Theory and research on globalization appears to have reached a mature phase in a relatively short period of time. Most attempts to survey the field, while differing radically on their interpretations of the literature, agree that globalization represents a serious challenge to the statecentrist assumptions of most previous social science. Nevertheless, the «natural» quality of societies bounded by their nationstates, the difficulty of generating and working with data that cross national boundaries and the lack of specificity in most theories of the global, all conspire to undermine the critique of statecentrism. Thus, before the idea of globalization has become firmly established, the sceptics are announcing the limits and, in some extreme cases, the myth of globalization. Globalization, in the words of some populists, is nothing but globaloney!
