On March 11, 2006, Jürgen Habermas wrote: Why should we get excited about such a lacklustre topic as the future of Europe? My answer is: if we are not able to hold a Europe-wide referendum before the next European elections in 2009 on the shape Europe should take, the future of the Union will be decided in favour of neo-liberal orthodoxy. Avoiding this touchy issue for the sake of a convenient peace and muddling along the well-trodden path of compromise will give free reign to the dynamic of unbridled market forces. This would force us to watch as the European Union's current political power is dismantled in favour of a diffuse European free-trade zone. For the first time in the process of European unification, we face the danger of regressing to a level of integration below what has already been achieved. What irks me is the paralytic numbness that has set in after the failure of the constitutional referenda in France and the Netherlands. Not taking a decision in this context amounts to a decision with major consequences. I believe Europe must pluck up the courage to introduce reforms which will give it not only effective decision-making procedures, but also its own foreign minister, a directly-elected president and its own financial basis. These could be the subject of a referendum held concurrently with the next European parliamentary elections. The draft would be considered passed if it received the 'double majority' of votes of the states and the electorate. At the same time, the referendum would only bind the member states in which a majority had voted in favor. Europe would then move away from the convoy model where the tempo is set by the slowest member. Even in a Europe made up of core and periphery, countries preferring to remain on the periphery retain the option of rejoining the core at any time.

In the fifth century BCE, Europe was a dubious name and a fuzzy part of the earth. Herodotus even questioned the wisdom of naming individual components of the geobody, “since the earth is all one,” but he also reported that Europe’s physical extension was greater than Asia’s and Libya’s combined.After Herodotus, Europe’s size shrank as geographical knowledge grew, and five centuries later, the geographer Strabo considered Europe the smallest part of the tripartite landmass. At that time, the Roman Empire still flourished and nobody could imagine that the backwoods of northern Europe would ever inspire the human mind. Around 1000, the Middle East and China were highly urbanized while Rome, once a city of 450,000, had fallen to 35,000 inhabitants. Córdoba, the center of Islamic Spain, had grown to half a million and Baghdad was standing tall with almost one million people as the largest city in the world. Its “House of Wisdom” had begun in the ninth century to collect, translate and synthesize the legacy of the advanced “foreign sciences,” notably Greek, Persian, Indian and Roman political, medical and scientific treatises. A few centuries later, Europe was to reap a momentous benefit from this careful conservation of the ecumenical heritage, yet at the cusp of the first Christian millennium, northern Europe was an underdeveloped region with a very low likelihood of achieving global dominance in either civilization or culture.

Around 1450, Europe had put itself on the map with a potent mixture of new universities, free cities, three-field agriculture, heavy-duty plows, stirrups, horse collars and shoes, flour, saw and hammer mills, printing presses, magnetic compasses, cannons, caravels and galleons. Still, it was not apparent at the time of Prince Henry of Portugal and Johann Gutenberg that the next five hundred years would amount to the “rise of the West.”  Even so, the early European attraction to power tools that provided access to non-muscular energy via water- and wind-powered machinery was notable. In addition, the geographic lust of Western Christendom, whose members began to call themselves Europeans in the fifteenth century,  had not only been stirred by the crusades and the more or less fabulous travelogues of John Mandeville and Marco Polo but also by the conquest of the Azores and Canary Islands, the exploration of Africa’s bulge, and the discovery of the North Atlantic triangle of navigation.

