Imperial Federation map of the world showing the extent of the British Empire in 1886. Cornell University Library.
Mohamed Amer Meziane’s book The States of the Earth (Des empires sous la terre in the French original) is timely and challenging. It speaks to our age in which we are thrown into multiple crises and are forced to grapple with the immense complexity of the powers responsible for them, a complexity that appears to be beyond the reach of conceptual frameworks and strategies thus far used to tackle “worldly” and “planetary” problems. The book presents a unique alternative to preexisting visions of world history, especially those based on progressive modernism or historical stage theory. With its original combination of historical analysis and philosophical conceptualization, the book invites us to reconsider the spatiotemporality of the reality we confront today, structured by the triad of capitalism-nations-states. The way it connects the colonization of the world with that of the earth can ultimately help our imagining of a horizon where various realms of struggle can meet toward planetary liberation. In this interview, I pose questions to Mohamed Amer Meziane about two of his main concepts: “imperiality” and “secularization.” The interview originally took place at Woodbine in Ridgewood, Queens in September.
—Sabu Kohso
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Imperiality
Sabu Kohso: In The States of the Earth, imperiality is the concept that weaves together the history of the West and its colonization of the world and the earth. At the beginning was the Roman Catholic Empire and its collapse—from which disseminated the ghost of the Empire and its secularized ingredients. And these disseminations seem to be what you call “imperiality.” The ghost created the Orient as its other and began its colonization. But what had taken place previously was “an imperial translation” from East to West, from the older empires in Asia to the Roman Catholic Empire; and when this geographical or spatial movement was temporalized, the idea of progress was created, with the West at its zenith. Along this line, the book develops analyses of three models of the nation-state or three epitomes of Europe: France, England, and Germany, which were formed only by imperiality, namely by creating their own colonies across the world. This is the origin of what we call “colonialism,” based on the expansive drive of the nation-state. In your formulation, imperiality is “empire = x,” as a sort of variable that haunts all nation-states and seduces them to adopt it. I have a personal interest in applying this formulation to non-Western history. For instance, so-called “Pan-Asianism” appeared in different nations in the nineteenth century, especially India, China, and Japan, to create “One Asia” to fight against Western colonization, which was then transmuted to undergird these countries’ own expansionism. (One example was the Japanese Empire’s project called the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere in 1940.) In other words, it was due to the interventions of Western colonialism, with its imperiality, that Asian nations came to conceive their own imperiality and became expansionist. In this way, the imperial form infected all nation-states in the world, like a pandemic, including even those nation-states that achieved independence from the colonial West. This means that no nation-state exists without imperiality, that is, without internalizing at least a kernel of imperialism. Could you reiterate your thoughts on imperiality and its role in the making of our world?
Mohamed Amer Meziane: Imperiality is what makes modern nation-states claim absolute power. Absolute power is what happens when states assert that nothing is beyond their power to kill, to dispossess people from their land, and to destroy their mode of life. They claim to be absolute powers and use violence to protect themselves against any threats. When killing civilians is justified by virtue of the security of a sacralized nation, what we have is secularization. The power to kill in the name of God is replaced by the right to kill in the name of security. These kinds of transfers pertain to secularization. Before claiming to protect the security of the nation, most Western states—including what is now called the Vatican—thought they were representing God on earth. They did so by claiming what I call imperiality, the imperial title, without being the legitimate heirs of the Roman Emperor. When Henri VIII creates the Church of England, he asserts: “This Realm is an Empire.” So imperiality is the theologico-political language of sovereignty. And the reference to the Kingdom of Christ was always a claim to be the successor of Caesar. I simply argue that this imperiality started before 1492 and then became colonial. This is what is at stake when the Spanish Empire both colonized the Americas and racialized Jews and Muslims in Spain: a colonial imperiality that they conceive as the Crusades, not as colonialism per se. And it’s funny to remember that Crusaders were criticized by Muslims not because they were fanatics but because they obeyed their kings instead of following their prophets. The States of the Earth shows that states could only materialize their desire for empire, for being God on Earth, by colonizing land outside Europe. So, it’s the failure of imperial unity in Europe that led to the spread of colonialism elsewhere. Hence there are now multiple competing empires without emperors, not one emperor ruling over the entire world. Now, the question regarding non-Western imperialities is posed by the book but not fully examined in it. One of the things at stake in the concept of imperiality is nevertheless to understand how the modern nation-state and capitalism were globalized in ways that have transformed non-Western societies and politics into something new, for better and for worse.
