential universality and its relative novelty. As the process of worldwide integration and transnational conjunction, globalisation (to be worthy of the name) should be all-inclusive and spatially expansive. Anything less than complete global coverage would be only a more generous form of internationalism, transnationality or even regionalisation, on however grand a scale. Because ‘globalise’ can be both a transitive and an intransitive verb, ‘at once an inexorable material development and a conscious human process’, it implies both an inescapable teleology and a congeries of contingent intentions. Those intentions may be consciously directed towards achieving the condition of globalisation; however, like the malign colliding wills that in their ‘unsocial sociability’ [ ungesellige Geselligkeit ] produce a benign historical trajectory in Kant’s vision of a ‘Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’ (1784), their consequences are likely to be as unintended as they are unforeseeable.