L'invention du Monde

This book offers an ambitious theoretical context, allowing a glance down the different dimensions of globalization : its economic fluxes, its anthropological configurations, its politics and geopolitics, some more specifically geographical (cities, mobility, telecommunication). The emergence of one or several important places across the vastness of the planet Earth, globalization is fundamentally a geographical event, the first of this scope to be expressed, considered, and discussed, at the same time that it emerged. Globalization changes the social sciences. It forces us to revisit the philosophical contexts tied to the national contexts in which and for which they were built. In geography, the issues are notably of space, territory, resources, of people and of humanity.

Globalization invents a new echelon that forces the reorganization of the assortment of other levels. Contrary to current perspectives, it does not destroy pre-existing places. It is not the victory of the general over the particular : globalization establishes new relations, not necessarily contentious, between the singular and the universal. The globalizing actors are also the globalized, and all play in the tension between these two logics. The individual is the 'big winner' in the process, while communities, despite new resources, find themselves frustrated. Business changes to adapt to this new environment, and states must pass from a geopolitic on their scale, to the politics of beyond.

Finally, globalization designs a new space of issue to the citizenry : horizons of development, complex choices among different possible benefits, options for governance in a political world yet to be invented. The word ‘humanity’ once again takes its meaning, which emancipates it from its former abstract or utopian senses. The invention of the World : it’s here and it’s now.