ABSTRACT
An assault on the financial and military headquarters in the metropolis of an empire is unprecedented in modern history. The horror of the massacre and the scale of the destruction as well as its aftermath in warfare in Afghanistan and Iraq have made 9/11 a moment of world-historical significance. Empires have always been built by war and expansion and therefore have encountered armed resistance and military setbacks, but Paris, London or Amsterdam were never under direct attack from militants, coming from Africa, India or Indonesia. In that sense the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and on the Pentagon in Washington highlight a rupture in the history of empires. Earlier European empires, such as those of the French, British, and Dutch, were outcomes of a form of globalization in which empire and nation-state were produced within the same historical frame. There was a direct linkage between imperial culture and the national cultures of both the colonizer and colonized (van der Veer 2001). The struggle for national independence by the colonized often did not so much challenge the universality of enlightenment values, but rather challenged their imperial application in the domination of peoples of other race and civilization. In the contemporary form of globalization, a period of decolonization, in which independent nation-states have filled the United Nations and the map of the world, has been succeeded by the collapse of the post-World War II division between the First (capitalist), Second (communist), and Third (developing) World. The current era is characterized by simultaneous talk about a New World Order (or Pax Americana) and about a Clash of Civilizations. While the first is a continuation of the notion of the universality of the Western Enlightenment and the need for a global police to keep global peace, the second is a continuation of the romantic notion of essential differences between civilizations and the need to keep these civilizations peacefully in their separate geographical places. The responses to the assault on the United States on September 11 have held elements of both notions. This is the contradictory result of the contemporary form of globalization, in which, on the one hand, there is a growing connection between people of very different historical backgrounds and traditions within a framework of huge power inequalities; and, on the other, a growing disquiet and desire to keep things separate.
