Diagnoses over the truly global nature of major economic, ecological or technological trends are now widely available across humanities and social sciences. They may account for the rise of ‘the global’ as something recent or coeval with the rise of modernity itself, emphasise the prevalence of technological, cultural, economic or institutional patters of change, favour a flat or a more layered understanding of the global and indeed refer to the normative consequences of these processes optimistically or pessimistically. Yet in all cases theorising ‘the global’ has become a major theme of our social-scientific Zeitgeist (Bauman 1998, Beck 2000, Castells 1996).