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7 Fundamina 119 (2001)
Report on the 55th Session of the Societe Internationale Fernand de Visscher pour l'Histoire des Droits de l'Antiquite 18-22 September 2001

handle is hein.journals/fundmna7 and id is 123 raw text is: REPORT ON THE 55th SESSION OF THE SOCIeTe INTERNATIONALE 'FERNAND DE VISSCHER' POUR L'HISTOIRE DES DROITS DE L'ANTIQUIT6 18-22 SEPTEMBER 2001 Philip J Thomas (Pretoria) The world as a global village has become a cliche. The term global village was coined by Marshall McLuhan of the Toronto School of Communication when he published, in 1968, his book War and Peace in the Global Village as a sequel to The Medium is the Message. McLuhan prophesied how electric technologywould stimulate globalisation and we have witnessed this during the last decennium as a result of the IT revolution. The number of people inhabiting this village is strangely enough unknown even to the majority of most outward-looking occupants. Thus it has been a rather rude awakening to experience that virtually none of the final year LLB students at the University of Pretoria, who had elected the course in comparative law, had the vaguest notion concerning the population of the earth (6 176 770 927 on 1 October 2001 according to the International Data Base of the United States Bureau of the Census) or the number of nations in the present world. The latter could be considered, without too much imagination, to be the so-called macro- population of the global village. At the Olympic Games in Sydney in 2000 80 nations participated (www.the5rings.com). In the United Nations 189 nations are represented (www.un.org/Overview/unmember.html). Although in particular the European Union shows a tendency to abandon the old-fashioned nation-state, a trend towards subdividing and thus enlarging the existing number of states, can also be recognised in, for example, the cases of the USSR, Yugoslavia, Ethiopia, Basque separatism. I want to use this macro-population as a metaphor to develop some pattems. With around 200 inhabitants, the global village is a small village. The inhabitants vary in age. We find youngsters like Croatia, Eritrea and old people like Rome, Greece and Israel. But the middle-aged like the United States of America, France

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