"The answer to globalisation is Europeanisation." These words of the German Chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, sum up what has been one of the most notable issues of the last year in world affairs.
He was responding to an intense discussion in Germany about the the loss of sovereignty, as power and decision-making are stripped away from the nation-state in favour of unaccountable international companies and finance houses and the supposed Anglo-American political culture which sustains them.
This theme - the interface between the national and the global, the deterritorialisation of economic activity, even the supposed end of geography - has become something of an obsession in continental debate. It has spawned a bestselling book by two journalists from Der Spiegel who argue in alarmist fashion that German welfare, prosperity and democracy are endangered by globalisation, which involves a loss of state capacity to regulate a rampant international capitalism. The book has sold over 250,000 copies and attracted much attention from social democratic politicians.
They argue that politics must regain control over economics if "the dramatic fusing together of humanity through technology and trade" is not to turn into its opposite and lead to a "global crack-up", even to "military clashes". They hope the European Union can rise to the challenge of regulation and see economic and monetary union as the opportunity to do so, by "imposing social rules in the control centre of globalisation, the international finance market". Their particular bete noire is the United States's cultural imperialism, unilateralism and what they describe as its populist, demagogic politics. They support green taxes, taxes on short-term speculative financial deals such as that proposed by the (US) economist James Tobin, and minimal social and environmental standards imposed by the World Trade Organisation.
A similar argument is advanced by William Greider, a campaigning American journalist from Rolling Stone, who depicts multinational firms as the observable face of "the manic logic of global capitalism".
The theme recurs in French debate, too, notably in the pages of Le Monde Diplomatique; but that journal has little time for Europeanisation, which it sees as a sub-variant of the wider malaise of globalisation.
Scattered through the international events of the past year are many examples of the phenomenon - and of attempts to regulate it - from the collapse of the East Asian tiger economies to the Kyoto conference on climate change, from the Amsterdam Treaty to the attempt by the new United Nations Secretary General, Mr Kofi Annan, to put human rights at the centre of the international agenda. Algeria and China were prominent in that debate.
Its most dramatic manifestation in Ireland arose this month when the Seagate company announced the closure of its hard disk drive manufacturing plant in Clonmel and the cancellation of plans to build new plants in Derry and Cork. It was convincingly reported that fiercer international competition had forced them to abandon plans to build close to their European markets in favour of sites in south-east Asia made cheaper by the precipitate collapse of currencies there.
We have become much more familiar with the fortunes of the South Korean won, the Malaysian ringhit, the Hong Kong dollar, the Indonesian rupiah as a result.
Readers of this newspaper have had the reportage of its most experienced foreign correspondent, Conor O'Clery, to bring them vivid news of these dramatic events. Such news brings home how bound up the global and the local have become for a small open economy such as Ireland's - and demonstrates the need for more awareness of the dynamics of international developments responsible for Ireland's own prosperity, so that a better understanding of its possible vulnerability can be arrived at. For those who remain indifferent or unconvinced that sovereignty is indeed bleeding away from the nation-state one might add, to paraphrase Trotsky on war, that you might not be interested in globalisation, but it is interested in you.
Nevertheless, it is difficult to define the term in such a way as to clarify rather than obscure the undoubted internationalising trends in today's world. Journalists and readers alike have much to learn from recent specialist writers on the subject.
Several recent collections of essays address it usefully (see details below). Economic globalisation can be defined as "the increasing integration of international markets being brought about by rapidly expanding worldwide flows of goods, services, capital, information, and sometimes people". It is associated with so-called post-Fordist, post-industrial structures in the developed states and a relocation of industrial plants in a worldwide setting, as well as with a phenomenal growth in capital's freedom to invest where and when it will.
