Europe, Japan, and the United States will all have a common currency at some point says Richard Cooper, an economist at Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.

Mr. Cooper sees a common currency as a logical way to deal with the fragility and fickleness of financial markets. A currency union would eliminate foreign-exchange volatility in these three industrial areas, which produce two-thirds of the world's output. It would add stability to what is fast becoming a global economic system. It would facilitate trade and investment.

One theory is that currency blocs will form around the dollar, the euro, and the yen. Then the three currency "biggies" would merge into a single currency.

Cooper sees the creation this year of the euro by 11 European nations as a major step in the direction of a single currency for the industrial democracies.

But Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, doubts that any step will end financial crises, as long as greed, fear, and hubris are "built into the human genome." It is these characteristics that are behind crises.

Five or ten years ago, I used to hear about grand conspiracies and smile. Oh, I knew about the Council on Foreign Relations, Trilateral Commission and the Bilderbergers, but it seemed natural that like-minded people (especially rich and powerful people) would find a forum to socialize. I was wrong. Very, very wrong.

In the wake of years of study, interviews, and critical analysis, I have learned (and believe) that hardly anything happens by chance. Conspiracies DO exist, and to arrogantly discount their existence, intentions, and results, is myopic, pretentious, and stupid.

If or when you read beyond the revisionist history of duplicitous academicians, you learn: The stock market has been manipulated. Past crashes designed and managed. The government knew about Pearl Harbor before the attack. Vietnam? The Gulf of Tonkin was an exercise in creative writing.

And Kosovo? Reports from no less than six different independent sources claim that NATO purposely targeted the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. Why purposely and specifically target a Chinese embassy?

When the U.S. struck Libya in the early Reagan years, the French embassy was bombed. Reportedly, the raid was put on hold for several days until the French ambassador left the compound. Supposedly, the raid was in retaliation for the French not allowing U.S. planes in their airspace. Gee, the U.S. will bomb an ally's embassy to send a "message." Must be standard operating procedure.

But why hit the Chinese embassy? What if it was done to derail the peace initiative being put forward by the Russians and the Chinese? According to numerous analysts, this is a war against national sovereignty--all and any national sovereignty. If the one-worlders can realize their agenda, countries will no longer be autonomous.

Borders will vanish, and henceforth an international watchdog/cabal would oversee everything, everywhere, every time. If or when a country refuses to comply with international treaties implemented by the United Nations, we should anticipate "the Serbian Solution."

Given the savage war in the Balkans, it is a strange thing to say, but one remarkable change has emerged from the post-Cold War era, and that is a peaceful and unified core Europe. When the veteran journalist Elizabeth Pond makes this point in her new book "The Rebirth of Europe," she is talking about the European Union, that assemblage of nations which has joined in common cause in far more powerful ways than Americans realize.

"On the eve of the 21st century, a miracle occurred," she writes. "Europe was reborn."

Europe, continues the longtime Christian Science Monitor correspondent, "is pioneering a post-national, postmodern pooling of sovereignty that is supplanting the nation-state system of the past three centuries. Europe's transformation will challenge us economically and psychologically. The world's sole superpower is not yet prepared for the shock to come."

"The era of the nation-state is over in central Europe," Ms. Pond said. The new era is one of collective decisions, decisions by consensus. Not only economically, but in foreign policy, in judicial matters, European integration is proceeding steadily.

Europe's attitude toward Kosovo has been a powerful thing to see, Ms. Pond said. "It's striking how in Europe, Kosovo ceased to be a tactical issue and became a moral issue," amid developing feelings that there must be "no more holocausts--that we as Europeans cannot tolerate this in Europe."

A friend of mine studies village life in central Africa. A few years ago, she paid her first visit to a remote area where she was to carry out her fieldwork. The night she got there, she was invited to a local home for an evening's entertainment. She expected to find out about the traditional pastimes of this isolated community. Instead, the evening turned out to be a viewing of "Basic Instinct" on video. The film at that point hadn't even reached the cinemas in London.

Such vignettes reveal something about our world. We live in a world of transformations, affecting almost every aspect of what we do. For better or worse, we are being propelled into a global order that no one fully understands, but which is making its effects felt on all of us.

I haven't been to a single country recently where globalization isn't being intensively discussed. Every business guru talks about it. No political speech is complete without it. Yet as little as 10 years ago, the term was hardly used. It has come from nowhere to be almost everywhere.

The global marketplace is now indifferent to national borders. Nations have lost most of the sovereignty they once had, and politicians have lost most of their capability to influence events.

It isn't surprising that no one respects political leaders anymore, or has much interest in what they have to say. The era of the nation state is over. Nations, as the Japanese business writer Keniche Ohmae puts it, have become mere "fictions."

The level of world trade today is much higher than it ever was before. Geared as it is to electronic money--money that only exists as digits in computers--the current world economy has no parallels in earlier times. In the new global electronic economy, fund managers, banks, corporations, as well as millions of individual investors, can transfer vast amounts of capital from one side of the world to another at the click of a mouse. As they do so, they can destabilize what might have seemed rock-solid economies--as happened not long ago in East Asia.

Yet it is wrong to think of globalization as just concerning the world financial order. It is also influencing intimate and personal aspects of our lives. The debate about family values, for example, that is going on in many countries, might seem far removed from globalizing influences. It isn't. Traditional family systems are becoming transformed, or are under strain, in many parts of the world.

