ABSTRACT
Holy ghosts of all sorts are haunting global politics: ‘global civil society’, ‘international public opinion’, ‘the peoples of the earth’, ‘the global NGO community’, ‘the peoples’ (or ‘the women’ or ‘the workers’ or ‘the poor’) of the world. On their behalf, seemingly incessant celebrations of planetary oneness are being held (see Table 0.1), ‘functional utopias’ (Falk 1993, 49) imagined, and numerous political and academic parleys organized. In politics, transnational protests are being waged and global programmes and blueprints drawn that range from plans for a people’s UN assembly, to ideas for good governance and global social contracts or ‘alternative humanist projects of globalization’, to more radical schemes for the reinvention of the sum and substance of the world economy.1
