There are two main generalizations that are used in describing the development of globalization over recent decades. One is that the level of economic, political and cultural interdependence of almost all countries is continually increasing. The other is that this increase is not uniform: some areas of the world are more ‘globalized’ than others.1 In fact, globalization resembles a web with three main nodes — Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific — and several loopholes. Some of the loopholes emerged due to the lower level of economic development in the ‘global south’, which restricted certain countries’ opportunities to engage in the process of globalization: for example, Sub-Saharan Africa has until recently been a ‘weak link’ in the global economic chain (although the current burgeoning of information technologies and mobile telephony could challenge this equilibrium2). China until the 1980s and the Soviet bloc until the end of the 1980s represented yet another loophole in the web of developing global economy. The socialist countries concentrated either on maximizing their autarchy or on cooperating primarily within the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance.