ABSTRACT
Globalization is a rather new concept in political discourse and in the social sciences. Malcolm Waters reports that the first sociological article to include the word in its title was published in 1985 and that by February 1994 ‘the catalogue of the Library of Congress contained only 34 items with that term or one of its derivatives in the title’, none of them published before 1987 (Waters 1995: 2). In the late 1990s the term became fashionable, however, and by the turn of the millennium it had appeared in scores of books and hundreds of articles. There is no point in trying to itemize or categorize these very numerous references, because the concept is not in itself contentious. It is simply an omnibus term used loosely as a shorthand label for any or all or, most commonly, some combination of five rather different trends in world affairs that can easily be enumerated.
