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During the early 1970s, Allied‐Signal of New Jersey developed high tech materials referred to as amorphous metals. These metals have exceptional electrical and magnetic properties and are used in recording heads in video and audio recorders. Additionally, they are used extensively by the electric‐power industry. Japanese power companies have always been interested in amorphous metals. In fact, if these companies had used amorphous metals, they would have saved one billion dollars per year in electricity cost alone (The Economist, 1990). However, these businesses were cajoled by Japanese officials into waiting for the American patents to expire so they could use a homemade version. As the end of the patents approached in 1993, the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) announced a catch up program involving thirty‐four Japanese companies to develop the know‐how for making amorphous metals themselves. The Japanese ministry used its influence to persuade Japanese power companies not to order amorphous transformers until Japanese manufacturers were ready to supply them. Thus, the market for American high‐tech products estimated at $100 million per year has been practically eliminated (The Economist, 1990).

In a New Yorker article, “Alone with the Secretary General,” Michael Ignatieff (1995) tells of watching, with Boutros‐Ghali, a CNN report of the Serbian attack on Zepa. At the time, the reporter was with the U.N. Secretary General in the “jungles of Zaire,” another nation‐state crumbling or about to crumble. Boutros‐Ghali's reaction was a simple phrase, “‘This is globalization’” (p. 37). The line captures the two sides of globalization. On the one hand, the ubiquity of CNN, its global reach, creates the immediate global village‐“News from around the world every thirty minutes.” Zepa is as near, perhaps as familiar, as Dayton. Yet the veneer of global community masks the ever‐present global disunity: a new world disorder, factionalism, opening seams of ethnic divisions, and new walls of religious and cultural intolerance.