ABSTRACT
World time is a matrix of problems, questions and new problematisations based on events located in time. World time can be defined as the point when all the geopolitical and cultural consequences of the post-Cold War period link up with the acceleration of the process of economic, social and cultural globalisation. It is therefore neither the post-Cold War period -since it is in Europe that its geopolitical consequences are greatest – nor the period of globalisation – since the process started a very long time ago – but the linking up of these two major processes. If it is necessary to contextualise globalisation, it is even more necessary to temporalise it. Of course, the political, social and cultural consequences of the market revolution and the liberal turning point are and will in the long term be considerable. But none of them can directly or immediately be interpreted or identified. That is why the acceleration of globalisation is separate from world time. This idea of the mutual involvement of events, prior to their linking up, is absolutely essential because it makes it possible to understand conversely why until then linking up could not occur despite the existence of many early indications. Analysing some major events of the 1970s and 1980s shows that the world order has changed (event), that the change brought about by this events made it possible to distinguish before from after by giving the change the meaning of a break with no possibility of going back (irreversibility), that, finally, if so many events accelerate and multiply, this is not ‘purely by chance’ but in fact because market forces and democratic aspirations inevitably combine (coherence). Yet world time is a matrix but not a system. All attempts at coherence which it may be the object of bring out ‘bifurcations’ and disjunctions and integrate into different mediations.
