ABSTRACT
In economic terms globalisation indicates a phase in the development of capitalism (Lash and Urry, 1987, 1994). One of the principal characteristics of this phase is that it signals a movement beyond the nation state (Giddens, 1990; Beck, 2000; Hardt and Negri, 2000) in which the nation state is not only replaced politically and economically, but also ‘as the decisive framework for social life’ (Featherstone and Lash, 1995: 2). The vacuum left by the economical and political ‘dis-appearance’ of the nation state and the subsequent deregulation (and de-nationalisation) of state-owned services has been affecting not only the way we understand and make politics, the manner in which we work or even think of our ‘productivity’ and ‘performance’, but also the very way we live our lives, eat, drink, conceive and educate our children, deal with pleasure and illness, die. Globalisation is both global in that it attempts to affect ‘everybody’ in the world and in that it concerns all the strata of our lives. Not only does it designate the fading of the sovereignty of the nation state, and so to a certain extent the end of democracy, but it also tells us that this phenomenon somehow involves the entire world population, regardless of race, gender, socio-political background and religion.
