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Home , Arjun Appadurai, Connectivity (media), First globalization, Globality, Paul James (academic)

Disjunctive in the Era of the Great Unsettling

Manfred B. Steger and

Globalization is now at its most uneven and disjunctive phase in human history. The current planetary COVID-19 crisis has combined with the vulnerabilities of global to disrupt social routines around the world. Most national borders have been closed to travellers other than those returning home. The value of stock- fluctuations has exceeded those of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and is overtaking those of the Great

Depression. Supermarket shelves in the world’s wealthiest , once carrying multiple competing brands of toilet paper and hand sanitizers, have been cleared daily by consumers apprehensively stockpiling essentials. ‘Social distancing’ has become a ubiquitous global term and government-mandated practice while instances of ‘distant socializing’ via such digital platforms as Zoom and Google Hangout have exploded. The neoliberal shibboleths of financial management have, for a time, been discarded in favour of calls for massive government emergency bailouts and old-fashioned Keynesian stimulus packages. Indeed, commentators have referred to the worldwide 2020 coronavirus pandemic as a ‘historic trigger event’ that has left social life as we know it unrecognizable. As a report of the Imperial

College COVID-19 Response Team (2020) concludes, the social effects of the measures which are needed to achieve the global policy goal of epidemic suppression will be profound.

To be sure, each of the monumental global shifts since the Great Depression has had major repercussions on social life. But the magnitude of the current moment of the ‘Great

Unsettling’—shorthand for the intensifying dynamics of instability, disintegration,

1 insecurity, dislocation, relativism, inequality, and degradation that are threatening familiar lifeworlds—is unprecedented in its compounding confluence of events (Steger and James,

2019). Despite numerous claims to the contrary, however, none of this is to suggest that globalization-in-general is waning.1 Rather, we are witnessing processes of contradiction and unsettling that require new lines of enquiry leading to alternative understandings. By

‘new’, we mean a renewed clarification of the basics of critical and engaged social theory

(Steger and James, 2019). While the basics of such a theory are contestable and require careful elucidation, some of its key points can be listed readily: social processes are never singular or one-dimensional/one-directional; embracing contradiction and accepting dialectical dynamics is crucial for social analysis; change and continuity are not binaries but bound up with each other; new terms like ‘fluidity’ and ‘liquidity’ are not in themselves useful theoretical categories for understanding social complexity; economics, even when understood in terms of the modes and relations of capitalist production, is not the overriding determinant of all social action; and ‘epochs’ are only the names we give to the dominant characteristics and gestalt of a given period. Still, even enunciated briefly, these basics provide further direction for useful global analysis: the world is not flat (contra Friedman,

2007); history has not ended (contra Fukuyama, 1992); nature has not been reduced to a human-mediated construction (contra McKibben, 1990); and large-scale pandemics are not basically under control (contra Harari, 2015). To understand the present complexity of

1 See, for example, the intervention by Branko Milanovic (2020). The usually discerning economist replicates of common mistake building his argument on a narrow conception of and its uneven slowing down in the area of , and then extrapolating to both economic relations in general and globalization in general. It is particularly blinkered to say that globalization-in-general is slowing down at a time when the whirlwind of a global pandemic is at the centre of world events. See also Farrell and Newman (2020).

2 globalization dynamics, we must resist the tendency to make one-dimensional, catchy tropes stand in for historically sensitive, interpretative theory.

It is in the contemporary context of exploding global crises that take as the point of departure for this article one of the most important interventions into social theory of the late twentieth century—a period which seems now a lifetime ago. This scholarly effort resulted in the remarkable anthology Global (Featherstone, 1990), published in the formative years of Theory, Culture and (TCS). Taking the nexus between theory and practice seriously, the TCS volume focused on ‘globalization’—especially its cultural and political aspects—at a time when the long-run phenomenon of ‘worldwide time-space compression’ (Harvey, 1989) was for the first time being named as such. Global Culture brought together scholars who made seminal contributions and key conceptual innovations to the emerging field of ‘’ (Steger and Wahlrab 2017): ,

Zygmunt Bauman, Peter Beyer, Ulf Hannerz, Jonathan Friedman, Anthony King, Roland

Robertson, Bryan Turner and .