A more political definition is offered by international relations scholars who say it denotes a departure from territoriality and the traditional arrangements of the nation-state system. Nationalism and industrialisation were linked intimately in the European system over the last two centuries. Vertically organised structures in government, business, administration, military and political affairs tended to coincide with national geographic boundaries and identities. Sovereignty, territoriality and nationality were more or less congruent. So were such abstract symbols of identification as money, law and language.
Globalisation, interdependence and regional integration break up or undermine these traditional foundations of political order and their vertically organised national cultures. Instead there have emerged new secular horizontal structures, following the lines of transnational networks in political and economic life, and also in non-governmental and United Nations organisations, where a new international civil society is beginning to express itself.
But this is a complex and contradictory development. It is also a highly contested one. Alongside globalisation there is a new localisation, alongside integration a new fragmentation, alongside homogenisation a new differentiation. This is partly reactive, as people resist the consequent loss of control and access, and then partly a matter of political choice against soulless, irresponsible capital mobility of the kind described in the German and US books already mentioned.
One scholar, James Rosenau, contrasts globalisation's "boundary-broadening" functions with the "boundary-heightening" preoccupations of an alternative movement of localisation. He suggests that the term "fragmegration" captures the integrating logic of the one and the fragmentation of the other. He suggests one can readily observe the process at work as the European Union comes to terms with monetary union, in the affirmation of essentialist nationalisms by Patrick Buchanan in the US, Jean-Marie Le Pen in France and Pauline Hanson in Australia. Such awkward neologisms may be typical of the disciplines most concerned with these issues; but it is worth persevering with them in order better to understand what is at stake. As Marx put it, and he was no mean student of such matters - arguably globalisation's first and major theorist - "ignorance never yet helped anybody".
Globalisation may, therefore, be a long term process, a secular trend by which many of the political and economic structures we have taken for granted are being superseded. But it can be contested from the right or left at local and international levels. Against Le Pen one must counterpose the dynamic localism and multiculturalism of Catherine Trautman's Strasbourg or the municipal administrations in the south of France which have courageously resisted National Front censorship and cultural closure. One can see elements of the same struggle emerging in Ireland over refugees.
Internationally, it has been suggested that we are witnessing the emergence of a "neo-medievalism", in which there are multiple, overlapping sources of power, authority, involvement and identity shared between the local/regional, national, international/regional and global domains, a multi-layered, multi-tiered, multi-levelled system of allegiances. The national would not be superseded by the global in this perspective, but embedded within it; identity, citizenship and rights begin at home in such a system, but they do not - cannot - end there.
If this is true, political conflicts are not necessarily confined to a struggle between the nation-state and global or regional integration. There are alternative models of international integration on offer. Two kinds of neo-medievalism have been suggested in the European setting: a globalising capitalist one and an alternative emancipatory and ecological model.
Whereas both would partially blur the distinction between insiders and outsiders on the boundaries of the EU, the former would tend towards exclusive membership of social institutions based on income, credit and productivity; overlapping centres of power and a generalised sense of powerlessness among much of the population; and a preoccupation with law and order within and external clashes without. The latter, by contrast, would tend towards more inclusive, welfare-based systems of participation; towards sharing power centres and empowering citizens; towards a novel kind of EU political community based on multiple identities and a reconceived cosmopolitan democracy; and towards an ecological definition of security.
The extent of globalisation is also strongly contested within the literature. Against Martin and Schuman such writers as Paul Hirst, Robert Taylor and Linda Weiss argue that while there has certainly been an internationalisation of economic life it has been exaggerated by those with a hidden agenda of convincing national governments that regulation is misconceived because they are powerless to control the forces involved.
These writers do not deny there has been a reinforced internationalisation of economic and political life, but insist it is largely within the three main regions of the industrialised world - Europe, north America and Japan/Asia. As between this North and the developing South there are large and growing disparities. They also insist that nation-states have to a considerable extent regained the capacity to regulate at the regional level, notably within the European Union. That brings us back to Dr Kohl. He is likely to dominate the coming year, like many previous ones, as EMU is established and Germany goes to the polls.