The Social Construction of Globality1

Abstract

Today the concept of globality is widely used to describe a condition characterized by the presence a single sociopolitical space on a planetary scale. Yet international relations theory has been either unwilling or unable to understand the global realm in sui generis terms. This paper argues that if we want to make coherent sense of the global realm and its relationship to the international system, we must account for how globality has been constructed as a social fact. The paper then tries to provide some of the foundations of such an account by analyzing how a distinctively global space was forged out of changing cosmological beliefs about the makeup of the terrestrial surface during the Renaissance, and how these new beliefs in turned conditioned the possibility of modern practices of territorial demarcation and national identity construction. If valid, this interpretation implies that the order of analytical priority between the international system of states and the global realm ought to be reversed, and hence also that a sui generis account of globality must be built on the recognition that the world was global well before it became international in any recognizably modern sense of this latter term.