The TCS volume was published during an era that brought to the surface unsettling undercurrents that had been in motion since the middle of the twentieth century. These insecurities about basic issues of existence go deep into questions about the nature of time, space, embodiment and knowledge. Particular to the 1990s, with a longer emergent history going back decades, Western power elites espousing their neoliberal credo were intensifying their ideational projection of providential and globally integrating markets. This ascendant paradigm of free-market economic globalization broadened its ideological appeal through the influence of new transnational media corporations, which saturating the world with images and of a shrinking planet. Powered by cyber-capitalism, new modalities of

3 electronic communication emerged, exemplified by the Internet and World Wide Web. The digital revolution intensified and expanded the spread of ‘globalisms’—that is, globalizing political (Steger, 2020b). At the same time, and changes in relations of capitalist production also surged. People working on what came to be known as

‘zero-hours contracts’ or ‘flexible’ employment conditions were living increasingly precarious lives while a small layer on top of the income-hierarchy experienced phenomenal wealth increases (Boltanski and Chiapello 2006; Piketty, 2014). And yet, large segments of this new ‘precariat’ (Standing, 2016) succumbed to their market-globalist utopia, thinking that they, too, would eventually reap the material benefits of growing interconnectivity. At the same time, scores of dissenters were attracted to the burgeoning alter-globalization movements that burst into the open in the last years of the Roaring Nineties.

Three decades on, the surface events and ideological slogans may have changed, but the era of the Great Unsettling has further intensified. A global flux of national populism, starting in the mid-2010s, has shifted mainstream public perceptions of globalization, with many now believing that the market globalist experiment of transcending the nation-state has spiralled out of control and needs to be curbed (Judis, 2016; Norris and Inglehart, 2019). The digital , mixed with a relativization of what should count as ‘truth’ and ‘facts’, have played a significant role in hollowing out the legitimacy of conventional political ideologies and parties, thus shaking the very pillars of liberal democracy. And, as we point out at the outset of this essay, the COVID-19 crisis has brought about a comprehensive disruption of face-to-face relations across the world, while depressing global trade, devastating employment, and rattling finance.

4 Even taken together, however, these processes do not add up the popular charge of

‘’—the curtailing of globalization tout court. A more discerning analysis must approach globalization not as a single phenomenon primarily based on world trade and transnational financial flows, but as a multi-braided and multidimensional set of processes of both conjuncture and disjuncture. Indeed, our moment of the Great Unsettling offers a critical opportunity to take stock of the current state of the intersecting processes of globalization and also speculate on its future trajectory. To this end, this article revisits and re-engages some pertinent themes raised thirty years ago in the pathbreaking Global Culture issue. In particular, we explore the crucial role of structural divergences and convergences that have been developing among major formations of globalization. Our special focus on the significance of disjuncture borrows from insights first articulated by Arjun Appadurai in the

1990 TCS volume. Second, we appreciate that Roland Robertson’s earliest mapping of the history of the globalization process. Calling the latest period ‘Uncertainty Phase’, he notes that this phase began ‘in the 1960s and displayed crisis tendencies in the early 1990s’ (1990:

27). Third, we draw on Mike Featherstone’s insight that the ‘binary logic which seeks to comprehend culture via the mutually exclusive terms of homogeneity/heterogeneity, integration/disintegration, unity/diversity, must be discarded’. Here, the example of the

2020 coronavirus pandemic is especially instructive. Indeed, as John O’Neill wrote in in the

TCS anthology, ‘sociology cannot remain ideologically ignorant of virology’ (1990: 330).

While we depart from some of the frameworks explicitly developed in Global — especially the conceptualizing of globalization primarily in terms of flows, uncertainties, or globalizing panics that confirm the world order—our own work has been greatly facilitated by insights expressed in the 1990 volume. Ultimately, we argue that gaining a better

5 understanding of the current globalization system and its dynamics requires a new framework that moves from a mapping of different domains of globalization—economics, politics, culture and ecology—to an elaboration of different formations of globalization ranging from the embodied to the disembodied. This analytic shift allows us to identify and describe multiple disjunctive relationships that have developed among and within these formations and shape not only the morphology of the contemporary globalization system but also cast a long shadow on its future dynamics.

