Globalization,modernity,and capitalism: On Victor Roudometof's ‘How should we think about globalization in a postglobalization era?’

Abstract

Victor Roudometof's goal is to defend the analytical value of ‘globalization’ against declarations concerning its alleged obsolescence, and especially against theories that associate globalization with Eurocentric narratives of Western modernity. His aim is to demonstrate the fruitfulness of examining the interconnections between different world regions that go beyond conventional temporal frames. In this he succeeds well, but the article has some omissions and contradictions, whose consequences I address in my response. A central one of these is that Roudometof seems to subsume capitalism under modernity, or at the very least avoids integrating the unprecedented intensification of capitalist imperatives to his analysis of cultural globalization and global connectivity, which is particularly problematic in the present historical conjuncture.

Victor Roudometof's (2024) thoughtful analysis of how the concept and paradigm of globalization should be understood today is profoundly conjunctural. That is, it begins with the observation that in contrast to the heyday of globalization debates in the 1990s and in the beginning of the new century, it seems that ‘globalization is over’, or at least ‘withering away’, as a central concept in social sciences.

Many developments have contributed to this condition that stands in stark contrast to the earlier advocacy of globalization theory and the liberal-cosmopolitan optimism to which it was attached. These include the rising geopolitical tensions between major states, the strengthening of authoritarian national-populist parties across the world, and the increasing border controls between countries that block or restrict the movement of immigrant workers and refugees in particular.

Such developments have undermined the central tenets of academic globalization theory that became a key current across social sciences around the turn of the millennium. While its representatives were aware of counter-trends against various forms of globalization, they emphasized flows, mobilities and hybridity, and the emancipatory possibilities for the advancement of cosmopolitan democracy (e.g. Held, 1995) and postnational identities (e.g. Appadurai, 1996). Roudometof charts these tendencies well, although I would add that many sociologists who became seminal advocates of globalization theory represented sociological Zeitdiagnose, a mode of analysis that emphasizes how the ‘global age’ departs from previous eras, rather than focusing on long-term timeframes, which is central for Roudometof.

Thus, in retrospect, the main advocates of sociological globalization theory, including Anthony Giddens, Ulrich Beck, David Held, Zygmunt Bauman, and Manuel Castells, made the error of mistaking the (certainly momentous) conjunctural events of the 1990s ‘for an epochal shift in the character of human society itself’ (Rosenberg, 2005: 59). The huge interest toward globalization was inspired by the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the (neo)liberal proposition that there were no alternatives to capitalism, and the intensification of de-territorialized cultural connections enabled by new information and communication technologies (ICTs). This combination promoted the idea that now, finally, the fetters of multiple transnational forces had been removed, enabling the integration of the globe in unseen ways, and pointing to the dissolution of nation-state sovereignty and imperialism.

An example of such widespread globalization myopia comes from the second edition of Manuel Castells’ (2004) The Power of Identity, volume II of his famous Information Age trilogy. There he considered the post-9/11 return to a powerful state posture by the United States as ‘the last imperial hurrah’ of ‘the last would-be-sovereign state’, which defied a ‘historical logic’ that was pointing to the decentralizing power of ICT networks and increasing global interdependence (Castells, 2004: 344–355). Recently, such a ‘transformationalist’ globalization perspective (Held et al., 1999) has lost its momentum in the face of strong re-assertion of national interests and imperial ambitions by major states.

At the core of sociological globalization theory was the attempt to elevate the categories of space and time as the cornerstones of a new social theory (Rosenberg, 2005). This endeavor relied heavily on problematic arguments concerning media and communications, in particular the assumed transformative power of digital ICTs that would propel humanity to a postnational or cosmopolitan existence (Ampuja, 2014).

As Roudometof correctly notes, the complex empirical record since the beginning of the new century has seriously challenged such media-based arguments. Transnational and national patterns of media use continue to co-exist, and world-wide media flows are still highly hierarchical. The very infrastructure of global digital connectivity is controlled by mainly US-based platform companies (Jin, 2013). And rather than being ‘only one node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes’ (Appadurai, 1996: 31), the United States is still the main node. Despite the rising global popularity of East Asian media cultures, for example, world television and film markets continue to be dominated by US producers (e.g. Mirrlees, 2016). On top of that, non-Western states with their own imperial goals, such as China and Russia, have blocked access to foreign social media websites and strengthened patriotic control of their citizenry via restrictions on media content. The globalization theorists’ expectation that the technological properties of ‘network society’ would lead to decentralization and weakening of nation-state sovereignty has not materialized.

Roudometof uses the notion of post-‘globalization’ to refer to the demise of such perspectives. The reason why he puts quotation marks around globalization is that his goal is to redeem its value not only against these tendencies but especially against theories that associate globalization with Eurocentric narratives of Western modernity, while highlighting the analysis of ‘the interconnections between different world regions’ that go ‘beyond conventional temporal frames’.

