Colonialism is the root cause of structural violence

The central question that interests us here is the following: What is really new with respect to modernity? And by this I mean not only what develops and redefines experiences, tendencies, and processes of other worlds, but, also, what was produced in the present model of global power’s own history. Enrique Dussel (1995) has proposed the category “transmodernity” as an alternative to the Eurocentric pretension that Europe is the original producer of modernity. According to this proposal, the constitution of the individual differentiated ego is what began with American colonization and is the mark of modernity, but it has a place not only in Europe but also in the entire world that American settlement configured. Dussel hits the mark in refusing one of the favorite myths of Eurocentrism. But it is not certain that the individual, differentiated ego is a phenomenon belonging exclusively to the period initiated with America. There is, of course, an umbilical relation between the historical processes that were generated and that began with America and the changes in subjectivity or, better said, the intersubjectivity of all the peoples that were integrated into the new model of global power. And those changes brought the constitution of a new intersubjectivity, not only individually, but collectively as well. This is, therefore, a new phenomenon that entered in history with America and in that sense is part of modernity. But whatever they might have been, those changes were not constituted from the individual (nor from the collective) subjectivity of a preexisting world. Or, to use an old image, those changes are born not like Pallas Athena from the head of Zeus, but are rather the subjective or intersubjective expression of what the peoples of the world are doing at that moment change and that they affect not only Europe but the entire globe. This is not a change in a known world that merely altered some of its traits. It is a change in the world as such. This is, without doubt, the founding element of the new subjectivity: the perception of historical change. It is this element that unleashed the process of the constitution of a new perspective about time and about history. The perception of change brings about a new idea of the future, since it is the only territory of time where the changes can occur. The future is an open temporal territory. Time can be new, and so not merely the extension of the past. And in this way history can be perceived now not only as something that happens, something natural or produced by divine decisions or mysteries as destiny, but also as something that can be produced by the action of people, by their calculations, their intention, their decisions, and therefore as something that can be designed, and consequently, can have meaning (Quijano 1988a).