Preface

p.xi) 
Globalization -- even the term itself has been hotly contested -- is thus the modern or postmodern version of the proverbial elephant, described by its blind observer in so many diverse ways. Yet one can still posit the existence of the elephant in the absence of a single persuasive and dominant theory; nor are blinded questions the most unsatisfactory way to explore this kind of relational and multileveled phenomenon
. 盲人摸象各自表述全球化，但事实上“象”确实存在。

p.xii)
 I thus propose to "define" globalization as an untotalizable totality which intensifies binary relations between its parts -- mostly nations, but also regions and groups, which, however, continue to articulate themselves on the model of "nation identities" (rather than in terms of social classes, for example).
 全球化是使得国家、地区、族群联系更密切的“无法总体化”的总体，但这些国家地区族群仍在“民族身份”（而不是阶级）的模式下运作。
这样的双向关系首先是张力和对抗形成的，他们不断以对方的反面来定义自己，使用的概念中充满符号和想象。但这样的关系并不只是文化的或虚幻的，在这样的概念转化成符号之前必须有经济和交流渠道做基础。这些民族国家内部的阶级（斗争）关系随之流向全球、反映在各种离心向心的交流活动中，但这些交流活动（还）没有以（阶级）的概念定义自己，也还停留在空间和地缘政治的局限内。但这样的临时“定义”是开放的、也即将被新的民族国家的形态发展和超越所重新定义（比如出现世界政府、世界文化，等等）。

p.xiii)
 At one level, it is the evaluation of globalization that is itself at stake: Is it a matter of transnational domination and uniformity or, on the other hand, the source of the liberation of local culture from hidebound state and national forms? For this second position, the transnational rejoins the regional and the local and substitutes NGO (nongovernmental organizations) for the corrupt and ossified one-party state. This marks a return to the ideal of civil society, as that was first theorized during the emergence of bourgeois society from feudalism. But "civil society" is an idea that has two distinct levels, which it sometimes slyly substitutes for one another in a kind of ideological prestidigitation. For it can mean political "freedom" of the various social groups to negotiate their political contract, or the economic "freedom" of the marketplace itself, as a plural space of innovation and production, distribution and consumption.
 

p.xiv) 
But these perspectives find themselves modified when, between the level of the new transnational system (whether it be welcomed for its liberatory effects or denouced for its increasing standardization and control) and the level of the local and regional, the third term of the individual nation-state is introduced. The critique of the nation-state, identified with a virulent "nationalism" (that can extend all the way to local ethnic violence), was a stock-in-trade of internationalism all the way back to the end of World War II, when the vision of the United Nations was opposed to the supposedly nationalist expansionism of the defeated fascist powers. This critique only occasionally developed as far as a projection of some new value of federalism, on a world or regional scale. Nor has the evolution -- in full globalization today -- of vaguely "federalist" regional blocs gone unnoticed, along with the immense hinterlands they drain: Latin America for the United States, the former Soviet bloc for the European community, and a new East Asia CoProsperity Sphere for Japan. At the same time, the palpable evidence of a crisis of the very idea of federalism has been less often addressed: something that might lead the disinterested observer (if there could be one) to characterize the upheavals of the present age less in terms of the death of communism or socialism than in the very agony of the various federalist experiments themselves, and not only in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, but also in Canada and Spain. 
但当在新的跨国系统和本地区域之间引入了独立的民族国家概念时，这些视角被重新修正了。对于民族国家的批判（以传染性 的“民族主义”——还能延伸到地方民族暴力事件——为显著标志），是国际主义的常见手段；这手法可追溯到二战后将联合国引入用以对抗原法西斯国家的民族扩张主义。这样的批判最多也只是联邦制在地区或世界尺度上的某种新价值观。那些近似联邦区域（在全球化的今天）也在我们眼前不断演化，同时对于其广袤腹地不断消耗（欧、美、日的例子）。而联邦主义的观念危机的明确显现却不怎么被涉及：这个观念使得置身事外的观察者（如果有的话）倾向于认为当代发生的剧变不是由于共产主义或社会主义的覆亡而是联邦实验的失败。

p.xv) 
They suggest that alongside a multiple and postmodern postcoloniality, there also exists a modernist one, for which the "liberation" brought by Americanization and American mass culture and consumption can also be experienced as a threat and a force of disintegration of traditions from which new and alternative possibilities might otherwise have been expected to emerge.