Postglobalization or reglobalization? A reply to Victor Roudometof

Abstract

As the vitality of the ongoing de/reglobalization debate demonstrates, rethinking globalization in our postglobalization era requires the integration and synthesis of multiple strands of knowledge in a way that does justice to the ever-growing complexity of our globalizing world. While I deeply appreciate Victor Roudometof's urgent call to reappraise globalization conceptually in light of our current ‘postglobalization era’, it is important to point out that such theoretical projects have been underway for some time now. To be sure, these research efforts can and should be strengthened as the current de/globalization debate evolves and broadens.

Much to its credit, Victor Roudometof's (2024) timely article – ‘How Should We Think About Globalization in a Post-Globalization Era?’ – focuses on what has become the central theme in the burgeoning fields of transnational sociology and global studies in our unsettled post-COVID era: the presumed ‘end of globalization’. As the author notes, the shibboleth of globalization's demise has not only made strong inroads into the academic world but has also dominated the public discourse on the subject. Most importantly, he builds his essay by foregrounding a crucial insight: the question framing its title should not be confined to the binary logic of a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response. Rather, Roudometof wisely invites globalization theorists to rethink established key notions and assumptions that constitute the conventional wisdom within the pertinent scholarly community. Thus, his article is explicitly framed as an urgent call to reappraise globalization conceptually in our current populist ‘post-globalization era’ where the dominant neoliberal policy regime of the 1990s has lost much of its appeal.

However, Roudometof's laudable reexamination of globalization theory takes as its point of departure a rather problematic speculation presented as fact: ‘Yet, one is hard-pressed to find sociological engagements that explore post-globalization conceptually.’ I consider this claim speculative because it flies in the face of much empirical evidence. After all, at least since the 2020 outbreak of COVID (and even some years earlier), there has been a robust debate among globalization scholars about ‘deglobalization’. This term refers to the stalling, or even the reversing, of the transnational flows of people, ideas, things, and institutions. During the 2020s, the concept gained much currency not only among globalization thinkers who embrace and advocate this perspective, but also among challengers who interpret deglobalization as ‘reglobalization’.

Surprisingly, Roudometof's important article overlooks this ongoing debate. It contains no bibliographical reference to its main protagonists other than sparse and dated notes related to some of these thinkers’ arguments made before the recent global health and geopolitical crises. Neither the term ‘deglobalization’ nor ‘reglobalization’ appear in his essay, while ‘post-globalization’ is used multiple times in often confusing ways that leave this reader wondering whether this concept is meant to apply to a historical era, a social process, a social condition, or all of these. Hence, the purpose of my short reply is to rectify Roudometof's oversight by introducing the main features and arguments of what we might call the ‘de/reglobalization debate’. This allows me to demonstrate, contra Roudometof, that significant attempts to rethink globalization have been underway for some time.

Let's start our discussion with Didem Buhari's (2023) important contribution, which provides a concise overview of three distinct theoretical currents in the deglobalization discourse. The first account is represented by thinkers who define deglobalization as the reverse or opposite of globalization as measured by its allegedly diminishing component parts. They tend to focus on trade and foreign direct investment and thus present deglobalization as an economic phenomenon that has sparked state-initiated measures toward a less connected world. These writers often regard moderate forms of deglobalization as a useful dynamic with the potential of strengthening democratic forms of decentralization and localization (Foroohar, 2022: 26; Kornprobst and Wallace, 2021). Another variant of this first account presents deglobalization as a necessary contestation of the US-led liberal global order by the rising powers in the Global South led by China, Russia, and India. While pro-market thinkers fear that deglobalization represents a long-lasting structural phenomenon undermining economic growth, this group welcomes it as a temporary phenomenon that weakens Western capitalist hegemony.