Yet around 1950, Europe was in ruins, and it was hard to overlook the ruins or to recognize the “European Civilization” in the patchwork of different states, cultures, histories, landscapes, languages, traditions, prejudices, policies, economies and ideologies. When, people like among others Robert Schuman, Charles de Gaulle, Konrad Adenauer, and Helmut Kohl — to mention a few of the Catholic leaders with the “back to the future” advantage— bridged the continent’s gaps and started to build the European Union (EU). In fact around 1950, the long nineteenth century was finally over. It had come into its own in London on May 1st, 1851, with the opening of the Crystal Palace Exhibition of the first world fair and ended on the 6th and 9th of August, 1945, with “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” exploding over the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The world had followed the trajectory of this period via electrical telegraphs, radio broadcasts, moving pictures and roving world fairs. In nearly one hundred years, Europe had gained enormously and then lost hugely. What she gained and lost, both in her self-perception and in the eyes of the world, was her meta-geographic fame. The “greatest achievement of organized science in history,” as the White House had called “Little Boy,” concluded the European phase of Western hegemony. And where European history did not stop after 1945 it once more became regional. A small consequence of this ‘ending without stopping’ was the effect that it had on the discourse of world history. As the standard reference to the European Civilization faded, the Western Civilization of the American undergraduate course blossomed. Oswald Spengler’s prophecy of the Decline of the West came true but on the war-ravaged side of the Atlantic only. A chorus reaching from Heidegger to Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard emerged arguing that reason had forfeited its critical capacity when it fused with the powers to be. Yet Europe’s intellectual mandarins went far beyond this reasoning to a hyper-critique of all reason, eventually inspiring the interim-philosophy of postmodernism. A supposedly true verdict about all reason is of course self-defeating in logical terms. Historically, however, the hyper-critique of occidental reason made some sense; it begs to be interpreted as an elegy about Europe’s loss of meta-geographic power. The vagueness of the transition from European to Western civilization has disappeared and Western by the end of the 20th century, meant primarily the United States of America. When it won the Cold War during the 1990’s, it dwarfed whatever tangible and meta-geographic strength Europe had once possessed. European history, to be sure, since then, has not been idle; the EU since then has advanced an already developed region even further. Nevertheless, the center of historical gravity has vacated Europe. Europeans are now searching for a way to cope with the global predominance of the United States, whereas Americans are debating how to best exercise the global leadership position that has befallen them after the unexpected death of the Soviet Union. And thus the long twentieth century developed the paradigm of globality. Globality (the condition of being global) which emerged as the distinctive condition and category of the global age in this beginning of the 21th Century it is not supplanting universality but “grounds” it. American and Asian power regions: The more developed regions will prioritize the environmental management of the planet and not the social abolition of the third worlds. The domestication of the Earth, which even the environmental movements cannot but advance, will progress from an issue of global concern to a series of global regimes; yet the ever-expanding “slurban” zones of global poverty will be allowed to fester.

A fifth point combines the first prediction with the keyword of global studies: Multiple processes of globalization constitute and require globality as a historical benchmark. However, globality is not yet a common term and regular item in the language and toolbox of the social sciences or history. For that to change it is paramount to develop globality conceptually, distinguish it from globalism, globalization, universality and modernity, find ways to assess it qualitatively as well as numerically, and apply these evaluations to global regionality for the particular benefit of assessing the potential futures of world regions. Globalism is the ideology of globalization, which in and of itself is not a reliable term or concept because it confuses process and outcome and, furthermore, implies a unidirectional development. Globalizations are plural. They are not one process but a host of uneven developments on the face of the earth. Processes of globalization determine the globality of things factually, but different conditions of being global need to be determined analytically to guide empirical studies about global phenomena and theoretical works on historical and contemporary globalizations.

Globality differs from universality. From Copernicus to Newton, the contributors to the Scientific Revolution worked out the laws of planetary motion and eventually arrived at the law of gravitation: All matter attracts all other matter with a force proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. This formulation turned a local mixture of empirical and mathematical research about the two-body system of earth and moon into a universal law. The all-sentence (all matter attracts all other matter…) covered all known and unknown matter in the whole universe and demonstrated the “cosmic” power of universality. Globality is different. Tied to this planet, it does not jump from local realities to a global or trans-global veracity with the metaphysical power of reason. It requires physical growth on the skin of the geobody. Think of networks. A communications network, for example, can be local, national, international or global depending on its actual geographical reach. The transitions have to be defined but the geographical reach-difference between neighborhood-watch networks, the optical telegraph system in France between 1800 and 1850, and the Internet today are such that one can clearly differentiate between local, national and global. Understanding past, present and future regional histories in a global context calls for spatio-temporal globality studies.

January 2007 World Journal-Update: While still the best possible introduction, it is clear that the above was written when it wasn’t  as obvious yet that Iraq indeed is America’s new Vietnam and that the US$ would as much, skydive against the EURO as it is doing now.

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