Conceptual Frameworks of Globalization: Old and New

Let us begin with some preliminary points. We define globalization as a complex ‘matrix’ or

‘system’ of multiple dynamics characterized by the expansion and intensification of social relations and consciousness across world-space as understood in world-time (Steger and

James, 2019: 112). There are important provisos to this definition: first, globalization is geographically uneven; second, it does not always translate into enhanced mobility, but can also slow down, disrupt, and disconnect; third, the intensity and scope of global interconnectivity is routinely overestimated in a world where the nation-state still colours the bulk of social interactions; and, fourth, the subjective aspects of globalization—ideas, ideologies, imaginaries, and ontologies2—tend to be downplayed in a public discourse that largely equates globalization with transnational flows of goods, capital, information, and people.

2 Although this four-fold framework enables a better analysis of various levels of subjective global relations, it is always understood as constituted in connection to objective global relations.

6 We consider globalization a ‘system’, because the material and ideational boundaries of what is being analyzed need to be simply delineated. Here, the concept of ‘system’ requires careful definition that meets the test of analytical coherence. To conceptualize a system as

‘closed’ is only possible through an act of analytical simplification. Thus, naming a system such as ‘globalization’ requires the abstracted bringing together of a complex and multiscalar spatial relations (Sassen, 2003). In this sense, a system needs to be defined as a bounded configuration of related elements that interact with each other in complex, living ways that over time establish patterns or structures of social practice. In turn, then, system dynamics need to be understood in the broad context of formations, forces, critical issues, and human responses that bear upon the system in question. Thus, we must remember that modelling or even describing a system like globalization and its dynamics is only possible if we draw away—abstracting—various ‘domains’ and ‘formations’ from the inter-relational complexity of our chosen object of inquiry.

Keeping these considerations in mind, let us consider the current status of globalization in the era of the Great Unsettling. Two probing questions guide our assessment of the present moment. First, do we find ourselves at the beginning of an enduring ‘deglobalization’ phase or are we experiencing the convulsive birth pangs associated with the transition to a new phase in the of the system? Second, and relatedly, is the dominant conceptual framework of globalization still adequate today or does the current moment call out for a new explanatory scheme and a new set of conceptual tools to help explain present and future dynamics?

Any attempt to characterize our present moment involves an interpretation of vast data sets that have split globalization experts into two antagonistic camps. Pessimists posit a

7 retreat of globalization measured by its allegedly diminishing component parts (Livesay,

2017; King, 2017; O’Sullivan, 2019). Optimists, on the other hand, read the current moment as an advance of globalization according to the purported expansion of its main dimensions

(Baldwin 2016; Schwab 2016; Altman et al., 2019; Suominen, 2019). Ironically, these clashing perspectives are presented with complete confidence and certainty that belies our current condition of uncertainty. Both sides have presented empirical evidence in support of their respective positions. For example, the 2018 KOF Index of Globalization records a downward movement for 2017—the first since 1975. It shows that world trade in goods and services has levelled off and cross-border financial flows have dipped from 2007 to 2016— returning to about the 1996 level. Conversely, the 2018 DHL Global Connectedness Index shows that the world’s interdependence reached a new high in 2017. Similarly, the 2016

McKinsey Global Institute Connectedness Index reveals that the amount of cross-border bandwidth in 2014 had grown 45 times larger than in 2005, suggesting that the world has become more digitally connected than ever before.

Thus, the dominant conceptualization of globalization as divided into specific

‘dimensions’ and ‘components’ goes a long way in explaining the discrepancy in evaluating the current moment. Pessimists tend to focus on the economic and political domains such as trade, FDI, and lagging structures, whereas optimists seize on technological and ideational aspects such as exploding digital flows and cultural mixing.

Breaking the stalemate requires us to move beyond legitimate methodological issues of measurement to a more fundamental theoretical re-evaluation of the dominant dimension- based globalization framework itself.

