For more than twenty years now, business corporations, institution and opinion caught in the foaming flood of a naïve conception of globalization. Everything is opening, everything is moving, everything is marketable, everything is mixing, everything has a price. The enchanted world of the Market creates the conditions for its universal extension. The world will soon speak a unique language of law, contract and price. And this Esperanto will concretize the conditions for endless progress, after having first ensured peace among Nations, which were disarmed at first, and will soon be dismantled. Lawyers most familiar with anthropology would have recognized one of the most ordinary stances of magic thinking: what really happens doesn’t matter, it’s what is said that does.

That is the crucial point: the world is diversity and the various streams that tend to cut it down to unity - i.e. those useless talks about universality and this illusion of the existence of rights without the conditions constituting them- give rise to contradictory streams that become streams of separation, streams of autonomy, streams of distinction, all of which are what they have always been: streams of salvation.

In the middle of this trend, companies are dealing with contradictory or paradoxical stakes at different levels. Everything happens as if the second globalization boiled down to conformity. This second globalization is the one that started after World War II and dramatically rushed since the year 1989, it is the one that constitutes a trend to which prominent actors, metropolis, national deciders must subscribe, a trend that makes international agencies and Non Governmental organizations (NGO) live. But the gap has never been so wide between the public or private rules that are posted, published and commented upon, and the socially acceptable rules that impose themselves through insinuating in multiples roundabout ways so as to eventually reduce the former rule to the nominalism that the said rule is content with. The second major risk concerning law that private companies face is constituted by this gap between conventions, extraterritorial obligations and territorial obligations, practices and norms.

Private companies which develop their activities in different countries are stucked in between those two sets of rules. They have to go through history and geography again. They have to get used to it: if they do not pay attention to identities, origins and beliefs, everything will either be more difficult or more dangerous for them. They have to be more circumspect when willing to substitute in the place of the State, to take responsibility for some public functions. They have to be more cautious to fostering good governance with the bodies they are working with and more discreet with their public commitments: the chance that they might be believed is no longer inexistent. They have to size up with great care their role in the making of rules, norms, behaviours and they have to measure what they owe to the communities with whom they are interacting. It is just about discovering the World again, with its differences, its gaps, and its irremediable singularity. How many had forgotten about it?