Abstract
Without doubt, an international society exists in our contemporary world. However, since most of the serious problems that we are facing today have not been resolved within the framework of international society, we need a new underlying concept to enable our comprehension of a new emergent society. Although we may refer to a new society as a world society, it is much more plausible to define it as a global society because the terms "two worlds" and "third world" have lost their meaning, and global environmental problems are currently assuming critical importance. If we regard societies as contradictions and overdeterminations (surdéterminations) of communality, stratification, systematization, and ecological restriction, global society can be understood as one that comprises the processes and effects of the global expansion of civil societies, which have been based on the separation of politics and religion, democracy, and the combination of science and technology. This constitutes the second social systematization that has been enabled by overcoming empires, which were the first social systematization sublating (aufhebung) the contradictions between communalities and stratifications with religions, states, markets, and cities. The structure of global society seems excessively weak in its communality and excessively complicated in its stratification due to the overwhelming
insufficiency of its systematization. Global environmental crises and an unevenly increasing population have emerged as unavoidable problems for global society. In order to overcome these obstacles, citizens around the world are making positive use of the global informationalization in their own capacities, criticizing the "empire" -like world ruling system, raising their own newly identified consciousness, and trying to counter global social formation with the help of NGOs and NPOs. These efforts portend growing participation in activities such as the World Social Forum in the future.
