Abstract
Beliefs in the coming of the global era confuse our understanding of the complexity of contemporary processes of world integration. Absorption in the latest that high-tech IT has to offer is conjoined with the flourishing of mythologies that celebrate the virtues of techno-global networks. By resituating the planetary process of unification in the longue durée, we may escape a one-sided vision of the destiny of the so-called ‘great human family’. It is against this fatalism that the new social movements are presently mobilizing themselves.