8 Since the emergence of the academic field of global studies in the late 1990s, scholars have recognized the enormous difficulties of constructing a systematic and integrative theory of globalization (Axford, 2013; Steger and Wahlrab, 2017; Darian-Smith and McCarty,

2018). Hence, across the field of global studies, different writers have opted to present the compression of space and time as differentiated sets of related processes, which cannot be reduced to a single entity but unfold at uneven speeds and intensities in specific domains of social life. First, they variously identified the major social dimensions of globalization, most usefully summarized as the economic, political, cultural, and ecological. In this, the 1990 TCS collection was pre-eminent in bringing the domain of culture into contention, particularly in

Margaret Archer’s insight that ‘tracing how cultural contradictions within and between belief systems make just as important a contribution to as anything going on in the structural domain’ (1990: 117). Thus, the anthology as a whole worked contra to mainstream contributions on globalization that tended reduce globalization to economic flows.

Second, key scholars of globalization named its main spatio-temporal properties as

‘extensity’, ‘intensity’, ‘velocity’, and ‘impact’ (Held et al., 1999). Both of these moves work at one level of analytical abstraction: empirical generalization. Nestled under the umbrella term ‘multidimensionality’, these dimensions and properties provided the bricks and mortar for the dominant framework that shaped the globalization debates of the last quarter century. It also served two important functional objectives. First, it made it easier for globalization researchers to accomplish their analytical task of breaking the enormous bulk of their subject into more easily digestible pieces. Second, it allowed them to work in a multi- and transdisciplinary fashion on the collective project of grasping globalization in its totality

9 while at the same time bringing their special academic expertise to bear on their analysis of its specific domains.

Drawing analytical distinctions to demarcate distinct aspects of the phenomenon under consideration is indispensable in any scientific endeavour. The violence of abstraction committed against real-life complexity can be lessened by the introduction of sustainable and coherent taxonomies and classification schemes, but not avoided altogether. Yet, as we noted above, it is an open question whether the dominant globalization framework anchored in the familiar categories of economy/politics/culture/ecology remain sufficient for understanding current dynamics. Our doubts derive primarily from an observation made by virtually all globalization scholars regardless of their conflicting assessments of the current moment: the domains of politics, culture, economics, and ecology have been subjected to formidable convergence dynamics. As a result, they have become enmeshed and interrelated in more complex ways than ever before (Crouch, 2019: 44; Bridle, 2018: 5; Stiglitz, 2018: 23;

O’Sullivan, 2019: 8–9). Separating out these conventional domains too easily—except for doing so reflexively for analytical purposes—eclipses more than it reveals about current dynamics.

Consider, for example, the role of Cambridge Analytica and WikiLeaks in the 2016 US presidential election. Or the development of the Chinese ‘One Belt One Road’ initiative across dozens of countries. Or the construction of the International Space Station requiring the co- operation of five participating regional space agencies. Or President Trump’s hostile tweets chiding the American football quarterback Colin Kaepernick for taking the knee at the opening playing of the national anthem (followed by a global debate that went viral on social media). Or, indeed, let us return to the spread of a virus in 2020 that is shaking up global

10 capitalism. Are these examples of economic, political, cultural, or ecological globalization?

Our choice would be ‘all of the above’.3 These adjectives are still useful when used carefully, but we need additional levels of analysis in order to understand tensions, disjunctures and contradictions that are not just empirical. In short, the conventional domain scheme needs to be located in a larger analytical framework. Our argument is not that we should give up on the well-used social categories of economy, politics, culture, and ecology. Rather, their status in the current globalization system should be that of domain qualifiers operating in overlapping fashion within and across a series of what might be considered integrative and differentiating formations of globalization.

What are these formations? Embodied globalization refers to the physical mobility of human bodies across the world. It is the oldest formation of globalization and endures in the contemporary movements of refugees, migrants, workers, travellers, entrepreneurs, digital nomads, and tourists. Object-related globalization covers the mobility of physical objects across the world, in particular commercial goods, traded commodities, and tangible exchange tokens such as coins and notes. But it also includes industrial refuse such as greenhouse gas emissions and various transboundary entities such as plastics, pesticides, nuclear waste, and viruses (HIV, SARS, N1H1, COVID-19). Institutionally related globalization refers to global mobility conducted through the ‘agents’ of , states, institutions, TNCs,

INGOs, churches, sports clubs, and so on. Like the other three formations, it has a long history running from the empires of antiquity to contemporary global supply-chains. Disembodied

3 The ‘ecological’ might appear the odd-dimension out, except perhaps in relation to COVID-19. We define the ecological as the practices, discourses, and materialities, extant and consequential, that cross the intersection of the social and the natural realms, including the important dimension of human engagement with and within nature. This means that the human body is an ecological materiality, just as it produces cultural meaning and is a medium for the extension of political power and economic management.