Taking his main cues from authors like Robertson (1992) and Hobson (2004), much of what Roudometof writes is familiar from earlier globalization literature and debates in historical sociology. But what makes his argument worthwhile is precisely the effort to assess the analytical status of globalization in the present conjuncture. I agree with his reconstruction of common fallacies made by globalization theorists and with his claim globalization needs to be examined in a world-historical context, which ‘entails decentring the narrative of Western modernity’. This is all commendable, especially since mainstream globalization theory suffers from technocentric presentism that overemphasizes novelties at the expense of historical continuities (Ampuja, 2014).

Despite this, and as is typical for response articles, I have some doubts concerning issues that lie outside Roudometof's views or those that he addresses in a somewhat indefinite way. Before I discuss them, I want to note that, like Roudometof, I find the concept of globalization a necessary and useful one. My qualification, however, is that it remains useful as a descriptive term that inspires, for example, historical studies of world-wide interconnections, but not as an explanatory concept that marks a supposedly new social theory that overtakes previous sociological paradigms (see Rosenberg, 2005).

The reason why I stress this is that, even though globalization theorists fascinated by the Zeitgeist of the 1990s did make historical comparisons (most notably Held et al., 1999), these were typically done in a way that ended up in dubious conclusions concerning epochal transformations caused by new ICTs. This also haunts Roudometof's text to some extent. Here there is no need to deny the point made by Roudometof via Castells that new ICTs lead ‘to the proliferation of de-localized practices and information flows’ and create a ‘space of flows’ that restructures global connections, without, however, replacing ‘traditional geographical space’.

Yet, the problem is what comes next, namely, Roudometof's reference to Castells’ key idea that the ‘space of flows’ constitutes ‘a new spatial model’. This is historically untenable and reveals a very Western-oriented technological determinism at the core of Castells's work (Garnham, 2000). Networks and ‘spaces of flows’ constitute for him ‘the new social morphology of our societies’, which ‘induces a social determination of a higher level than that of the special social interests expressed through the networks’ (Castells, 2000: 500). Yet, despite the extension and speeding-up of global networks via new ICTs, a similar structural logic of ‘spaces of flows’ – the electronic absorption of locales into networks that link them together (although unevenly, as today) – was well established already in the period between 1860 and 1930. This era witnessed the rise of a global electronic communication infrastructure through the actions of capitalist entrepreneurs from different countries, including the United States and Brazil, based on, for example, the telegraph, which ‘supported huge flows of capital, technology, people, news, and ideas’ (Winseck and Pike, 2007: 2). Thus, the ‘spaces of flows’ does not constitute ‘a new spatial model’, and in my view a reference to this ‘overarching conclusion’ in Castells' trilogy (Castells, 2000: 500) does not serve Roudometof's effort to prioritize long-term historical structures.

Roudometof's perspective is motivated, above all, by the idea that we need to dissociate the analysis of globalization from Eurocentric narratives of modernity and to ‘establish the theoretical connections among global, glocal and local’. The latter concepts are spatial in nature, and thus this perspective has affinities with the ‘spatial turn’ that lies at the heart of the academic globalization theory mentioned above. It is therefore not surprising that Roudometof ties his analysis to a spatial problematic, namely ‘the importance of connectivity throughout human history’, which for him is a ‘far superior perspective’ vis-à-vis those that associate globalization with Western modernity.

This is all well and good, but one can always ask questions concerning the assumptions of theoretical orientations in terms of what they include and exclude. For if a theory wants to have insightful things to say, it must ‘identify central concepts to pick out purported key mechanisms and forces within a complex whole’ (McLennan, 1996: 66). Otherwise, it runs the risk in arriving at debilitating indeterminacy. I do not claim that this happens in Roudometof's article, but I think it is worth pointing out what his focus leaves out, and why this is problematic in the present historical conjuncture.

The globalization paradigm represented by Roudometof emphasizes cultural difference and local agency vis-à-vis forces that generate uniformity. Several examples from Roudometof's text testify to this, such as the emphatic claim – presented as an extension of Roland Robertson's view – that ‘diversity is the essence of social life’, so that ‘globalization does not erase all differences’, and ‘history and culture operate autonomously to offer a sense of uniqueness to groups (whether cultures, societies or nations)’. In this he follows Robertson, who argued that his paradigm is ‘a cultural perspective on globalization’, which ‘must involve analytical separation of the factors that have facilitated the shift towards a single world – for example the spread of capitalism, Western imperialism and the development of a global media system – from the general and global agency-structure (and/or culture) theme’ (Robertson, 1992: 28, 55).

Their differences aside, globalization theorists who focus on cultural themes from such a position are indeed united by an aversion to Marxist theories which highlight cultural imperialism and/or capitalist globalization (Ampuja, 2014). For the cultural paradigm, such perspectives miss the multidirectional character of global cultural flows, oscillating between the global and the local, so that both are constantly being reorganized in relation to each other.

