The world has become a village. People in Estonia wear jeans made in China, people in China listen to music produced in the US, Americans buy computers and cars made in Taiwan, while people in Taiwan drink wine made in France. It seems that national boundaries no longer count. On one side, the worldwide exchange of goods, people, and money seems advantageous as these now can move to areas where profits, wages, and interest rates are highest. On the other hand, protective laws and regulations instituted and monitored by national governments and trade unions no longer seem to matter. When goods can be produced and sold everywhere, is there still room for quality control, a decent wage for the workers, and environmental protection? Should we retain some of the restrictions on the employability of non-nationals, on the importation of foreign goods and services, and on allowing any financial institution to act as it sees fit?

To none of these questions are there easy answers, and for the rich countries the answers are different from those for the Third World. In the developed countries, globalisation carries the danger of a race to the bottom with lower profit rates, lower wages and less social security, and no compensation for damage done to the environment. The poor world, on the other hand, often views globalisation as a way finally to profit from the fact that they have low wages and less environmental restrictions in producing goods and services. That dichotomy is a novelty as until very recently only the developed nations were competing with one another. Goods, services, mobile labour and investment capital now seem to be coming from everywhere.

For some, globalisation is bad per se. Come an economic summit, you can bet that a large group of anti-globalist protesters will appear, who – sometimes violently – express their opposition to globalisation. In their view, globalisation is a trick of the rich elites in both East and West to gather yet more wealth off the backs of others. That is why globalisation should be stopped. Some of these protesters seem to have become professionals travelling from one protest manifestation to another.

Time to take stock. And that is what the authors of the volume under review have done. There are contributions on the effects of globalisation on the national administrations, on international law and international relations, on the history of globalisation, on democracy on a world scale (‘an illusion’), on communication, on changes in the temperature and the environment in general, on economic policy, on European integration, and on the policies of the World Trade Organisation. One chapter sings the praises of a new international exchange of radio programmes, also seen as a kind of globalisation. As most authors are Belgian, it seems appropriate that the volume carries a preface by the former president of the Belgian House of Representatives, recently prime minister of Belgium, and presently the first President of the European union, Herman van Rompuy. The conclusion carries the appropriate title: ‘globalisation, a multi-layered phenomenon’.

This volume makes abundantly clear that globalisation has multiple meanings even within one discipline. The historical profession is a case in point, as historians seem unable to agree when the process of globalisation started. For some, that is not before the 20th century. Other historians point to the revolutionary period between 1770 and 1830, when for the first time new revolutionary ideas spread from one part of the world to another. However, the most dramatic impact of the process of globalisation might well have taken place with the trip of Columbus in 1492, when Old World pathogens were globalised, killing millions of Amerindians. In the historical profession, globalisation seems to be an easy label pasted over the various ways in which parts of the world started to interact. Around 1500, before the growth of national industries, the production of and trade in goods might well have been more globalised than it is today, but in popular culture, human rights, law, and communication, globalisation is a much more recent phenomenon.

Increasingly, national governments are faced with the problem that parts of the economy of their countries are dominated by multinationals, while most of the existing legislation is based on the assumption that the economy only exists within a national framework. How does one deal with a local subsidiary of a multinational that goes bankrupt and cannot pay redundancy compensation to its employees, while the same firm is making a profit in other countries? Recently, the West has experienced a wave of bankruptcies in the banking world, forcing national governments to compensate those of its nationals who had saving accounts with subsidiaries of foreign banks governed by the legislation of another country. The two contributions on law and governance in the volume under review explain that such problems seem likely to continue, as progress towards an international legal framework to regulate international finance does not keep pace with the rapid economic and financial globalisation. On the other hand, globalisation provides banks with many more opportunities to increase the return on their invested capital and thus enables them to provide the owners of small savings accounts with a higher return on their money than the national finance markets would have allowed. While many simply equate globalisation with the integration of the economy, the contribution on international law points out that an increasing number of countries have now adapted legislation making serious crimes against humanity punishable under their national laws.

A topic conspicuously absent in this volume is global migration, in spite of the fact that many in the more wealthy regions in the world consider the uncontrolled movement of people from the Third World to be the main threat from the process of globalisation. Yet intercontinental migrations go back a long time and were hardly impeded by government regulations. Between 1850 and 1950, more than 60 million Europeans migrated to other continents. With all the restrictions put in place against the free movement of people, we seem to forget that after the Second World War migration has become less globalised.

Several of the contributions to this volume are truly excellent surveys of the scholarly discussions regarding globalisation in a certain discipline, but the volume as a whole cannot provide a clear-cut, definitive answer to the question as to whether globalisation is increasing in speed and amplitude, or in which domains its effects will be most important. Still, the editors of the volume reviewed here cannot possibly be blamed for this unsatisfactory state of affairs – it is simply too early for a final conclusion.