11 globalization pertains to the relations formed through intangible things and processes including the exchange and communication of ideas, words, images, meanings, knowledge, sounds, electronic texts, software programs and novel cyber-assets such as blockchain- encoded cryptocurrencies. Since the digital revolution in the 1990s, many of these movements have occurred as electronic transactions in cyberspace.

While all of these four principal formations operate within each particular historical moment, their dynamics and limits can be enduring, emergent, residual, and dominant at different times and places. In other words, we can picture these macro-configurations of globalization as perpetually moving tectonic plates possessing both an underlying structure

(‘formation’) and visible morphology or shape (‘form’). Bonded by substantial synergies and convergences, they are also driven apart by significant tensions and divergences. Appadurai’s

(1990) pioneering intellectual contribution to the study of globalization lies in his recognition of globalization as a complex, overlapping, and disjunctive order. However, his conceptual model relied on a reification of the conventional economics/politics/culture template to designate five ‘scapes’ under which global flows occur could be classified. Noting that human history had always been characterized by disjunctures in such flows, Appadurai emphasized that the sheer speed, scale, and volume of each of these flows had become so great in the late twentieth century that the analysis of disjunctures had become central to understanding the globalization system. Still, his prudent use of the term ‘global cultural economy’ perhaps suggests that Appadurai already intuited three decades ago the dynamics leading to an even more overlapping and intertwined field of economy-politics-culture whose analysis required the introduction of a new conceptual framework.

12 Globalization Dynamics: Present and Future

The first, and perhaps most consequential, movement of disjuncture destabilizing the current globalization system has been occurring exogenously between the increasingly digitalized disembodied formation of globalization and the other three configurations. To put it in a nutshell, the former has been charging ahead while the others have been relatively constrained—as measured in terms of their extensity, intensity, velocity, and impact. On the surface, this great digital leap pertains to everything a group of globalization analysts associate with the ongoing ‘fourth industrial revolution’: exploding data flows, multiplying computer processing-power, novel digital devices and software packages, the expansion of bandwidth and the emergence of 5G networks. In communications and data analysis, advanced cloud computing has intersected with machine translation, digitized speech- technologies, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Global exchange relations have been speeded up through the growth of the platform economy and global commodity-chain management processes, including what has been projected as the Internet of Things.

Production has become increasingly automated and trans-spatial through robotics and artificial intelligence. And finance has become one of drivers of global capitalism with derivatives markets continues to explode, along with proliferating intangible assets and the expansion of blockchain technology beyond cryptocurrency—all despite the Global Financial

Crisis. International studies scholar Richard Baldwin (2019) refers to this exogenous disjunctive movement as a ‘globotics upheaval’ that has been sweeping across the conventional economy/politics/culture divide.

13 As the mobility of people, things, and institutions fails to keep up with the broadening of digital networks and the deepening of electronic interconnectivity, the growing stature of disembodied flows in the globalization system begins to scrape off pieces of its adjacent tectonic plates. For example, the application of 3D printing is transforming the global merchandise trade built on global value chains—an aspect of object-related globalization— into regionalized and localized networks of exchange based on digitally enabled production- on-demand as close to the end market as possible. Familiar neoliberal practices of

‘’ and ‘’—hallmarks of object-related globalization—have become destabilized and even reversed as emergent disembodied globalization makes ‘reshoring’ an attractive option for many companies. Similarly, the service sector is being cannibalized by digital globalization’s growing ability to transform embodied workers thousands of miles away into disembodied tele-migrants by means of new collaborative software packages like

Slack or Office 365 and electronic project-management platforms like Trello or Basecamp

(Baldwin, 2019: 139).

