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Hegemonic metronome: the ascendancy of Western standard time

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 November 2010

Abstract

To date, studies of international politics have little space for time. In this article, I argue that time is constitutive of the international system by offering a genealogical historical sketch of the coeval rise of territorial state sovereignty and Western standard time (consisting of seconds, minutes, and hours). Sovereignty is rightly a foundational concept of both the international system and the field of International Relations (IR), but the emergence of the contemporary method of reckoning time during the Enlightenment also supported the project of political modernity, and is thus critical to IR. The genealogical motive of the sketch is to understand what have become naturalised, global social conventions as historically contingent, cosmopolitical phenomena that resulted from significant socio-political efforts and conflicts. I locate ‘sites’ where modern sovereignty emerged and explicate contemporaneous processes, factors, and events implicated in the rise of modern time at those sites. In doing so, I outline how particular modes of understanding space and time were bred in Western Europe, spread around the world via colonialism, and embedded during the eras of global war and post-colonialism. I conclude by contrasting current challenges to territorial state sovereignty with Western standard time's untrammelled global hegemony.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2010

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References

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6 A genealogical inclination is also appropriate in terms of post-modernist efforts, based on understanding insecurity as temporal contingency, to challenge the promise that security and stability can be accomplished through knowledge production, see Derian, James der, Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War (London: Basil Blackwell, 1992), pp. 3538Google Scholar .

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13 Hutchings, ‘Happy Anniversary!’, p. 72; Hutchings, Time in World Politics. Brent Steele and I have recently conducted a temporalised overview of the discipline, including a further engagement with some of Hutchings’ arguments, see Hom and Steele, ‘Open Horizons’, pp. 275–6, 285–86. Hutchings understands progressive temporality as a particular relationship between clock and calendar time. The current discussion must, for practical reasons, bracket calendrical time, with the acknowledgement that calendars have historically undergone extensive rationalisation and standardisation efforts, see Adam, Barbara, Time (Cambridge: Polity, 2004)Google ScholarPubMed ; Zerubavel, Eviatar, ‘The French Republican Calendar: A Case Study in the Sociology of Time’, American Sociological Review, 42 (1977), pp. 868877CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Zerubavel, Eviatar, ‘The Standardization of Time: A Sociohistorical Perspective’, The American Journal of Sociology, 88 (1982), pp. 123CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Zerubavel, Eviatar, The Seven Day Circle: The History and Meaning of the Week (New York: The Free Press, 1985)Google Scholar ; Zerubavel, Eviatar, ‘Calendars and History: A Comparative Study of the Social Organization of National Memory’, in Olick, Jeffrey K. (ed.), States of Memory: Continuities, Conflicts, and Transformations in National Retrospection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 2003), pp. 315337CrossRefGoogle Scholar . It is likely that the rise of territorial sovereign states produced and was produced in part by increased interests and capabilities in controlling all of the manners of time reckoning of their populaces.

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18 Philpott, , Revolutions in Sovereignty, p. 16, fn. 7Google Scholar . Landes, Although, Revolution in Time, p. 48Google Scholar , remarks, ‘Not until the fourteenth century do we get our first unmistakable reports of mechanical clocks’, he also discusses ‘legend and speculation’ about the rise of mechanical timekeeping dating back to the turn of the millennium. The liberal historical window used here is open to criticism, but my investigation is premised on the belief that, no matter how rigorously the window of modernity is construed, the processes visible through that window have been a long time coming.

19 Spruyt, Hendrik, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), p. 3Google Scholar .

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29 Toulmin, , Cosmopolis, p. 34Google Scholar , refers to this shift in preferences as the process by which philosophy became ‘timeless’.

30 Ibid., p. 81.

31 Empiricism and Reason seem to oppose each other in that the former relies on experience and the latter relies on context-less propositions. I include them here because they both oppose ‘the various forms of innatism and essentialism’ associated with persistent religio-political violence in Europe, Williams, Michael C., Culture and Security: Symbolic Power and the Politics of International Security (London: Routledge, 2007), p. 14Google Scholar , and because they both hold implications for the attractiveness of modern clock time.

