Although the term globalization has acquired the status of a popular cliche, the concept itself is not new.Its origins lie in the work of many nineteenth and early twentieth-century intellectuals, from Karl Marx and sociologists such as Saint-Simon to students of geopolitics such as MacKinder, who recognized how modernity was integrating the world.But it was not until the 1960s and early 1970s that the term "globalization" acquired academic and wider currency.This "golden age" of rapidly expanding political and economic interdependence between Western states demonstrated the inadequacies of orthodox thinking about politics, economics and culture which presumed a strict separation between internal and external affairs,the global. domestic and international arenas,and the local and the global. in a more interdependent world, events abroad readily acquired impacts at home, while developments at home had consequences abroad. Following the collapse of state socialism and the consolidation of capitalism worldwide, public awareness of globalization intensified dramatically in the 1990s. coinciding with the information revolution, these developments appeared to confirm the belief that the world was fast becoming a shared social and economic space - at least for its most affluent inhabitants. However, the idea of globalization is a source of great controversy : not just on the streets but in the academy too. in short, the great globalization debate has been joined.