ABSTRACT
Metaphorically speaking, globalization turns many people into orphans in their hearts and minds. The majority of people still think of globalization as a phenomenon affecting first and foremost the economic realm. In the age of globalization, even large nation states such as Germany or France are probably the last bastions with which the individual can identify aside from familiar entities such as the family, village, town, or region. The comeback/revival of the nation state exists also in sharp contradiction to two other major characteristics of the international system, namely economization and multilateralization. As globalization causes formerly independent policy fields to be more intertwined with one another and as it blurs the boundaries between areas of different responsibilities, foreign policy understood as realpolitik is hardly feasible in the age of globalization. If the nation state could re-implement some of its already abandoned sovereignty, so the argument by proponents of the strong nation state goes, then national decision-making would be strengthened.