The postcolonial flavor inherent in this variant is significantly amplified in what Buhari identifies as the second account of deglobalization. Presented as the re-empowerment of the local and national, this defiant perspective on deglobalization was pioneered by the Filipino sociologist Walden Bello (2004). Since then, it has attracted a large following among thinkers in the Global South as well as sympathetic Northern theorists. At the core of this communitarian perspective lies the demand for a wholesale delinking from the corporate elite-driven globalization system.

But, in the past few years, such ideas about delinking from the global economy – without repudiating capitalist modes of production – have also been articulated on the political right. These entail the fundamental demolition of all forms of globalization through comprehensive policies of de-internationalization initiated by nation-states (Bishop and Payne, 2021a, 2021b). On both ends of the ideological spectrum, then, the ultimate goal of deglobalization understood as localization is the reduction of existing economic and political dependencies on forces external to the nation-state (or bounded region). Indeed, this discussion of the interplay among the local, national, global, and glocal in our postglobalization era could add a new wrinkle to Roudometof's (2016) longstanding sympathy with ‘glocalization’.

Buhari refers to the third approach as the ‘waves of deglobalization model’. This perspective focuses on cyclical economic processes throughout history, when periods of hyperglobalization have been followed by counterphases of deglobalization. For example, the long globalization wave from the 1870s to the 1910s dissipated in the upheavals of World War I and the Great Depression. The ensuing deglobalization backlash took the political form of the totalitarian nationalist movements of the 1930s, which promised to shelter citizens from the negative consequences of unfettered capitalism. Hence, proponents of the waves of the deglobalization model suggest that each globalization wave carries its own seeds of destruction by generating political forces opposed to internationalization. Analyzing deglobalization within this long-durée waves model may help build the knowledge necessary to design global policies aimed at the reduction of extremes on both ends of the deglobalization cycles (Van Bergeijk, 2019: 15).

However, Buhari's meticulous overview of recent deglobalization only hints at what might be considered a fourth emerging academic perspective on the subject: deglobalization reinterpreted as reglobalization. This approach starts with the recognition that deglobalization cannot be essentialized as diminishing global interdependence. As many historical examples demonstrate, connective and disconnected processes are deeply interwoven. Separating them in such binary fashion eclipses more than it illuminates. Unlike the proponents of the deglobalization waves model, reglobalization thinkers also reject the proposition that integrative and disintegrative dynamics simply follow each other like pendulum swings. Rather, they interpret connectivity and rupture as turbulent and multilayered movements that incessantly interact with each other in productive but highly contingent ways. Hence, they consider the inherent tensions and interplays between these opposing forces as the engine of open-ended globalization processes, resulting in unpredictable forms of constant social reconstruction (Benedikter, 2022; Wenzlhuemer, 2023).

Focusing on the increasing complexity of contemporary globalization processes, reglobalization thinkers envision deglobalization neither as a linear nor as an accumulative dynamic, but as an intricate emergent set of processes that establish connections, as well as producing breaks, delays, and absences in various forms and intensities. They admonish globalization theorists to examine more seriously the constructive roles of crisis and ruptures in the forging of new global interdependencies. In their view, analyzing disconnection in this manner also leads to a broader understanding of our unsettled era.

As Roland Benedikter (2022), a leading globalization theorist, emphasizes, ‘reglobalization’ should be adopted in the social sciences as a key concept because it expands our understanding of the extent to which globalization is being reconfigured by a combination of integrative and disintegrative shifts, events, and forces. For Benedikter (2022: 7–32), designing new theoretical models of reglobalization constitutes a crucial task that should appeal to academics but should also attract policymakers eager to find practical solutions to pressing global problems.

Reglobalization perspectives possess the additional virtue of broadening the narrow economic focus that confines the imagination of many deglobalization proponents. Rather than reducing globalization to a monolithic process of growing worldwide economic interconnectivity, reglobalization thinkers emphasize the multidimensionality of the phenomenon. As a result, they foreground the complexity of mixed (dis)integration processes, which can be traced to distinct globalization formations operating at different speeds and intensities. Some theorists who initially started as reglobalization proponents have extended their thinking to create new conceptual frameworks more capable of capturing globalization's seemingly disjointed movements and trajectories in the twenty-first century.