Political economist Finbarr Livesey (2017: 171) calls the tendency of such turbocharged disembodied globalization to devour its lagging cousins, ‘physical deglobalization’. While this term captures some of qualities of exogenous disjuncture described above, we would like to point out that the flipside of ‘deglobalization’ is ‘reglobalization’, that is, a profound rearrangement of its constituent formations that move at different speeds and at different levels of intensity. To be sure, the current globalization system still entails significant embodied and object-related dynamics—embodiment and place remain a grounding basis of the human condition—but the story of the moment is undoubtedly the emergent power and significance of its disembodied formation.

14 Our new conceptual framework also enables us to push back much more effectively against the common claim that globalization no longer matters. Typically, such assertions present embodied and object-related globalization such as declining trade and foreign-direct investment flows as though these were still the dominant dimension and thus represent the sole standards by which to judge the allegedly diminishing significance of globalization in general. In fact, however, globalization still matters a lot—just not in the same way as it did twenty-five years ago (Steger and James, 2019).

Finally, the recognition that today’s dominant form of globalization is ‘disembodied’ also opens up new perspectives on key concepts in the social sciences. It informs, for example, the study of power by bringing into sharper focus novel forms of disembodied power seeking to control and exploit human behaviour. This has been the subject of a recent landmark studies authored by Shoshana Zuboff (2019) and Timothy Ström (2019). These scholars describe and analyse exploitative capitalist practices of corporate digital giants Google,

Facebook, and that unilaterally claim human experience as free material for translation into behavioural data designed to fuel and shape consumerist desires towards profitable outcomes. Such ‘surveillance capitalism’, or what is better called ‘cybercapitalism’, strips away the illusion that the networked form has some kind of indigenous moral content, that being ‘connected’ is somehow intrinsically pro-social, innately inclusive, or naturally tending toward the of knowledge. Digital connectivity can thus become a mere means to commercial ends: a disembodied form of power that feeds on every aspect of the embodied human experience (Zuboff, 2019: 516–20). As Barrie Axford (2020) notes, the prospect of a ‘datafied’ world dominated by data-mining corporate giants ‘draws attention to the post-human features of a new global cultural economy, wherein communication

15 technologies constitute an indifferent of machines and the hidden agency of algorithms’. In other words, the dominant form of global capitalism retains its central feature—exploitation—but does so in increasingly abstracted ways, even as they impact heavily the bodies of workers and consumers.

Indeed, it is crucial to clarify our theoretical argument about the dominance of disembodied global relations in the context of today’s path-breaking research on cybercapitalism. First, in objective terms, Zuboff considers surveillance capitalism a new phase in the history of capitalism. Our approach, however, suggests that dominance of disembodied relation is remaking all modes of practice, not just communications and the gathering of data. Artificial intelligence, robotics, computerized analysis, biotechnologies, and so on, are reconfiguring all forms of production, exchange, organization and enquiry, as well as communications. Zuboff suggests that the new form of capitalism has shifted its source of raw materials from nature to human nature. As she puts it, ‘Industrial capitalism transformed nature’s raw materials into commodities, and surveillance capitalism lays its claims to the stuff of human nature for a new commodity invention. Now it is human nature that is scraped, torn, and taken for another century’s market project’ (Zuboff, 2019: 94). Our point is that this kind of scrapping is one crosses the nature-culture divide. It is a generalized process that goes far beyond surveillance.

Second, in subjective terms, disembodied globalization (and localization) is unsettling the foundations of both modern and traditional personhood. The exogenous movement of globalization’s disjunctures and conjunctures—as part of the broader and disproportionate growth of its disembodied formation at the expense of the other configurations—means that people around the world find themselves increasingly creating their lives in a digitally

16 extended layer of meaning and interchange. As a result of this advancing process of

‘cyberspatiation’, people romanticize fixity of embodied place while at the same time becoming increasingly alienated from its perceived sluggishness and lack of plasticity.

People thus spend increasing time in the malleable arena of cyberspace. For example, in

2018, the average American spent more than six hours a day online, 24 hours a week online, which equates to more than 100 days a year (Salim, 2019). The growing disjuncture between their experiences of intensifying global interconnectivity in virtual reality and their existence in the more slowly moving spheres of embodied, object-related, and institutional globalization produces what G.W.F. Hegel (1977) called an ‘unhappy consciousness’ that experiences itself as divided within and against itself. Similarly torn between their new attachment to the pleasures (and pain) of digital mobility and their old affection for the political and cultural fixity of familiar local and national life worlds, people under conditions of advanced globalization experience heightened sentiments of anxiety, alienation, anomie, and anger (Standing, 2016).

