The Seattle meeting of the World Trade Organization has attracted unprecedented coverage, partly because of the number and variety of planned protests. But it is very much worth noting, writes PNS commentator Walter Truett Anderson, that the opposition forces are themselves a product of the globalism they find so objectionable. Walter Truett Anderson is the author of "The Future of the Self" (Tarcher Putnam, 1997).

If the protesters now marching Seattle's soggy streets intend to obstruct the work of the World Trade Organization, demonize it and create some public pressure for change in the ways the organization does its business, they may well succeed.

If, however, they want to slow, stop or even reverse globalization, they are in for a serious disappointment. In fact, the anti-globalism movement now flexing its muscles in Seattle itself represents a form of globalization.

Globalization is not just the integration of markets and financial systems. It is the increasing mobility that enables thousands of people from all over the world -- delegates and protesters alike -- to get to Seattle. It is the rise of the Internet as a tool that activists can use to form international ad hoc coalitions with dazzling speed. It is a sort of global theater created by the media, drawing attention to wherever something exciting is happening and focusing on it obsessively until something more exciting happens somewhere else.

It is also -- and this is the least visible and the most powerful aspect of the enterprise -- an ongoing expansion of our mental maps, as we all come to see the whole world, not just our neighborhood or nation, as the space we inhabit.

The anti-globalization movement is sophisticated about all this in some ways, but clueless in others. Its leaders are adept at manipulating the media -- considerably more so than the suits running the WTO -- but have little understanding of what globalization is or where it is taking us.

They are hopelessly infatuated with an image of life in stable, homogenous, relatively isolated communities and societies. They tend to view globalization as a malevolent threat to such ways of life that must be slowed, halted or even reversed. Blinkered by this narrow vision, they fail to see that they are themselves agents of globalization -- in some ways in the vanguard.

They are vigilantly opposed to economic practices that change the cultures and lifestyles of indigenous peoples. They do not seem to recognize that attempts to mobilize such people against free trade -- indeed, bringing some indigenous leaders to Seattle to take part in demonstrations -- also create irreversible changes.

The protesters in Seattle are not alone in their tendency to view globalization as mainly (or exclusively) a matter of economic integration, and as a recent deviation from a norm of stability and relative isolation. That kind of thinking, however sloppy, is widespread even among the experts.

For example, "Has Globalization Gone Too Far?," a widely-quoted recent book on globalization by Dani Rodrik, states clearly on page one that globalization is "the international integration of markets for goods, services and capital." Thomas Friedman, in his best-selling "The Lexus and the Olive Tree," doesn't ignore the psychological aspects of globalization, but he definitely views them as secondary to the economic action. His provocative preface declares, "The World Is Ten Years Old" -- quoting a Merrill Lynch newspaper ad saying the world was born when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

A wider and deeper view of globalization comes from the Australian sociologist Malcolm Waters. He defines globalization as "a social process in which the constraints of geography on social and cultural arrangements recede and in which people become increasingly aware that they are receding."

He regards globalization as a huge process that has been underway for centuries, though it took a major leap in the middle of this millennium with the voyages of discovery, the Copernican revolution and the publication of the first maps of the world. Consciousness of globalization, he points out, could not really begin to develop until people became convinced that they inhabited a globe.

But globalization is moving with increasing speed. In the past decade, all parts of the process -- technological leaps, political and cultural changes, economic integration, concern about ecological impact, the spreading sense of living in the whole world -- have been coming together and moving faster. In that sense, Friedman is right -- globalization is happening now and sweeping us along, carrying us into a new kind of civilization.

Political movements can affect policies and events in this new world, but nobody has the power to turn back the clock. Ironically, both the dignitaries in the meeting rooms in Seattle and the protesters in the streets are cosmopolitans, global citizens, not only participating in the globalizing process, but also hastening it along.