ABSTRACT
Obviously we, humanity, are engaged in a rather ambitious project these days: ‘world-building’; and the term used is ‘globalization’. We have been through this before, at a lower level of ambition, in processes referred to as state-building and/or nation-building. A distinction should be made between the two. ‘State-building’ is here conceived of as a process endowing a territory with a certain military, economic and political coherence. ‘Nation-building’ would be based on the (presumably) sacred nature of (points in) that territory, seen as the motherland/fatherland, and is an effort to endow the people living there with a certain cultural coherence.1
