1998.This is a revised version of a paper presented at the IPSA Study gropu II "New world orders?" workshop on "Globalisms and regionalisms", centre for development and the environmnet, university of Oslo, Norway.This paper examines the interaction among the three forces that shape world politics in the contemporary system: Regionaliztion, globalization and nationalism. The main thesis suggested here is that theses three forces cannot be assessed in isolation, independently from one another, nor from a perspective of either convergence or divergence among them.