ABSTRACT
Historical continuities notwithstanding, there is something new afoot. Globalization, that most over-used expression after the end of the Cold War is, despite the hype, different from previous historical eras.1 Moreover, in addition to its now more commonly understood economic and cultural dimensions, the parameters of a concomitant process of political evolution, we suggest, can also be discerned. This we choose to call the emerging global polity. We recognize this is a contentious claim, likely to provoke resistance in a range of differing scholar communities of thought in international relations. Some scholars, with good cause, would argue that they have been talking about the institutionalization of world politics for more than twenty years (Keohane and Nye 1997). Quite so, but this is not the agenda of the essays in this volume which rather aspire to clarify a range of conceptual ways of thinking about what we call the ‘globalization of political life’. The argument to be advanced in this volume is not, we hasten to add at the outset, simply an exercise in academic or scholarly introspection. Strong connections between the emerging discourse on the global polity and contemporary political practice across the borders of the nation-state already exist. Theorizing about the nature of politics in the abstract casts massive policy shadows in the opening stages of the twenty-first century, and, we should add, vice versa.