32 Toulmin, , Cosmopolis, p. 30Google Scholar , calls this the prioritisation of ‘epistemological proofs’ over religious doctrine.

33 Williams, , Culture and Security, p. 14Google ScholarPubMed .

34 Ibid., p. 16.

35 Hall, , National Collective Identity, pp. 77104Google Scholar .

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37 Ibid.; Osiander, Andreas, ‘Before Sovereignty: Society and Politics in Ancien Régime Europe’, Review of International Studies, 27 (2001), p. 144CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

38 O'Malley, Michael, Keeping Watch: A History of American Time (Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1990), p. 105Google Scholar ; Österud, Öyvind, ‘The Narrow Gate: Entry to the Club of Sovereign States’, Review of International Studies, 23 (1997), p. 169CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Warner, Carolyn M., ‘The Political Economy of “Quasi-statehood” and the Demise of 19th Century African Politics’, Review of International Studies, 25 (1999), p. 235CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Standardisation may be understood as a liberal coordinating process, as well as an advantage in international competition, see Mattli, Walter and Böthe, Tim, ‘Setting International Standards: Technological Rationality or Primacy of Power?’ World Politics, 56 (2003), pp. 9, 16CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

39 Warner, ‘The Political Economy of “Quasi-statehood”’, p. 236.

40 Williams, , The Realist Tradition, p. 38Google Scholar . See also, Hall, , National Collective Identity, pp. 2425Google Scholar ; And Hindess, Barry, ‘Citizenship in the International Management of Populations’, American Behavioral Scientist, 43 (2000), pp. 14871493CrossRefGoogle Scholar , who has referred to the modern notion of citizenry as a form of international population management.

41 For instance, see Osiander, ‘Before Sovereignty’, p. 144.

42 Toulmin, , Cosmopolis, p. 67Google Scholar .

43 Ibid., p. 68.

44 Ibid., p. 107.

45 Ibid., p. 62.

46 Ibid., p. 114.

47 Ibid., p. 127.

48 Ibid., p. 108.

49 While vertical, hierarchical visions of domestic authority coexist with horizontal, autonomous relations between states in most accounts, Toulmin uses the clockwork metaphor to give an orbital explication of the modern nation-state: ‘the Roi Soleil, or Solar King, wields authority over successive circles of subjects, all of whom know their places, and keep their proper orbits’, Ibid., p. 127. This image overlaps with structural materialist theories of the international system as constituted by a core, semi-periphery, and periphery, see Wallerstein, Immanuel, ‘The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System: Concepts for Comparative Analysis’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 16 (1974), pp. 387415CrossRefGoogle Scholar . Such accounts recognise their debt to an iconic rationalist, Karl Marx, but pay little homage to the cosmopolitical roots underpinning his philosophy.

50 Toulmin, , Cosmopolis, pp. 127128Google Scholar , also points out that the Enlightenment version of cosmopolis argues against a secularised state because it retains the belief that ‘Everything in the natural order testifies to God's dominion over Nature. That dominion extends through the entire fabric of the world, natural or human, and is apparent on every level of experience.’

51 Evidence of the diffusion of this idea from Europe can be found in the writing of the US constitution, which was conceived by American Federalists as ‘“a machine that would go of itself”, like the deist's perfect watch’, O'Malley, Keeping Watch, p. 27.

52 Spruyt, , The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, p. 36Google Scholar .

53 Any references to the Church denote the Roman Catholic variety.

54 Spruyt, , The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, p. 70Google Scholar . See also, Foucault, Michel, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1995), p. 150Google Scholar .

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56 Ibid., p. 18, see also, p. 33.

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58 Ibid., p. 56.