Secularization/Secularocene
SK: You argue that imperiality as the secularization of the Roman Catholic Empire affected the formation of modern Western ideas, both metaphysical and political: universalism, the Enlightenment, the slogans of the French Revolution (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity), Hegelian philosophy, and so on. Secularization seems to be the catalyst for imperiality to develop the triad of capitalism-nation-state, whose essence is the expansionist drive to conquer the territory of other nations as well as the planetary body. Capitalism that endlessly commodifies the earth could not have come into existence without secularization. But to me, “secular” is a difficult concept. It seems to be clear and simple—profane vs. sacred, plebeian vs. aristocrat, and so on—but it is complex. When I was young, I used to think of it simply as a positive thing—like “we are secular and materialist and we fight against sanctified authority and idealism.” But I am learning from your book that it is not so simple. The usage of “secular” also has a long and winding history. Could you describe your own concept of “secular” and the idea of the Secularocene?
MAM: Let me give an example. At the end of the eighteenth century, European miners still feared that they could meet demons underground. This shows that our perception of the underground world has since been disenchanted. The “states of the earth” are also states of heaven on earth. The world we live in has never abandoned the search for heaven. It tried to make heaven on earth and ended up destroying the earth itself. This means that there were no “heavenly empires”—not the Christian Medieval Empire or the colonial monarchies of the Renaissance. Hence the subtitle of the book (An Ecological and Racial History of Secularization): when states became of the earth and not of heaven, they destroyed the earth by forcing the earth to bear the burden of heaven. This is what I call secularization. I do not think that Christianity as such led to climate change. I argue that the racialization of non-European populations led to very material crimes perpetrated by a very material colonialism. These crimes eventually murdered Christ by ransacking nature and transforming Western Christendom—not Christianity per se—into extractivism. Without colonization, imperial Christendom would have never morphed into capitalism.
We have known, since at least the emergence of Black Ecology in the 1970s with people like Nathan Hare, that racialized communities in the North and populations in the Global South have less ecocidal impact on the planet but suffer more from the consequences of climate change. My book participates in criticizing these colonial dimensions of the Anthropocene. But I am also trying to excavate the racial history of the climate from an Arab and (North) African perspective. How does the specific racialization of so-called “Orientals,” from Asia to Africa, participate in climate change? This focus on Orientalism shows that there was an acceleration of Western imperial expansion during the nineteenth century. From 1492 onwards, Europe colonizes the Americas, it enslaves Black people, and it dispossesses Indigenous people. It is predominantly Christian and oriented towards either erasing or converting people. I argue that, in the eighteenth century, European empires begin their expansion towards Asia and Africa. The crucial role of Orientalism during the nineteenth century expresses the shift that results from the military defeats of the Ottoman Empire against Russia. But without fossil fuels, this new hegemony would have been simply impossible. Hence, the book proposes an environmental history of Orientalism, a dimension that postcolonial critics did not analyze, as they focused mainly on discourse and representation. It is well known, for example, that Muhammad ceased to be seen as the devil from eighteenth century onward. He started to be depicted as a great man who unified the Arabs into a nation. So, before Orientalism became colonial, Orientalism underwent a process of secularization, which is not the same as secularism. This is the reason why Napoleon’s statement in Egypt is so puzzling: “We are true Muslims.” It testifies to the fact that Orientalism becomes a colonial force when empires stop converting Muslims and Arabs to Christianity. This is what I call imperial secularization.
My itinerary for the question of secularization thus began while I was experiencing the rise of anti-Muslim racism in Europe. My first name is Mohamed. I do not experience racism because white people first see me as non-white but primarily because they identify my name with a religion called Islam. September 11th changed how Arab Americans are seen in the US and more generally how Muslims are perceived globally. The experience of being racialized as Muslim challenges accounts of race and racism in terms of color that are predominant in critical race theory. Indeed, it is via categories that condemn Arabs for confounding religion and politics that they are racialized, dismissed, dehumanized, and sometimes brutally murdered. The book focuses on nineteenth-century France and Algeria before comparing them to other colonial situations such as Britain and India. It does so because I think what happened in Algeria is a typical example of how racism is deployed and denied when it racializes religion. A historical example I give in the book is that of the colonial category of the “Christian Muslim” in Algeria. When Indigenous people converted to Christianity, they remained Muslims. It means that Islam is now a sign of “race.” And paradoxically, this happens when empires become secular and reject the systematic conversion of Indigenous subjects to Christianity. Hence, I say that race is the inconvertible. When the Spanish Empire forces Jews and Muslims to convert to Christianity during the Reconquista, they also assume that these conversos are not fully Christian. Something remains inconvertible. This inconvertibility is what is called the impurity of blood. During the fifteenth century, inconvertibility puts Christianity in a state of crisis because the universality of the Church is suddenly impossible. As soon as one analyzes forms of racism such as anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, the racialization of religion becomes unavoidable. Thus, secularization is not an abstract concept but a dimension of racism. This dimension of the problem is what makes anti-racist activism more difficult when you are Muslim: because you are always susceptible to being accused of “Islamism” and thus of being defined as a direct threat that needs to be eliminated. The terrible consequences of this are very clear today in the Middle East and in Euro-America.
