You say de-globalization,I say post-globalization;but don’t call the whole thing off (with apologies to Ira Gershwin)

Abstract

Victor Roudometof's thought-provoking article revisits questions the academy has asked of itself ever since globalization became a must-have concept in the late 1980s: What are we talking about? Have we got it and to what degree? Where is it headed? And finally, what does all this mean for the social-scientific prospectus? Answers to the first two questions are superficially easy but how we respond to them still has a profound bearing on the demeanour of social-scientific inquiry into the human condition. So, willy-nilly, our attention is drawn to the status of global studies as a callow branch of knowledge. If globalization is the matrix of processes that extend social relations and consciousness across world space and world time, what is de-globalization? More to the point, what is post-globalization, the elusive subject of Roudometof's essay? Much abroad these days the latter still gets rather short-shrift as a usable concept despite the fact that it is being asked to carry a considerable analytical burden when describing and predicting the demeanour of the world. De-globalization does not signify an inevitable end to globalization, only a change in its density, extensiveness and velocity. On the other hand post-globalization has about it an aura of transformation. It implies radical, not to say systemic, change. Today we are witnessing renewed attention to globalization because of the changing nature of 21st century global dynamics; though whether these actually sum to a ‘new’ globalization is rightly contested. Is a more agonistic multipolarity the defining feature of this changing (dis)order?

Victor Roudometof's (2024) thought-provoking article revisits questions the academy has asked of itself ever since globalization became a must-have concept in the late 1980s: What are we talking about? Have we got it and to what degree? Where is it headed? And finally, what does all this mean for the social-scientific prospectus? Answers to the first two questions are superficially easy but how we respond to them still has a profound bearing on the demeanour of social-scientific inquiry into the human condition. So, willy-nilly, our attention is drawn to the status of global studies as a callow branch of knowledge. These are topics that keep on giving.

The elephant in the room for all students of globalization is that where not casually employed as a description of things as they are, or as a slogan in some lexicon of good and bad keywords, the concept is most often used to signify a game change in the aforementioned prospectus; or at any rate in its promise. That prospectus adverts an epistemological shift in how the world is understood and an ontological shift when describing its features. For globalization sceptics (remember them?) this may look too much like vaunting ambition hardly fulfilled. For agnostics and, of course, for believers of various hue (including attributed and self-styled ‘transformationalists’) a contested scholarship at least makes for good theatre. But with a little more gravitas and some intellectual elan, might it conjure a social science not in thrall to boundaries, which surely is the USP of global studies? Such is the burden of Roudometof's essay and it echoes much recent criticism of existing knowledge on global constitution. Taking the academic exploration of globalization (along with globalism and globality) seriously means addressing the variety of the human – and the transhuman – condition globally and accepting that what hyperglobalists (remember them?) once thought was an ineluctable process of integration is in fact a tortuous dialectic of sameness and difference and of interwoven local and global identities. It also requires engaging around key themes and issues that reveal the constitution, pomp and decline of hegemonic orders, however conceived, and of generic and bespoke mobilizations of bias.

So far so demanding; but I am getting ahead of myself. Let's return to the questions I posed at the start of this commentary. What are we talking about? Have we got it and where is it headed? The first question is important because it goes to the heart of the matter as far as Roudometof's argument is concerned. It seems to me that the goal of conceptual precision is crucial to the quality of global scholarship, but we remain surprisingly querulous about what to designate as global, let alone specify what explains it and what, if anything, it explains. While the perception of global as denoting ‘world-wide’ consciousness and practices is given in most accounts, particular conceptions and spatial configurations, as well as the forces driving them, can, and do, change. Taking this on board makes judgements about whether we are experiencing piecemeal or wholesale de-globalization, incremental re-globalization, or an epochal transformation to something manifestly different, fraught to say the least, because these are slippery concepts that are very susceptible to slovenly usage.

In their elegant treatise on why globalization – and by implication, global studies – matters, Steger and James point to a changing, and sometimes unpredictable, melange of social forces, complete with a scholarly prospectus to describe and explain the extension of social relations and consciousness across world-space and world-time (Steger and James, 2019: 77). Of course, the devil of this definition lies in how its detail is specified. But I am happy with their formulation mainly because it is so permissive – the global can be found anywhere, anytime. Such conceptual largesse riles critics and does rather run against the grain of my earlier caveats. But please note that I am not just being hortatory about the need to keep an open mind on what constitutes globalization, but on where to look for it. As a case in point take the concept of ‘indifferent globality’ (Axford, 2016; Hird, 2010). Inter-alia this promises to augment our understanding of globalization; especially the variant Steger and James label ‘disembodied’ (2019) by alerting us to the world of non- and post-human actors. In the wrack of the COVID19 pandemic and assailed by the threat or promise of more viral contagion, robotics, artificial general intelligence and quantum computing, the concept of indifferent globality adverts new sources of global imagining not, or perhaps scarcely, reliant on human agency (Axford, 2020 2022). Steger and James’ permissive treatment of globalization is also an endorsement of what Michael Burawoy calls public sociology (2016), a means of combating the western ‘universalization’ of knowledge for long couched in the ingrained prejudices of national sociologies. In passing, he also disparages the ‘domination’ of economics and political science in framing the temper of global social science, or a social science of the global; which dominance has also served to narrow the scope and ambition of inquiry.