59 Ibid., p. 54.

60 Ibid., p. 58.

61 Ibid., p. 51. For current purposes, I define mechanical timekeeping as utilising stored energy in moving parts. More nuanced treatments include Dohrn-van Rossum, History of the Hour; Landes, Revolution in Time; Cipolla, Carlo M., Clocks and Culture, 1300–1700 (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003)Google Scholar ; Mooij, J. J. A., Time and Mind: The History of a Philosophical Problem, trans. Peter Mason (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

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63 Ibid., who also points out that a ‘tower is no place for a water clock’ because ‘lofty exposures make it very difficult to keep water from cooling and freezing’.

64 Ibid., p. 48.

65 Ibid., pp. 58–9.

66 Spruyt, , The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, p. 36Google Scholar .

67 Philpott, , Revolutions in Sovereignty, p. 14Google Scholar ; Spruyt, , The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, p. 36Google Scholar , claims that, as early as 1300, city-states and city-leagues represented a significant challenge to the Church, the Holy Roman Empire, and feudal obligations.

68 Philpott, , Revolutions in Sovereignty, p. 125Google Scholar .

69 Ibid., pp. 145–6. In addition, the growing urban masses were highly individuated, disconnected from the socio-economic predictability of rural communities, and lacking in consistent political influence, which may have made them more susceptible to Reformation efforts. On the urban character of the Reformation, see, Scribner, R. W., Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (Hambledon: Continuum, 1987)Google Scholar . For a discussion of the link between social atomisation and mass mobilisation, see Kornhauser, William, The Politics of Mass Society (Glencoe, IL: The Free Press, 1959)Google Scholar .

70 Spruyt, , The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, p. 150Google Scholar . For a counter-argument, see Philpott, , Revolutions in Sovereignty, p. 21Google Scholar .

71 Landes, , Revolution in Time, p. 76Google Scholar .

72 Spruyt, , The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, p. 74Google Scholar .

73 Ibid., In this way, the rise of commerce in cities displayed the power of the market to produce specific types of citizens – in this case modern, time-conscious ones – through the lure of economic security. On the ‘civilizing’ abilities of market economies, see Hindess, Barry, ‘Neo-liberal Citizenship’, Citizenship Studies, 6 (2002), p. 139CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

74 Spruyt, , The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, p. 74Google Scholar .

75 Ibid.

76 Landes, , Revolution in Time, p. 75Google Scholar .

77 See Spruyt, , The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, pp. 89, 163Google Scholar , for a similar treatment of the rationalisation of revenue extraction in cities.

78 Landes, , Revolution in Time, p. 75Google Scholar .

79 Rossum, Dohrn-van, History of the Hour, p. 237Google Scholar .

80 Ibid., p. 239.

81 Ibid., pp. 234–5.

82 Ibid., p. 235.

83 Ibid.

84 Ibid.

85 Ibid., p. 236.

86 Ibid.

87 Spruyt, , The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, p. 105Google Scholar .

88 For a critical appraisal of such accounts, see Walker, ‘State Sovereignty and the Articulation of Political Space/Time’, p. 450.

89 Spruyt, , The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, pp. 1819, 62Google Scholar , also understands division of labour, on which capitalism is based, as partially due to the rise of cities.

90 Hall, , National Collective Identity, p. 21Google Scholar .

91 Ibid., p. 22.

92 Giddens, , The Constitution of Society, p. 144Google Scholar , contends that this understanding ‘is surely one of the most distinctive features of modern capitalism’.

93 Landes, , Revolution in Time, p. 240Google Scholar ; Thompson, E. P., ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past and Present, 38 (1967), pp. 60, 7179CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

94 Landes, , Revolution in Time, p. 240Google Scholar .

95 Rossum, Dohrn-van, History of the Hour, p. 8Google Scholar .

96 Hanson, , Time and Revolution, p. viiiGoogle Scholar .

97 Giddens, quoted in Tucker, Kenneth H. Jr., Anthony Giddens and Modern Social Theory (London: Sage, 1998), p. 113CrossRefGoogle Scholar . It must be noted that, in addition to capitalism, control of time became a major part of many other aspects of modern life. The treatment of factories (and later schools) in this article is not exhaustive of the sites of temporalised command-obedience during the rise of modernity. See Foucault, , Discipline and Punish, pp. 149155, 195228Google Scholar , whose examination of panopticism points out the importance of temporality in the disciplining of soldiers, students, prison inmates, and hospital patients, among others.

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101 Landes, , Revolution in Time, p. 241Google Scholar ; lateness was one of the most egregious errors an employee could commit, while a personal clock was often offered as a prize to productive workers.

102 Ibid.

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104 See O'Malley, Keeping Watch.

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107 Thompson, ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, p. 85.

108 Hanson, , Time and Revolution, p. viiiGoogle Scholar .

109 Ibid., p. 52. The rise of leisure time parallels an emerging distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ time, see Kern, , The Culture of Time and Space, p. 34Google Scholar .

110 Spruyt, , The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, p. 61Google Scholar .

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114 Ibid., p. 110.

115 Ibid.

116 Ibid., p. 111.

117 Ibid., p. 116.

118 Ibid., p. 115.

119 Ibid., p. 168.

120 The short treatment here summarises a centuries-long process of discovery, see Ibid.; Howse, Derek, Greenwich Time and the Discovery of the Longitude (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980)Google Scholar .

121 Landes, , Revolution in Time, p. 111Google Scholar . A chronometer was generally understood to require greater expense and exactitude than common timekeepers of the era, Landes, , Revolution in Time, p. 310Google Scholar .

122 Landes, , Revolution in Time, p. 135Google Scholar , and chap. 18.

123 I take ‘peripheral’ to denote cultures that were ‘pushed aside, enslaved, and in most conceivable fashions exploited’ by European ‘commercial quasi-military enterprises and the settlers that followed on their heels’, Hall, , National Collective Identity, p. 100Google Scholar .

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127 Telegraphs had originally been installed to aid in ‘imperial defense’ and ‘as a stimulus to colonial trade’, Kesner, Richard M., Economic Control and Colonial Development: Crown Colony Financial Management in the Age of Joseph Chamberlain (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1981), p. 135Google Scholar .

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131 O'Malley, , Keeping Watch, pp. 57, 94Google Scholar .

132 Ibid., p. 109.

133 Ibid., p. 107.

134 Ibid., p. 109.

135 Many signatories were also informed by successful efforts to standardise domestic ‘national times’, see Rossum, Dohrn-van, History of the Hour, p. 349Google Scholar .

136 Bayly, C. A., The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914: Global Connections and Comparisons (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2004), p. 17Google Scholar .

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138 Ibid., p. 8, see also, p. 215.

139 Ibid., p. 231; Kesner, , Economic Control and Colonial Development, p. 138Google Scholar .

140 Hall, , National Collective Identity, p. 37Google Scholar .

141 Murphy, ‘The Sovereign State System as Political-Territorial Ideal’, p. 90.

142 Ibid., p. 98.

143 Von Laue, quoted in Hall, , National Collective Identity, p. 240Google Scholar .

144 Ibid., p. 233, emphasis added. Furthermore, Giddens, , The Constitution of Society, p. 135Google Scholar , traces the origins of modern school discipline to the emergence of clock time.

145 Ranger, quoted in Hall, , National Collective Identity, p. 232Google Scholar .

146 Bayly, , The Birth of the Modern World, p. 17Google Scholar .

147 Ibid., p. 51.

148 Ibid., p. 17. Furthermore, Strang, ‘Contested Sovereignty’, p. 37, shows how such processes also took root in non-colonised, non-Western societies as a form of ‘defensive Westernization’ which lowered the likelihood that Western states might interfere in their affairs ‘on the side of an “outraged civilization”’.