An Outside of Imperiality and Secularization
SK: There are communities and territories in the world that sustain autonomy or semi-autonomy from the territorialization of capitalism-nation-state by their resistance, such as the people of Palestine, the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Kurds in Rojava in northern and eastern Syria, Indigenous communities on various continents, and smaller communities engaged in land-based struggles such as Sanrizuka, the ZAD, and Stop Cop City. Some of these preserve or nurture singular relationships with the environment or the planetary body, which seem to be different from relationships infected by imperiality and secularization. Is there an outside to imperiality and secularization? Or are there chasms or pores in which alternatives may exist and grow? Would you consider these communities I mentioned as outsides, or as chasms? Can you think of any territory external or alien to imperiality?
MAM: I had a debate with Étienne Balibar and Talal Asad at Columbia, years ago, about this very difficult question you are asking. It led me to publish an essay titled “The Deafness of the State” in the academic journal Political Theology, to which Asad responded. My argument is that violence would not be needed if the state-capitalist system was a totality. It is rather a never-ending process of totalization, which is not the same as a totality because it is never fully achieved. There is no outside but there are chasms and breaches within the “states of things.” Protests are always vocal, physical, and rhythmic. States translate them into rights, which are needed. But this dynamic is also a form of counter-insurrection because it seeks to neutralize or put an end to the movements of insurrection or contestation that it responds to. Hence, I argue that the state is deaf to voices of protest. While it is certainly possible to develop autonomous communes, I think the state always looks at forms of political autonomy with deep suspicion. So the sustainability of these forms of life is very precarious, alas, and the question of their “planetarization”—they are local after all—is a truly difficult one.
The World and the Earth
SK: Ontologies of totality seem to be the ultimate horizon of secularization. It seems that your philosophy of world history assumes an immanence of the world. On the other hand, as far as I know, you are one of the few thinkers who explicitly introduce the earth into world history. In this context, is the earth a passive object of secularization, or something more subjective? An active agent of what we call “history”? I ask this question because I want to envision a possible horizon for planetary liberation, involving a coalition between anti-colonial and ecological struggles, instead of a world revolution or international revolution that considers the liberation of human societies only, as if they were detached from the earth. Can you tell us about your conceptualization of the earth, in its relationship with the human world?
MAM: The title of the book, The States of the Earth, is a way of referring to the world we live in, to the air we breathe, and to what we have done to the planet. It is an alternative to expressions such as “climate change” or the various “-cenes.” But the word “states” also refers to the political entities that have national sovereignty over a given territory. Hence, the “states of the earth” are also those that rule the earth and its inhabitants, including humans. In other words, the so-called “Anthropocene” is a cosmological effect of how capitalistic and imperial states have ruled and still claim to rule the earth by “taming nature.” We breathe the violence of imperiality in the air. The book is a history of that imperial violence, which gave birth to extractive capitalism by reducing the earth to an object. Because there are inequalities between these states, and because the exploitation of the South by the North has been central to our modern world, the “climate crisis” is, of course, an outcome of the colonial objectification of nature. But sometimes even some decolonial thinkers tend to forget that states colonize, not forms of life or discourse. I therefore argue that there is a “fossil state” that sustains both fossil capitalism and empire.
But the earth resists objectification and does respond to these states. It resists with floods, fires, and heatwaves, which multiply not unlike generalized warfare and increasing militarization. These planetary catastrophes do manifest an agency of the earth as it is being transformed not by “man” but by state violence and capital, both effects of longer imperial processes of secularization. The secular is what we force the earth to be in this world; we force the earth to bear the burden of heaven. I think the earth has agency, but I don’t think it is a subject. Precisely because of our belonging to the earth, humans must act with and within the earth, which also acts through us. The idea of nature being a subject, however, is a form of anthropomorphism that might be useful from our “human” perspective but is not necessarily true from a cosmic point of view—a view that doesn’t consider the human as the center of the universe. In the book I analyze a letter attributed to amīr Abdelkader that compares the Algerian resistance to a wave and claims that, while his army will fight, “the climate will do the rest.” The earth thus participates in the human insurrection against the French colonial army.