Globalization also explains both why and how Soviet communism met its end. The Soviet Union and the East European countries were comparable with the West in terms of growth rates until somewhere around the early Seventies. After that point, they fell rapidly behind. Soviet communism could not compete in the global electronic economy. The ideological and cultural control upon which communist political authority was based similarly could not survive in an era of global media. Street protests taking place in one country were watched by TV audiences in others, large numbers of whom then took to the streets themselves.

Globalization is not a benign force. It creates a world of winners and losers. The statistics are daunting. The share of the poorest fifth of the world's population in global income has dropped from 2.3 percent to 1.4 percent over the past 10 years. The proportion taken by the richest fifth, on the other hand, has risen. As one writer put it recently, rather than a global village, this is more like global pillage.

Everywhere we look, we see institutions that appear the same as they used to be, and carry the same names, but inside have become quite different. We continue to talk of the nation, the family, work, tradition, as if they were all the same as in the past, but they are not. They are what I call shell institutions.

Globalization is not incidental to our lives today. It is the way we now live.

What is globalization? Here is one of the best answers. It is the "constant revolutionizing of production" and the "endless disturbance of all social conditions." It is "everlasting uncertainty." Everything "fixed and frozen" is "swept away," and "all that is solid melts into air."

This is from the Communist Manifesto, by Marx and Engels. One hundred and fifty years ago, they marveled at a "constantly expanding market," the "daily destruction of old established industries," the emergence of ever "new wants," the "universal interdependence of nations" and "intercourse in every direction." Substitute 21st-century English for the Marx-speak, and the Manifesto would read as if written by Bill Gates.

But a few things have changed since Karl Marx. It is now a few industrial revolutions later, and with the exception of Africa, the Islamic Middle East and central Asia, the market has become truly global. For the first time in history, it operates like one big domestic market.

Second, things have revved up. Communication is now virtually in real time. The cost of modern transportation, with jets setting the pace, has dropped precipitously, especially relative to the value of traded goods. Back then, it was grain for pig iron, heavy stuff that was expensive to lug around. Today, it is pricey chips that take pennies to ship--or bytes moving around at no cost whatsoever.

Finally, finance. When we ponder globalization, especially since the Asian crash of 1997, we think mainly about that legendary trillion dollars said to circle the planet each day--docking here, escaping there. The reason is the progressive liberalization of capital markets since 1945.

But what does it all mean? Thomas L. Friedman, in his book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, delivers the best answer yet. One of my favorite stories (with a powerful moral) concerns the Prime Minister of Thailand, to whom Friedman confesses: "I helped oust your predecessor--and I didn't even know his name. You see, I was sitting home … watching the Thai baht sink. So I called my broker and told him to get me out of East Asian emerging markets. It's one dollar, one vote, Mr. Prime Minister. How does it feel to have Tom Friedman as a constituent?"

Once you join the global economy, it is the "equivalent of turning your country into a public company," the author notes, and whereas in centuries past, the "public" was a few dozen banks, now anybody can play, provided he has a computer and some spare cash.

Which leads directly to my other favorite tale, this one about the Malaysian leader Mahathir Mohamad, a most voluble enemy of the open global system.

Friedman recounts how Mahathir, at the height of the 1997 Asian crisis, kept accusing the Jews and George Soros of deliberately debasing the Malaysian currency. So his advisers finally went to him with a warning that probably sounded something like this: "Look, you said this about Soros on Monday, and the Malaysian ringgit fell to here. You said this about the Jews on Tuesday, and the ringgit fell to here. … SHUT UP!" The moral? The market rules.

Friedman claims that "all world leaders" have to think like American state governors now, meaning that their "main job" is keeping investors happy while "constantly living in dread that they will leave."

Globalization has been around for 500 years, but right now we are surely witnessing the most tumultuous part of an ancient drama because what we call globalization is driven above all by technology. That force, especially information technology, is transforming itself and the world with extraordinary speed. So Friedman may be right when he predicts, "You ain't seen nothin' yet."

Two weeks after the launch of the euro, Germany's new Left-wing leaders are unveiling their blueprint for a federal Europe built on the back of the single currency. In recent days, the most powerful ministers in the Red-Green government have spelled out their plans for political union. Their words will fuel Eurosceptic fears that monetary merger was merely a step on the road to a United States of Europe. As holders of the EU presidency for the next six months, Germany wants to capitalize on the momentum of the euro's birth to set Europe firmly on the road to a federal future.

Germany risked a new clash with Britain over the pace of European integration by calling for the national veto to be removed in most EU decision-making. The effect of such a change would be that decisions in sensitive areas such as taxation would be taken by weighted majority voting instead of unanimously, as at present.... The voting issue was raised by Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, when he outlined to the European Parliament his country's plans for its six-month EU presidency. Bonn would be pressing for the change at the Cologne summit in June, he said. It wished to keep unanimous voting only for changes to EU treaties. He said the EU would suffer an institutional heart attack' unless it took 'bold steps' towards full integration, which would give 'the Europe of the past, the Europe of nationalism and war', no chance in the future. Referring to conflicts in the Balkans, Mr. Fischer said: 'Both alternatives are at present the reality in Europe.' These are seen by German politicians as proof of the horrors caused by national rivalry and the absolute need for integration.