149 Hall, , National Collective Identity, p. 91Google Scholar .

150 Ibid.

151 Keegan, John, A History of Warfare (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1993)Google ScholarPubMed .

152 A. J. P. Taylor, quoted in Kern, , The Culture of Time and Space, pp. 269270Google Scholar .

153 Ibid., pp. 270–1.

154 Ibid., p. 268.

155 Ibid.

156 Ibid., pp. 268, 264.

157 Ibid., p. 268.

158 Ibid., p. 274.

159 Ibid., pp. 279, 290, 293.

160 Ibid., p. 288.

161 Ibid.

162 Edmund Blunden, quoted in Ibid., p. 293.

163 For an account of the Paris Peace Conference that vividly recounts the tragic parlour games of territorial negotiations, see Macmillan, Margaret, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2003)Google Scholar .

164 Quoted in Kern, , The Culture of Time and Space, p. 293Google Scholar .

165 Philpott, , Revolutions in Sovereignty, p. 155Google Scholar .

166 Ibid., pp. 155, 36. Although see Hindess, ‘Neo-liberal Citizenship’, p. 132, who refers to this process as the ‘imposition of independence’, in which a sovereignty based on European-established borders and standards was ‘granted’ to colonies without consulting them.

167 Philpott, , Revolutions in Sovereignty, pp. 9394Google Scholar .

168 Ibid., p. 194.

169 Ibid., p. 198.

170 See Ibid., p. 8; Hall, , National Collective Identity, pp. 215216Google Scholar .

171 Hall, , National Collective Identity, p. 240Google Scholar .

172 Ferguson, Niall, The War of the World: Twentieth Century Conflict and the Descent of the Wes t (New York: Penguin, 2006)Google Scholar .

173 See Hall, Rodney Bruce and Biersteker, Thomas J., The Emergence of Private Authority in Global Governance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Ferguson and Mansbach, Remapping Global Politics.

174 Hutchings, ‘Happy Anniversary!’, p. 88; Hutchings, , Time and World Politics, pp. 160176Google Scholar . Brent Steele and I propose ‘open time’ as an alternative to the cyclical and linear-progressive variants which we argue have dominated IR theory to date, see Hom and Steele, ‘Open Horizons’, pp. 274–80.

175 See Inayatullah, Naeem and Blaney, David L., International Relations and the Problem of Difference (London: Routledge, 2004)Google Scholar ; Blaney, David L. and Inayatullah, Naeem, ‘The Savage Smith and the Temporal Walls of Capitalism’, in Beate Jahn (ed.), The Classics and International Relations in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 123155CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Hindess, Barry, ‘The Past Is Another Culture’, International Political Sociology, 1 (2007), pp. 325338CrossRefGoogle Scholar .

176 See Derian, James der, ‘The (S)pace of International Relations: Simulation, Surveillance, and Speed’, International Studies Quarterly, 34 (1990), pp. 295310CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; who relies heavily on the thinking of Paul Virilio, see Virilio, Paul and Derian, James der, The Virilio Reader (Boston: Blackwell Publishers, 1998)Google Scholar . While intimately connected to time, accelerationism is actually concerned with the ratio of technological convenience to increased activity, much as acceleration in the physical sense is a squared ratio of movement to time, see Rosa, Hartmut, ‘Social Acceleration: Ethical and Political Consequences of a Desynchronized High-Speed Society’, Constellations, 10 (2003), pp. 333CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; and the forum in the same issue. In political theory, see Wolin, Sheldon S., ‘What Time Is It?’ Theory & Event, 1 (1997)Google Scholar ; Shapiro, Michael J., ‘National Times and Other Times: Re-thinking Citizenship’, Cultural Studies, 14 (2000), pp. 7998CrossRefGoogle Scholar ; Connolly, William E., Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis; London: University of Minnesota Press, 2002)Google Scholar ; Scheuerman, William E., Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004)Google Scholar .

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