Introduction

One of the effects of globalization is that it creates a new context, a public forum in which it becomes possible for people to argue about all manner of issues. In this wired agora, one of the most heated political issues is globalization itself. Economic globalization is viewed as a relatively occurrence. The idea that globalization has "gone too far" and that some sort of political action can either turn it around or slow it down can usefully be applied to only a very restricted meaning of the word. Exponential curves, those upward-sweeping lines that most of us first encountered in connection with global population growth, are accurate measures of many different processes. A new evolutionary ball game, a new global web of life, with a whole new set of ethical and political dilemmas. The most effective responses to the problems of globalization are not the ones that try to re-create the imagined closed systems of the past.