The relevence of Time zones and Time

The evening of December 29, 2011 was a Thursday evening. Most of the citizens of Samoa — a mere 190,000 in total — came home from work, had their nightly meal, and went to sleep. But when they awoke, it was Saturday morning. Friday, December 30, 2011 had disappeared. More precisely, December 30 was erased from the routine progression of time. Those with December 30th anniversaries, lovers of Fridays, and people not quite ready for the next year were out of luck. The clocks had been turned forward, a full day forward. December 30, 2011 was a day no Samoan would know.

The government of Samoa had decided the previous June to move westward across the international date line, so everyone knew the lost Friday was coming. The Samoan government made this change because they wanted to better align Samoa with trading partners in the East: Australia, New Zealand, China, the rest of Asia in general.

Samoans had actually been on the Asian side of the date line before, back in the 19th century. Then, in 1892, an American business house trading in the region convinced the king of Samoa that slipping over the date line to the other side, facilitating trade with California rather than Asia and Australia, was in everyone’s best interest. At the time, it made sense to the king. San Francisco was proving to be a much more influential trading partner than Sydney, and American ships lined Samoan shores. So Samoa left its time zone, and was suddenly just three hours behind California. In a twist of diplomatic self-congratulation, Americans had Samoa perform the shift backward in time on July 4, giving Samoans the opportunity to celebrate American Independence Day twice. In her Letters from Samoa, Margaret Isabella Balfour Stevenson — the mother of Robert Louis Stevenson, who had emigrated to Samoa with her son in 1890 — described the double Fourth of July thus:

It seems that all this time we have been counting wrong, because in former days communication was entirely with Australia, and it was simpler and in every way more natural to follow the Australian calendar; but now that so many vessels come from San Francisco, the powers that be have decided to set this right, and to adopt the date that belongs to our actual geographical position. To this end, therefore, we are ordered to keep two Mondays in this week, which will get us straight.

For 120 years, America’s trading authority has been encapsulated in the Pacific island nation of Samoa. Now, Samoa is three hours ahead of eastern Australia rather than 21 hours behind it, and 22 hours ahead of California. You could say the ever-shifting time zones in Samoa are symbolic of the ever-shifting tides of geopolitical influence: then from East to West; now from West to East.

The international date line is an imaginary line we have drawn onto the planet. The line is artificial and did not exist until we drew it. It is not a straight line, but rather snakes through the middle of the Pacific Ocean, bending this way and that around islands and atolls. It is opposite from the Prime Meridian on the planet’s other side, which helps to define Universal Time and is the meridian by which we calculate all time zones. If you could peer from one side of the date line to the other, you would see a different day. Though the globalization of time would seem to be something quite old, it is only as old as globalization itself. The date line was first proposed in 1884, at the International Meridian Conference held in Washington, D.C., where the primary topic was to choose “a meridian to be employed as a common zero of longitude and standard of time reckoning throughout the world.” The common zero chosen was Greenwich Mean Time, the national mean time of Britain, established in the 17th century mostly to aid naval navigation. So the world’s time turned British. But it wasn’t until 1929 that most major countries had adopted time zones and they still did so at their own discretion. Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC, (once Greenwich Mean Time) is universal only in the sense that it is an internationally agreed upon reference point. Otherwise, local time zones are decided upon by individual nations.

A century or so later, time zones seem sacred, inviolable. And so it is disconcerting when we remember that they are not inviolable at all, that they are, rather, capricious. Time zones are suggestions. There are international overseers of time zones, like the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, creator of Greenwich Mean Time. But there is no transnational or trans-universal time zone enforcer. “There seems to be no legal reason why any country cannot declare itself to be in whatever time zone it likes,” the Royal Observatory confirmed to the New York Times around the turn of the millennium, when the tiny nation of Kiribati had caused an international stir by proposing it, too, would enact a time zone change. Taken at face value, the Royal Observatory’s statement is shocking. Could New Yorkers experience the UTC+0545 time zone of Nepal, 10 hours and 15 minutes ahead of itself, living days of nights and nights of days simply because they chose to?

The uneasy truth is that we can shift time around all we like, if we like, and countries have been playing with the malleability of time zones since their inception. But the way we mark time is as metaphysical as it is economic. As Manuel Castells wrote in The Rise of the Network Society, “We are embodied time, and so are our societies, made out of history.” The Russian Empire, for example, once observed solar time, the time of the ancients in which days are dictated by the sun, and traditional Russian society, wrote Castells, “viewed time as eternal, without beginning or end.” For hundreds of years, Russia was regularly disrupted by modern notions of organizing life around time, until Moscow Mean Time was finally introduced in the late 19th century. The country has had a fickle alliance with its time zones since, moving them about, creating and deleting as geography and politics dictated. Today, Russia has the most time zones of any nation; they totaled 11 as of 2010, but President Medvedev excised two that year, and now the country has nine. Perhaps Russia’s time zones are as restless as the Russian soul.

By contrast, there is China. The vast nation of China encompasses a citizenry speaking 292 languages and a land mass that has almost as many climates as exist on Earth. It geographically spans five times zones but observes just one — one big time zone that stretches from cosmopolitan coastal Shanghai to the rural far west. From 1912 until 1949, China did observe five time zones. But after the Chinese Civil War, the emergent Communist Party used a unified time zone as a way to consolidate the Party’s power over all the territories it claimed and to hail the existence of a unified Chinese nation.

Once, when there were no time zones, our time was told by the basic movements of the sun — daybreak, daylight, peak sun, nightfall, darkness. If you were living in Samoa, people in the United States didn’t exist in the future; regardless of what time it was, everyone was still living now. Even when we decided to split our days into 24 hours, to facilitate a common understanding of time, noon in Denver still felt a little different than noon in Los Angeles. Before the 1880s, British clocks had two minute hands, one for Greenwich Mean Time and one for local. It’s likely only businessmen and sailors were interested in the former. As the world has become more regulated, time zones represent a tension between how time is thought about and planned for, and how time is actually experienced.

If there were no time zones, would we work when we could, and sleep when we could, regardless of train schedules or cargo shipments? Would the consequences be disastrous? Would civilization as we know it collapse?

Stefany Anne Golberg in The Smartset. Here