Some reflections on ‘How should we think about globalization in a postglobalization era?’

Abstract

In ‘How Should We Think About Globalization in A Post Globalization Era?’, Victor Roudometof posits that since 9/11 – that is, the start of the twenty-first century – we have been living in a postglobalization era, by which he means an era marked by the breakdown of the 1990s Washington consensus of neoliberal, economic policy-oriented globalization. He then outlines ways to think about globalization for this new era via redefining integral versus interactive globalization beyond modernization and westernization. While moving away from modernization as telos and Western-centrism is a good idea, one cannot erase the colonial/modern project and its impact globally. Perhaps in the future we may see a different kind of integral and interactive globalization, but for now the modern/colonial imprint still reverberates, and dismissing it is irresponsible.

In ‘How Should We Think About Globalization in A Post Globalization Era?’, Victor Roudometof (2024) posits that since 9/11 – that is, the start of the twenty-first century – we have been living in a postglobalization era, by which he means an era marked by the breakdown of the 1990s Washington consensus of neoliberal, economic policy-oriented globalization. Since the pandemic this era has become even more entrenched. Yet, globalization as a concept, he argues, is so ubiquitous in the social sciences that it is worth retaining, albeit in a self-limiting way. Roudometof begins the essay by outlining two positions currently espoused by scholars of globalization: those who think that globalization is dead, versus those who think the current nationalist tendency is merely a phase in its evolution. The author, rightly, eschews such binaries to analyze the assumptions that undergird the positions, to make a case for a better-defined concept of globalization that can be more generative.

To do so, he begins by portraying the heyday of globalization in the 1990s as one of consensus on privatization, free trade, and global flows of capital, though not necessarily labor. Consensus among whom? Where? For starting in the 1980s, movements throughout the erstwhile Third World, now the Global South, protested the structural adjustment programs, precursors to neoliberal economic policies, imposed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund on their countries as conditionalities for loans. Even in the First World, or the Global North, the 1990s saw protests against the North American Free Trade Agreement, the Seattle protests against the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference, and myriad protests against corporate globalization more generally (e.g. Juris, 2008).

At the intergovernmental level as well, the 1990s were marked by contestations at the various United Nations world conferences: from the Environment Conference in 1992 in Rio, to the Human Rights conference in 1993 in Vienna, to the women's conference in 1995 in Beijing, among others (Desai, 2009). All these world conferences and their accompanying NGO Fora were sites for challenging the inequalities generated by neoliberal globalization. The potency of such protests is evident in the formation of the World Social Forum (WSF) in 2001 led by the Brazilian and Latin American Left. The WSF for over a decade became a space to bring together social movements from across the world which challenged corporate globalization with its settler-colonial, patriarchal, and racist DNA (Conway, 2013). It became an alternative to the World Economic Forum, where industry and political elites met to shape neoliberal globalization and later co-opted activists from the WSF. Such contestations led to the conception of alter globalizations, or globalizations from below, which remain invisible in Roudometof's analysis. Thus, even in the 1990s there was no consensus around even narrowly defined globalization.

Similarly, except among some business, professional, and international NGO jet-setters, it is not clear that even in the 1990s there was a proliferation of cosmopolitan and postnationalist identities. As most feminist scholars noted even back in the heyday, nationalism was an undercurrent in both the North and the South (e.g. Grewal and Kaplan, 1994). The borders even then were selectively open for capital, goods, and labor – a consequence we still deal with today. Yet, the author cites a 24-nation survey conducted by Pew Research in 2023 that suggests that most people feel closer to people in their countries than others across the globe as evidence for a turn to nationalism. Probably, most people even in the 1990s felt that their governments should take care of people at home before those in other countries. Only the business and professional elites, from the North and the South, were comfortable in a cosmopolitanism which, for all its diversity, was still marked by a certain cultural uniformity, as evidenced by the proliferation of similar craft fashion and food trends, along with other material cultural productions.

