Interview with Jürgen Osterhammel

141 Ab Imperio, 3/2011 INTERVIEW WITH JÜRGEN OSTERHAMMEL Ab Imperio: Your discussion of time points out the universal and global character of the process by which measuring time – chronometrizing – and setting standards became the benchmark of modernity and of the “unification ” of the historical process. At the same time, you point out how the emergence of national standards and introductions of national time regimes created tensions within the modern “regime of time.” How did the time unification of the world play out in the context of Europe’s relations with the non-European worlds? How did this modern perception of time help create different “time worlds,” zones of “progress” or “stagnation?” In short, what rules governed the politics of spatializing time? Jürgen OSTERHAMMEL: The unification of time was a truly worldwide process.As with all such processes, it took some time to spread across the planet and, of course, it created new asymmetries and differentials. “National time regimes” never gained much relevance. National or nationalist tendencies were in many ways called forth or intensified by globalizing dynamics, but not really in the field of time. Even the revolutionary Soviet Union and, later, Maoist China adopted world time. I am reluctant to condemn the temporal unification of the world as an instrument of imperialist mental coercion. It cut both ways: While it was frequently resented as a tool of unwelcome interference in given modes of life, it also made life easier in many respects. Even anti-imperialists discovered simplified time and time-keeping as a resource of political coordination. The temporal side 142 Interview with Jürgen Osterhammel of philosophies of history is a different issue, not all that closely related to regimes of time. “Backwardness” or a lack of “coevalness” do not require precise markings on the time axis. They are consequences of Hegelianism. As for the “rules” you mention, I do not believe that politics is governed by the kind of grand and general rule you seem to have in mind. AI: You describe the rise of geographical studies (Ritter, Reclus, et al.), which looked for descriptions of “world regions” and combined specifically spatial categories with historical and cultural ones. Do you think these studies , which are largely looked at today as objects of critical reading, can offer insights or help us better understand historical processes? In other words, is there a heuristic potential in studies of “world regions” invented or reflected by nineteenth-century geographers? JO: Those early concepts of what people nowadays call “world regions” are a lost continent to be rediscovered. I am always surprised at the naiveté exhibited by world historians – even “critical” ones – when it comes to spatial nomenclature. Methods of Begriffsgeschichte (the history of concepts) ought to be applied to “meta-geographical” naming. Classical authors like Carl Ritter or Elisée Reclus (and certainly others, especially from an East European context) used strange concepts that are now almost untranslatable . But they had a keen awareness of the fluidity and malleability of the geographer’s and geopolitician’s language. AI: While much is made of European “orientalism,” nineteenth-century geographers differed widely in terms of their views of non-European worlds. Can we argue that in some cases, such as German, for example, these studies were a sign of “another colonialism,” a form of encounter with the nonEuropean worlds that was different from the “classical” British–French– Belgian–Dutch encounter? JO: I am not so sure. We have the Humboldtian tradition, which, I would insist, was thoroughly noncolonial, if not anticolonial – one of the great and enduring legacies of the nineteenth century. But, historically speaking, it was submerged in the new Kolonialgeographie after Germany acquired its first colonies in 1884. The various colonialist projects mobilized similar kinds of geographical support – a topic in need of comparative study. The Germans, perhaps, put greater confidence than others in “scientific” colonialism, but only by degrees. After 1918, of course, Geopolitik came to be deployed as a weapon of German chauvinism aimed at the empires of the Western powers. In no way did it represent a gentler approach toward non-European worlds. 143 Ab Imperio, 3/2011 AI: In your work you revisit the old...