He has identified five causes which led to the global disconnect in the first quarter of the 20th century. The first was the imperial overstretches of the then British Empire that lacked the will and the capacity to withstand the German challenge for global hegemony.

Ferguson detects the same weariness in the US which suffers from "personnel deficit" as the US can deploy no more than half a million troops overseas of which nearly 150,000 are already in Iraq engaged in an unwinnable war.

Besides Osama bin Laden estimates that while al-Qaeda spent only half a million dollars for the 9/11 carnage Bush administration has so far spent 500 billion dollars and more are being sought from the Congress which has passed a resolution giving a deadline for the return of US troops from Iraq.

The second disruptive factor responsible for sinking globalization is how great power rivalry (in the form of Anglo-German conflict leading to the First World War) can now take the form of US-Russian rivalry, a concept dismissed by Harvard Professor Joseph Nye Jr. and many others because true to the promise made by President Bush to the American people that arms race shall not be allowed to be repeated. The US spends more than 400 billion dollars on defense while it spends a much lesser sum on diplomacy.

The third fatal factor, writes Ferguson, is unstable alliance system. One suspects that NATO and the coalition of the willing notwithstanding possible coalition of disparate elements having convergence of interest e.g. economic conflict between the EU and the US, Putin's refusal to accept unipolarity and emergence of a revivalist in post-Putin Russia, China's ire over Taiwan despite Chinese phenomenal economic development mainly by US driven consumerism, could account for a possible disruption in globalization which mainly depends on overcoming cultural, economic and political barriers dividing the world into zones of different shades.

Had Austrian Arch-Duke Ferdinand not been assassinated in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb having shady links with the Serbian government perhaps the First World War could have been avoided. The moot point here is the presence of rogue states that abounds in the world today in the form of failed and failing states. Taleban Afghanistan, present day Iraq, North Korea, DR Congo, Somalia and Sudan can be cited as examples.

Finally, writes Ferguson, "the rise of revolutionary terrorist organizations hostile to capitalism", he terms al-Qaeda "Islamo-Bolshevists," could rupture the globalization process.

Despite the doomsday scenario painted above, the sheer impossibility of armed conflict among major powers in the face of US nuclear primacy and the international connectivity caused by technological advancement inducing an unquenchable thirst among the people of First, Second, Third and even the Fourth world to acquire the material benefits and adopt the liberal democracy enjoyed by the fortunate makes globalization an irreversible process.

In this context the remarks made by the Indian Prime Minister at the 13th Saarc summit at Dhaka that the member countries have not been able to achieve the "shared goal of prosperity" envisioned when Saarc was formed and that "regional economic cooperation in South Asia has fallen far short of our expectation" become relevant.

Development described by Amartya Sen as a fundamental human right cannot be attained in isolation and the process of globalization in which social Darwinism is an integral part to weed out the inefficient has to begin with regional cooperation in a new context where the Westphalian concept of sovereignty has to be abridged and shared with other members of the region as has been successfully done by the European Union.

The world called by Marshal McLuhan as "the global village" in qualitative term is still afflicted by tragedies like in Darfur, Sebrenica, Rwanda and conflictual politics as in Bangladesh where till recently we could not recognize the Father of the Nation in whose name the liberation war was fought.

Yet now we in Bangladesh, for the first time after 1975, can feel proud that inhibitions of the past have been swept aside, and that too by the armed forces chief (we had our fair share of army rule), and of a government determined to free us from being branded as the most corrupt country in the world.

It is evident that politicians will continue to do politics in the future and steer the destiny of the country as is done in liberal democracies. But we expect that after the silent revolution of January 11, politicians will no longer be conducting public affairs for private gains. That no one is above the law and politicians, of all people, are accountable for their actions are the lessons of the recent past.

Already the international community's concern about us on the scores of corruption and Islamic fundamentalism appear to be waning. We should, however, not rest on our laurels but be alert that the unstinted support given by the Bangladeshis to the interim government is not wasted and that the chief adviser would embrace the cooperative hands expected to be extended to Bangladesh at the Delhi Saarc summit for the benefit of all the people of the region.

Kazi Anwarul Masud is a former Secretary and Ambassador.