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What emerged was generally bruited as the ‘Washington Consensus’, a belief in ‘unimpeded private market forces [as] the driving engines of growth’ (Williamson, 1989, 1243). Thus was fashioned the most controversial globalist dogma, namely that ‘there is no alternative’ to liberal globalization. In a rather downbeat classification Mittelman labels these positions as ‘centrist neo-liberal thinking’ (2004, 50), but the ideological orthodoxy they espoused has been subject to increasing challenge intellectually and, both metaphorically and physically, on the streets.

The neo-conservative moment in US economic and security governance and the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis perhaps muster as increments in the demise, or possibly the transformation, of global neo-liberalism. They certainly underline the increasing importance of military-security, as opposed to purely economic, factors in the debates on globalization. Alternative globalist ideologies out of Marxism or ethical cosmopolitanism attest to the sporadic vitality of different genres, but, arguably, fail to find any real purchase outside the academy.

Rather, globality has social as well as spatial meaning. Above all, it is a matter of consciousness and constitutes a ‘self-consciously common framework of human society worldwide’ (2000, 62). As Shaw notes, such views are not unique to his conception of globality. They are prefigured to some extent in the universalist claims of both religious and, in the case of cosmopolitanism, secular world-views. The idea of a ‘common framework’ is given substance in, for example, the cooperative responses of political elites to the threats of planetary destruction, while a more ‘practical consciousness’ also resides in the existence of the widespread perception that we are all subject to global constraints as a matter of routine.