ABSTRACT
After the demise of the ‘socialist system’ at the end of the 1980s, the discourse on ‘globalization’ became dominant in the social sciences. The volume of literature on the subject that has since been published is immeasurably vast. For E. Luttwak (1994) and K. Ohmae (1990), the most prominent proponents of the idea of a new era of ‘geo-economics’, the main characteristics of globalization are: economic competition on global markets in place of political conflicts in international relations, and the transformation of the binary logics of political enemies and hostile nationstates into the peaceful rules of (by definition) an era of multilateral systems and of free trade. In the meantime, however, and especially after 11 September 2001, the binary interpretation of the world as divided into accepted friends and hostile foes has returned into favour. This notion has been forcefully pushed for, particularly by the Bush administration and the neoconservative think tanks and media that are backing it ideologically.