Cultural globalization theory is a distinctive perspective that has generated a wealth of insights, acting as a necessary corrective, for example, to simplistic accounts of how Western cultural forms overpower ‘weaker’ local cultures (e.g. Hannerz, 1997). However, my issue with this paradigm, and by extension Roudometof's argument, is that it makes such observations via theoretical equivocations, which remain conspicuously silent on the determination of social and cultural life by capitalism at the time of ‘the unprecedented globalization of capitalist imperatives’ (Murdock, 2004: 27).

The problem here is the tendency by Roudometof and the paradigm that he represents to make no analytical distinction between Western-centric modernization and the globalization of capitalist imperatives. Underlying this omission is the related tendency in international historical sociology from which Roudometof strongly borrows (e.g. Hobson, 2004). In their attempts to grant more significance to the non-Western regions in the historical constitution of the international world order, historical sociologists subsume capitalism under modernity and deny its historical specificity as a system of social relations, or they leave the topic unaddressed (Duzgun, 2018; Wood, 2001). ¹ This creates two types of blind spots that I address in the following.

The first one is the reduction of the capitalist commodification of culture to a question of cultural power between countries or regions (whether conceived as ‘extension of Western modernization’, ‘Westernization’, ‘Americanization’, etc.). However, the world-wide commercialization of media, for example, does not lead to a capitalist monoculture, and it does not have to be discussed through the conceptual lenses noted above. The capitalist compulsion to commodify everything is perfectly capable of catering to cultural difference, and countries all over the world with their own media cultures actively take part in this. Yet, this process has also undeniable dimensions of sameness; media systems throughout the world are compelled increasingly to prioritize advertizers’ interests, such as the promotion of consumer-oriented lifestyles and business-friendly contents. Such trajectories are not merely ‘economic’, for they have obvious cultural implications and imprint themselves in cultural forms. Joseph Straubhaar (2015), a notable cultural globalization researcher specializing in Latin America, captures this aspect well by stating in retrospect that he ‘severely underestimated the underlying power of increasingly global capitalism’ and ‘the implantation of a mass consumer model’, which, via their function as a vehicle for advertising, helped ‘to pull [Brazil's] population into a commercial economy’, together with the help of the local media-cultural innovations (telenovelas) (Straubhaar, 2015: 48–49).

The second one relates to the fact that Roudometof makes only one passing reference to capitalism, noting that in contrast to modernity, ‘the category of globalization is considerably less biased at least from an axiological point of view – but only insofar that it does not view globalization as global modernization or a historically recent phenomenon (or a stage in the development of global capitalism)’. Globalization is, indeed, not a recent phenomenon, and it makes sense to study the ways in which non-Western regions have contributed to the making of the international world order. But I have trouble understanding the analytical merit of avoiding discussions of capitalism with its specific ‘laws of motion’ in this context, as they are deeply consequential for understanding how globalization (in economic, political, social, ecological, and cultural terms) takes form today.

Thus, an answer to the main question set by Roudometof - ‘How should we think about globalization in a post-globalization era?’ - benefits from an engagement with capitalism-specific globalization perspectives. They do not, of course, explain everything within that topic, as the complex diversities of social lives makes it necessary to have different sociological theories and entry points. Nonetheless, it is precisely the universalization of capitalism with its distinctive compulsions (which cannot be reduced to age-old practices of market exchange) – the annihilation of communal systems of social reproduction and their replacement with capitalist commodity production, the imperatives of competition and profit maximization, and a relentless drive to improve labor productivity and develop the forces of production—that have caused the present global ‘polycrisis’. It includes rising social inequality, decaying public infrastructures and services, increasing border controls, pandemics, extreme weather conditions, and the loss of biodiversity. The culprit for these is what Nancy Fraser (2022) aptly calls ‘cannibal capitalism’, a system of social relations that is fast destroying its own means of survival. Surely such concerns need to be integrated to serious analysis of globalization today, and the abovementioned compulsions are also important for explaining the technological forms of global connectivity since the nineteenth century.

To sum up, in my view Roudometof succeeds in demonstrating that globalization still marks an important field of study, and that the concepts he brings forward in his article enrich our understanding of the multifaceted formation of the modern world, in which non-Western countries have been active agents. As Duzgun (2020: 302) reminds us, the whole project of modernity with its ideas of equality, science, cities, arts, literature, and so on were ‘the result of the millennia-old accumulation of universal human struggles and knowledge … found throughout human societies’. These must be understood as different developmental paths instead of conceiving them in the context of European Enlightenment. However, such views need to be complemented with the realization that ever since its inception as a specific social formation from the nineteenth century onwards, capitalism has, because of its inherent geographically expansionary character, imposed its imperatives throughout the world. Without this theoretical standpoint, sociological debate about globalization will be impoverished. At the same time, instead of precluding possibilities for dialogue between paradigms, it leaves ample room to discuss the national and local variances in how those imperatives have been unevenly adopted, how they have changed in various contexts of capitalist transformation, and how they have been socially and culturally challenged from ‘below’ in different regional, national, and local settings.