This is all part of a fruitful address to scholarship that explores the variety and complexity of world-making practice, both exotic and mundane. Roudometof's intervention is of this order too. But if globalization is, as Steger and James opine, the matrix of processes that extend social relations and consciousness across world space and world time (2019: 77) what is de-globalization? And since you mention it, what is post-globalization, the elusive subject of Roudometof's essay? Much abroad these days the latter still gets rather short-shrift as a usable concept despite the fact that it is being asked to carry a considerable analytical burden when describing and predicting the demeanour of the world. By contrast the former is a workaday concept whose value lies in being able to catalogue (and perhaps measure) globalization as a transactional and connective process. Here, and depending on your point of view, what musters as globalization can accommodate both hyperglobalist excess and claims that globalization – usually in its Western and neo-liberal guise – is little short of being dead and buried. As Jan Nederveen Pieterse says, this version of global studies consists of sprawling arrays of data collected and curated by divers actors – governments, corporations, international organizations, epistemic communities, security pacts and the like – for a variety of purposes (2013). And in this warp, the graph of globalization rises and falls depending on trend and circumstance, though possibly in line with greater world-historical forces. It comprises the raw data of global studies and is largely un-theorized, while having purchase in the musings of journalists, free-market politicians and businesses, along with those subaltern groups ‘left behind’ by the juggernaut of market capitalism and the global success of elite cosmopolitanism.

But de-globalization does not signify an inevitable end to globalization, only a change in its density, extensiveness and velocity. On the other hand post-globalization has about it an aura of transformation. It implies radical, not to say systemic, change including the possibility of non-globalization. But what would that look like? Is it even conceivable? When discussing the temper of 21st century globalization the changing state of play admits a number of possible tropes for what is taking place, including an evolutionary metamorphosis; a ‘Great Unsettling’ or ‘Dislocation’ in Steger and James’ sense (2019) or a ‘Great Implosion’ from Barry Gills (2020). Could the idea of transformation also admit just recalibrating the grand signifiers of the previous phase of globalization – markets, states and preponderant power, the international order of states, analogue capitalism, the meaning, shape and location of society and its attendant values? Some commentators have dubbed this prospect re-globalization while others claim they can discern the toils of a ‘new’ globalization (Axford, 2021; Benedikter and Kofler, 2019; Rodrik, 2018).

Without doubt we are witnessing renewed attention to globalization because of the changing nature of 21st century global dynamics; though whether these actually sum to a ‘new’ globalization is rightly contested (Axford, 2021). The world is now more interconnected than ever, albeit in ways not conceived of in the previous millennium and in analogue cultures. It is also more aware than ever of the threats and promises residing in that condition, including the risks of severe dislocation and even multi-species destruction. So, it is commonplace to say that we live in increasingly turbulent times, one crisis plaited with another, for that is disobligingly true. Today there are few takers for any kind of hyperglobalism, with its dénouement in a smooth, networked world characterized by biddable differences. So what have we got? To reiterate: the recently dominant trope of a hegemonic, benign and borderless global order – capitalist, liberal and tolerant of (cultural) diversity – has less and less purchase as an inclusive description of globality. Other contenders, other globalizations, such as ‘justice globalism’ or ‘jihadist globalism’, as well as evidence of multiple routes to bespoke modernities, point up the increasingly fissiparous qualities of the umbrella concept ‘globalization’. An increasingly acerbic multipolarity is the defining feature of this new order, and it elicits both approbation and opprobrium. Some commentators argue that it is a myth, and even those who discern its rise claim that it is unbalanced and therefore very dangerous. The new multipolarity results from the combination of three dynamics. First, a wider distribution of wealth in the world, second, the willingness of (hitherto middle-ranking) states to assert themselves strategically and ideologically and third, the emergence of an increasingly transactional international system, seen in bilateral deals – strategic partnerships and the like or in forms of minilateralism – rather than in global institutions. Populism too can be seen as a distinct (though not singular) challenge to the remnants of Western universalism and embedded liberalism; a feature of the revolt against its hegemony (Axford, 2021). So conceived it too is part of the ideological and policy rebalancing of globalization (Rodrik, 2018).

All this is a good way from the uniform ‘end of history’ envisaged by Fukuyama in the early 1990s, or in visions of a universalised Western modernity, and it is clearly threatening to liberalism and universalism as the paradigm expressions of a post-ideological world. The multipolar cast of 21st century globalization is significantly different from the 20th century version. But it is still an expression of the tension that arises between globalization as a process of interconnection and de-bordering on the one hand, and on the other strains of consciousness, as well as pressing exigencies that resist any such convergence.

To conclude: the much-rehearsed crisis of (Western) liberal capitalism is, along with the travails of Western modernity more generally construed, a staple in accounts of global change, leading to intense arguments about the end or rebirth of modern history. Sometimes this is glossed as a hegemonic shift, the sequential, and even cyclical, passing of preponderant might. But more often today the emphasis is on systemic disruption, disjunction and fragmentation, and on alternative futures, where nothing is certain, and insecurity is rife. In terms of scholarship's attention to things global this is an important development but it adds to scholarly uncertainty. Whether there is a new globalization or we have morphed to a condition of post-globality remains infuriatingly moot. The point is that charting all such possible changes demand an agile scholarship to address global complexity now comprised – inter alia – of non-western, post-colonial, post-capitalist, even post-socialist globalities and a host of global assemblages. This scenario also includes the possibility of a revived brand of civilizational realism seen in the posturing of Russia and China and trumpeted (no pun intended) by the Christian Right in the USA. A truly pluriversal scholarship must be open to evidence of de-globalization, re-globalization and post-globalization, which are highly plausible but still imprecise concepts residing somewhere between the heuristic and the polemical. Needless to say, the weight of all these considerations imparts a nebulous quality to any judgment about putative, let alone seminal, indicators of change.