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As we approach the end of the 20th century, there is widespread interest in globalization which is thought to be shaping our lives technologically, economically, culturally, and in terms of changing political identities. The author takes globalization and its opposite, fragmentation as the organizing themes for a grand retrospective of 20th-century international history. Challenging the presentation of globalization as a pre-ordained, technology-driven, and irreversible process, he argues that both globalization and fragmentation have ebbed and flowed throughout the century, governed by its great formative events: Westernization, the two World Wars, the depression, and the rise and fall of the Cold War. The text sets out an analysis of globalization as a process reflecting political relations both between and within states, and brings together the historical and theoretical study of international relations.