ABSTRACT
A bizarre adventure happened to space on the road to globalization: it lost its importance while gaining in significance. To reduce the confusion somewhat, the conspicuously "uneven" or one-sided nature of the globalizing tendency needs to be admitted. In the globalizing world disengagement has replaced engagement as the paramount technique of power. The era of empires and imperialism, of the chase to fill up the remaining blank spots on the planetary map, of wars aimed at the redistribution of territorial sovereignties, is by and large over. Such minority status only adds vigor to the proclamations of the emergent "globality of culture," as one would expect in the case of a cultural model whose main function is to secure the self-distancing of the elite. Democratic institutions of self-government developed in the two hundred years of modern history stay local, while the power that draws limits of their ambitions and their capacity to act turns global and circulates far beyond their reach.
