ABSTRACT
When does humanity come into existence? To answer this question one must decide what humanity means. On the most important level, it is a social construct, an imaginary community, emerging through historical vicissitudes as a form of self-awareness. In the terms in which I am addressing it, the notion of humanity is a recent invention, a novel conception, whose existence is correlated with the ending of World War II and the beginning of the present-day process of globalization. The invocation of WWII gives a relatively precise date for attempts to define humanity legally and for globalization to give it actuality.