Evidence from the COVID-19 crisis reinforces our point. The effect of more embodied forms of globalization (travel and migration) and object-related globalization (viral transmission) continue to bear against the dominant formations of abstracted interchange even as they become curtailed or remade in the name of . John O’Neill’s 1990

TCS essay describes how the phenomenon of ‘socially constructed carnal ignorance’ in relation to the HIV/AIDS crisis4 generated both global-local panic and personal risk-taking.

It accentuated disjunctures between the subjective autonomy of the consuming individual

4 Human immunodeficiency virus infection and acquired immune deficiency syndrome.

17 and the limits of embodied relations and identities. COVID-19 takes this to a new generality.

Its attendant ‘barbarisms’—including a ‘social order founded upon a contagion model of social relations’ (O’Neill, 1990: 336) treat embodied relations as part of the problem.

Thus, the objective disjunctive dynamics among the major tectonic plates of globalization work their way into the subjective sphere of globalization comprised of meanings, ideas, ideologies, moods, sensibilities, and identities. One specific manifestation is the mounting tension between the rising global buoyed by swelling digital flows and the resurgent national imaginary opposed to the mobility of ‘alien’ Central American bodies ‘invading’ the U.S. ‘homeland’ or cheap Chinese steel exports flooding the domestic market. We witness the proliferation of everyday life paradoxes such as American anti- immigration activists making online bookings for their vacation at the Mexican Riviera Maya;

French industrial workers rushing to buy the new China-assembled iPhone 11; and German neo-Nazis beefing up their worldwide digital presence.

National populist leaders, in particular, have benefitted from the disjunctive production of the unhappy consciousness. Experts in utilizing the ideological echo chamber of the global social media, they accuse footloose ‘cosmopolitans’ of cheating the toiling masses and reproach the ‘liberal media’ for spreading ‘fake news’. Fattening their , , and

YouTube platforms with transnationally produced ‘alternative facts’, the captains of our post-truth era successfully globalize their antiglobalist slogans, each communicating with and learning from each other in a global context. For example, Donald Trump’s anti- impeachment accusation of ‘witch hunt’ was seamlessly turned into indicted Israeli Prime

Minister Netanyahu’s campaign rallying cry of ‘witch hunt’. Thus, national populism is not just a backlash against globalization, but also an expression of it (Steger, 2019).

18 The second movement of disjuncture has been occurring endogenously within each of the four major globalization formations. Multiple fissures have emerged as a result of the tense relationships among its multiple strands. Due to the spatial limits of this essay, one short example drawn from the sphere of embodied globalization must suffice. It involves the social consequences of contradictory flows of human bodies classified as ‘immigrants’ versus

‘business travellers’ and ‘tourists’. Long before COVID-19, most national governments in the

Global North have taken drastic measures to curtail the former by tightening their immigration policies, especially with regard to low-skill migrants and political refugees. In fact, their policies are much more restricted today than they were in the nineteenth century or even in the immediate post- II period (Peters, 2017). Yet, the same governments actively seek to attract the latter. Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, business and leisure travel had never been more popular. In 2018, there were 1.4 billion overseas arrivals throughout the world. The total number or international and domestic trips taken— disproportionally by more prosperous people in the North—stood at a staggering 7 billion.

By 2019, travel had become the second fastest growing industry worldwide, injecting a whopping $12.33 trillion into the global economy (Steger, 2020a: 11). It remains to be seen what the long-term consequences of the 2020 coronavirus pandemic on global business and leisure travel will be.