Beyond the problematic account of a 1990s consensus on globalization, what I find curious is Roudometof's construction of the academic dilemmas related to globalization. As he sees it, the academic dilemma is whether to concede that ‘globalization equals global modernization’, or to see globalization as an intellectual breakthrough ‘that offers a new and different conceptual template for the interpretation of human affairs’. Despite the author's earlier disavowal of false binaries, this framing not only reproduces binaries, but also leads him to offer a solution to the dilemma, which in the name of avoiding ‘Western bias’ would rather erase the past 500 years of Europe's colonial/modern projects.

According to Roudometof, to understand globalization as modernization would open it to a critique of ‘ideological amplification’ or ‘reviving the prescriptive modernization theories of the 1950s and 1960s’, or worse the ‘politically motivated critiques stemming from post-colonial and critical or neo-Marxist viewpoints’. So rather than engage with these critiques or the ‘oppositional readings of global modernization’ that highlight its continuing negative impact on societies in the Global South, he comes up with a new definition of globalization that would provide ‘a broader vision… beyond accounts – even post-colonial or anticolonial ones – that remain centered on the problematic concerning the transatlantic West. Such a vision could lead to inquiries into globalization without modernity’. For Roudometof this is important as humans have been interconnected before the rise of the ‘modern West’, and what he calls the self-limiting definition of globalization leaves the outcomes of such connections open and not predetermined. For example, connectivity between actors could be merely transactional, that is, interactive globalization. Or the exchanges between actors could lead to transformation which he calls integral globalization. But in these two types of globalization, there is no sense of the power differences between actors and whether the various actors seek such transformation or not.

Yet one cannot wish away global modernity. Its settler colonial genocides in the Americas, Oceania, and parts of Africa, enslaved and indentured servitude, and colonial conquests continue to haunt the lives of millions across the globe. Decentering the West in world historical perspective – premodern, modern, and postmodern – is important, as is not assuming the outcomes of interactions between different actors. But given that we know the outcomes of the centrality of the West for the past 500 years, and the continuing consequences of those colonial/modern projects, now to decenter it is not only ahistorical but rather irresponsible. To mark the modernity of globalization of the past 500 years, however, is not to disavow interconnectivity among regions prior to the rise of the West, nor is it to foreclose other possible configurations in the future. After all, even in the most dominant and damaging mode, European colonial/modern projects were challenged in the twentieth century by socialist and national liberation movements, and in the twenty-first century by BRICS with their own agendas of geopolitical and economic dominance.

Furthermore, the self-limiting conceptualization of globalization does not address the problematic that Roudometof identifies in the relationship between global, glocal, and local. While local is clearly spatial and can be delineated in multiple ways, what is the global that combines with the local? If we do not want it to be a stand-in for the West, then where does it reside? Globalization as a process is not the same thing as global, however we define it. Perhaps Appadurai’s (1999) conceptualization of the translocal might better address human connectivity across time and space, without the need for a global that remains unmarked and untheorized.

In sum, while we can all agree that globalization post-9/11, post-2008 recession, and postpandemic looks different, the flows of goods and capital have neither been fully restricted nor reversed. Neoliberal policies continue, albeit in varying ways. While protectionist policies have been enacted in many countries, the supply chains for consumer goods remain global. While the COVID pandemic did disrupt the supply chains, as Peter Goodman (2024) notes, the solution to not relying on China as the global factory has not meant moving production back home. Rather, there has been a big push to look for alternative sites such as India to be the next global factory. Similarly, the United States is also moving operations to Mexico. Even Trump with his xenophobic rhetoric was unable to reintroduce manufacturing on any large scale back to the United States. China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), or the New Silk Road and its interventions on the African continent, however, do suggest that the Roudometof's definition of interactive globalization, of interactions among multiple local actors, may be a generative formulation. But if ‘globalization applies solely to those instances in which phenomena, practices, ideas, models, or in general any specific theme or domain of human action spreads throughout the globe or comes reasonably close to justifying such a claim’, then Western modernity is the only period in world history that we came close to globalization.