Virilio's idea of globalisation diff ers from standard defi nitions and interpretations of the term in several important respects, including his emphasis on how acceleration is central to the endo- colonisation of space- time and his ‘dystopian’ theory of the exhaustion of the spatial and temporal dimensions of the world.

Described and articulated by writers such as David Held (1999) the notion of globalisation refers to ongoing processes of national and individual interconnectedness, interdependence and the creation of a sense of a global place. On this view, globalisation has transformed the social, political, economic and cultural spheres of nation- states and led to a global system based on individualism and international free trade, Postmodernisation, consumerism and technologically mass mediated communications and forms of spatio- temporal consciousness.

Post- Second World War American society has been central to the development of globalisation because of the United States's (US) export of an increasingly neo- liberal belief in international free trade, in its own advanced technological development, huge economic growth, ideologically powerful fi lm and television industries, and, of course, the fall of its main rival – Eastern European and Soviet Communism – during the 1990s. Indeed, the American thinker Frances Fukuyama (1993) proclaimed the end of history and enthusiastically greeted the emergence of a unipolar world where US social, political, economic and cultural ideas dominate the global landscape. Moreover, since the end of the Cold War (1947–91), America has sought to police the neo- liberal internationalised system of free trade through a complex arrangement of hard technological and soft developmental power, but this has proved problematic, and economic globalisation in particular has become less associated with growth than with ideological chaos, mediated instability and post- industrial and post- Soviet politics. Neo- Marxists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2000) suggest that the new global system, or ‘Empire’, as they call it, is essentially unmanageable, and certainly beyond the control of any one nation- state such as the US. In their view, this is because contemporary globalisation is unipolar but bi- directional, entailing both a tendency towards the domination of the local by the global, and the fractalisation of the local under conditions of generalised fragmentation that is beyond all territorial control.