by Joschka Köck
… and what colonisation has to do with it!
In the preceding media journal of ‘Glaspaläste’, Judith Fischer made a distinction between ‘globality’ as a status and ‘globalisation’ as a process. If we assume that globalisation has not yet ended, the question that arises is: when did it actually start? In the common use of the term we speak of the 1980s as the real starting point of globalisation, be it due to a rapid technological leap making the world smaller or because of the end of the Soviet Union and the deregulated world order that followed it. In academia there is disagreement about when exactly globalisation started (for a detailed discussion see Nederveen Pieterse 2004: 15ff.).
In this article I will argue with decolonial theory that the beginning of globalisation can be traced very clearly to the year 1492 and the ‘discovery’, or rather the beginning of the colonisation, of the Americas by Columbus. Also, I will show that this is closely related to Luther. With this date, 1492, I will draw a clear interpretation that globalisation and colonisation describe almost the same phenomenon.
The beginning of the European modern era is commonly dated around the year 1492. In this way, also the posting of Luther’s theses in 1517 falls into a time when Europe is marked by a huge departure. Eurocentric thinking (i.e. a way of thinking that is centered on Europe as the world) paints a universal line of progress of humanity until today. But European modernity came into existence through violence. Colonial violence meant and still means genocide, but also the eradication of knowledge(s). To legitimate the colonial extinction in the Americas, indigenous people were simply called ‘people without a soul’ (cf. Grosfoguel 2013). And if they were (generously!) ‘granted’ a soul, they then had to be missionized or educated to become better humans (also through Lutheran/protestant missionaries) and the knowledge of their culture was lost.
Coloniality and modernity – the condition of the European modernity – are therefore two sides of the same coin, or, what Walter Mignolo, one of the most prominent thinkers of decolonial theory calls it, ‘the darker side of western modernity’ (Mignolo 2011). Luther’s Reformation is an important marker of the European universal history of progress and is even considered (together with Columbus ‘discovery’) the starting point of European (global) modernity, whose darker side is often rendered invisible in official discourses.
Manuela Boatcă summarises the central varieties that globalisation/colonisation has taken since its beginning in Luther’s and Columbus’ times: The first is the above mentioned ‘Christian mission’ and the second the enlightenment, which is considered exclusively European. Europe was seen as the ‘end of history’ and had a duty to civilise ‘the Others’. The third variety is ‘development’ and the division of humanity into ‘developed’ and ‘under-developed’, who have to be ‘helped’ to reach Western ‘standards’. ‘Globalisation’ is the fourth and last variety in this model in which the world is divided into (Western) democratic and undemocratic countries (Boatcă 2015: 86, 115), and again the Western standard has to be spread. The world therefore has already been becoming more global since 1492/1517! All these varieties have never disappeared totally but built on each other cumulatively, and continue to do so today. For example, protestant and evangelical churches ‘still’ maintain missions in so called ‘underdeveloped’ countries on a large scale.
Even if one has never heard about decolonial theory, one could understand that globalisation is an extremely unequal process. The geographer Doreen Massey talks in this particular case of ‘relational spaces’ and ‘relational identities’ (Massey 2004: 5). To allow ‘us’ in the ‘West’ to be global and e.g. by flying long-haul, others have to stay local or suffer from this in another way. This possibility to be ‘global’, or the necessity to stay ‘local’ doesn‘t have to happen continents apart. This unequal relationship exists even in your city, in your home. This inequality is, as shown above, not a coincidence, not ‘easily’ fixable, but a direct consequence of colonisation and exploitation that continues to this day, under different circumstances. To not only ‘reform’, but transform, this process of colonisation/globalisation is our common and shared responsibility. And with ‘our’, I explicitly mean not only the colonized.
At the end of my article I want to ask you for your personal stories: Where have you encountered colonial relationships in your personal lives or in yourself after reading this article? Where are you global? Where local?
If you are at the ‘Weltausstellung’ in Wittenberg right now, write your story on a piece of paper and pop it in the letter box that is at the ‘PROGRAMM_PALAST’.
If you read this article on the internet or at home, I will be happy to read your response. If you send them to joschka.koeck@tdu-wien.at , I promise to reply!
- This process was and is a violent and all but a voluntary one. It is therefore based in specific social struggles which always have a materialist grounding (vgl. Federici 2012 [2004]).
Sources
Grosfoguel, Ramon (2013): The Structure of Knowledge in Westernized Universities. Epistemic Racism/Sexism and the Four Genocides/Epistemicides of the Long 16th Century. In: Human Architecture: The Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge 1/Fall 2013. S. 73–90.Federici, Silvia (2012 [2004]): Caliban und die Hexe. Frauen, der Körper und die ursprüngliche Akkumulation. Wien: mandelbaum.Boatca, Manuela (2015): Orientalism vs. Occidentalism. The Decolonial Perspective. Global Inequalities Beyond Occidentalism. Farnham/Burlington: Ashgate. S. 81–116.
Massey, Doreen (2004): Geographies of responsibility. Geogr. Ann., 86B (1): 5–18.
Mignolo, Walter D. (2011): The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options. Durham/London: Duke University Press.
Nederveen Pieterse, Jan (2004): Globalization and Culture. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.
About the Author
Joschka Köck was a member of the developing team of ‘GLASPALÄSTE’, and he is a white researcher, activist and theatre maker. As an alumni of ‘Evangelisches Studienwerk Haus Villigst’, he graduated with a Master in Development Studies from the University of Vienna. His thesis was on the theatre collective ‘Center for Political Beauty’ from a decolonial perspective (presented here).
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