ABSTRACT
It is characteristic of our time that all over the world proponents and opponents of globalization are confronting each other and fighting for the right path of future global development. Whereas one side commends the actual process of globalization and its megatrends of technological development, internationalization and the deterritorialization of competition as the biggest welfare programme of all times (and thus tries to revitalize the perspective of liberal capitalism in a so-called neoliberal way), the other side claims that a different kind of globalization is possible, involving less social inequality and injustice worldwide and more ecological sustainability, more democratic participation, less suppression of cultural diversity and more political and institutional regulation of economics on a worldwide scale. At one extreme, advocates of globalization basically endorse a kind of market fundamentalism and laissez-faire economic globalization; at the other extreme critics of globalization call for more than only a restructuring of the political and legal foundation of economic globalization – the big anti-globalization demonstrations in Seattle in 1999 and in Genoa in 2002 were driven by the slogan that ‘a different world is possible’. But what is the real global world like right now?