The construction of globalization theories attentive to such disjunctures often starts with the difficult task of creating new globalization typologies that better capture the multiplicity and complexity of global flows. Building on Arjun Appadurai's (1990, 1996) innovative presentation of globalization as a set of complex and disjointed ‘scapes’, Manfred B. Steger and Paul James (2020; Steger, 2024) have introduced such a new theoretical model that they call ‘four social formations of globalization’. In their view, this typology is better equipped to capture reglobalization understood as disjunctive integration dynamics.

Steger and James (2020) refer to the first social formation as embodied globalization, which encompasses the worldwide interconnectivities and mobilities of people, including tourists, refugees, business travelers, and so on. Second, disembodied globalization relates to worldwide interconnectivities and mobilities of increasingly digitized ideas, information, images, and data. Third, objectified globalization involves worldwide interconnectivities and mobilities of things, ranging from tradable commodities transported around the world by gigantic container ships to the molecular components of greenhouse gases. Finally, institutional globalization refers to worldwide interconnections and mobilities of organizations, including transnational corporations, international economic institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), legal institutions like the International Court of Justice, and global sports clubs such as Real Madrid and the New York Yankees.

Steger and James (2020; James and Steger, 2022) liken these four globalization formations to moving tectonic plates whose complex dynamics shape the geology of our planet in profound ways. Possessing both an underlying dynamic structure – a formation – and a visible morphology or shape – a form – such dynamics are bonded by substantial synergies, as well as driven apart by potent antagonisms. In our contemporary period, the movements of the four globalization formations have become increasingly desynchronized and disjointed, thus contributing to the widespread sense of instability and uncertainty. Steger and James (2020) suggest that the most consequential disjuncture destabilizing the current global system has been occurring between its increasingly digitized, disembodied formation and the other three configurations. In short, the growing digitization affects all aspects of everyday life that drive disjunctive globalization (Azhar, 2021).

As measured according to David Held's (1999) four criteria of extensity, intensity, velocity, and impact, disembodied globalization has been charging ahead while the embodied, objectified, and institutional formations are lagging behind. As the mobility of people, things, and institutions fails to keep up with swelling digital flows, the growing stature of the disembodied globalization system begins to devour ever larger pieces of its adjacent formations. For example, the application of three-dimensional printing has been transforming the global merchandise trade built on global value chains – an important aspect of objectified globalization – into regionalized and localized networks of exchange based on digitally enabled production-on-demand facilities located as close to the end market as possible (Livesay, 2017).

Other disjunctive globalization thinkers like Richard Baldwin (2019) refer to the ongoing digital transformation of previously objectified and embodied forms of transnational interconnectivity as the coming ‘globotics upheaval’ impacting the manufacturing sector by eliminating millions of embodied jobs and threatening to overwhelm the human capacity to adapt. Even the service sector is being cannibalized by disembodied globalization's growing ability to transform embodied workers thousands of miles away into digital tele-migrants by means of collaborative software packages. In short, the disjunctures created by accelerating digital globalization have resulted in social disintegration and the growth of unaccountable power. Finally, disjunctive globalization thinkers argue that the 2020–2023 coronavirus pandemic has further accelerated and intensified the systemic dynamics of disjunctive globalization that were already underway prior to the outbreak (James and Steger, 2022).

As the vitality of the ongoing de/reglobalization debate demonstrates, rethinking globalization in our postglobalization era requires the integration and synthesis of multiple strands of knowledge in a way that does justice to the ever-growing complexity of our globalizing world. While I deeply appreciate Victor Roudometof's urgent call to reappraise globalization conceptually in light of our current postglobalization era, it is important to point out that such theoretical projects have been underway for some time now. To be sure, these research efforts can and should be strengthened as the current de/globalization debate evolves and broadens.