Introduction

Globalization was yesterday (Dasgupta and Kiely, 2006). Today we are increasingly facing a world of “globality,” that is, a state of affairs where a global impact of individual actions, local business practices, and national politics is no longer the exception but has become more and more the rule (Carver and Bartelson, 2010). While numerous processes of globalization might still be stopped, and some reversed, the general trend of the developments of the last decades cannot be undone. The reach that globalization, especially economic globalization, has had in the past means that ever more people are faced with living in a state of de facto globality (Sklair, 1991). Whatever the future development of globalization, this emerging state of globality must be addressed, because its distinctive features require particular ways and modes of governance beyond those that characterized the era of the nation state.