It is not difficult to see how such incongruencies among various flows of people not only lead to rising levels of economic inequality, but also foster political polarization and cultural resentment and fragmentation. Scores of similar examples can be drawn from disembodied globalization such as the tension between digital cultural flows and online copyright piracy; from object-related globalization, including the strain between global merchandise and

19 transboundary pollutants and new viruses like COVID-19; and from institutionally related globalization, such as the frictions between the expansion of radical Islamist networks and the proliferation of political surveillance regimes. The broadening and deepening of endogenous disjunctural dynamics reinforce observations made earlier in our discussion of exogenous change: the current moment of globalization is characterized by enhanced levels of instability, polarization, and fragmentation that jeopardize the integrity and coherence of the entire system. Instead of certainty, predictability, and the inevitability of progress promised by modern science and economics, we find ourselves today in the volatile and unpredictable world of a globalization system beset by runaway dynamics of its own making.

Concluding Speculations

This rather gloomy assessment of the present informs our brief concluding speculations on how current globalization dynamics might change going forward. Unfortunately, we see little evidence of dramatic reversals. The disjunctive globalization dynamics outlined in this article are likely to intensify within the next ten to fifteen years. We are now living through the perhaps most visible wave of the Great Unsettling brought on by the coronavirus pandemic—a specific manifestation of object-related globalization that serves as a catalyst for the further acceleration of disembodied globalization. In spite of mounting problems of cybersecurity and systematic attempts of authoritarian governments to disconnect their citizens from worldwide electronic networks, digital globalization continues to pull even further ahead of its environing formations. To reiterate, COVID-19 has only accelerated these tendencies as schools and universities around the world have made online teaching their

20 default mode of instruction and millions of people have switched to working ‘remotely’ from their homes. In addition to some perceived benefits such as the elimination of the treaded commute to work, the materially abstracting effects of globalization’s disjunctive dynamics will continue to feed an unhappy consciousness savouring the glories of the global imaginary yet unwilling to let go of the national imaginary.

We agree with insightful commentators like (2018), Klaus Schwab

(2016), and Colin Crouch (2019) that a principal task at hand is profound social reform at the global level with the aim of ‘managing globalization better’. However, we would go much further in the direction of social transformation. From the perspective of the present analysis, improving globalization depends in the first instance on the enhancement of institutional capabilities to make the increasingly complex and differentiated formations of globalization work in a more coherent and balanced manner. Even if we confined our efforts to moderating the exogenous hypermovement of disjuncture—by slowing down disembodied globalization and recharging the rest, particularly embodied relations—this task would be immensely difficult. After all, the two main mechanisms required to achieve this goal—the strengthening of global solidarity and the assemblage of more widely shared and effective global governance architecture—are unrealistic prospects in our national populist era and under the current crisis conditions of the globalization system. The nation- state might be weakening, but the attachment to national interests remains major driver in the dawning geopolitical order of the twenty-first century.

Still, our introduction of a new conceptual globalization framework based on four major formations makes it easier to avoid the common mistake of confusing global reconfiguration with deglobalization. Our analysis suggests that globalization is far from finished. The

21 flipside of the apparent degeneration of the current globalization system—experienced as the Great Unsettling that has been turbocharged by the worldwide spread of COVID-19 and its devastating social impacts—might well be the regeneration of a new globalizing system born of the disjunctive dynamics of its predecessor’s constituent formations.

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Manfred Steger

Email: [email protected] Postal Address: University of Hawai'i-Manoa, Department of Sociology, Saunders Hall 236, 2424 Maile Way, Honolulu, HI 96822, USA.

Manfred B. Steger is Professor of Sociology at the University of Hawai’i-Manoa and Global Professorial Fellow at the Institute of Culture and Society, Western Sydney University. He has served as an academic consultant on globalization for the US State Department. He is the author of twenty-eight books on globalization and social theory, including: The Rise of the Global Imaginary: Political Ideologies from the French Revolution to the Global War on Terror (Oxford University Press, 2008) and Globalization Matters: Engaging the Global in Unsettled Times (with Paul James; Cambridge University Press, 2019).

25 Paul James Email: [email protected] Postal Address: Institute for Culture and Society Western Sydney University Locked Bag 1797, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia

Paul James is Professor of Globalization and Cultural Diversity in the Institute for Culture and Society at the Western Sydney University. He is an editor of Arena publications and author or editor of over 30 books including Globalization Matters: Engaging the Global in Unsettled Times (with Manfred Steger, Cambridge University Press, 2019) and , Nationalism, Tribalism (Sage, 2006). Other books include 16 volumes mapping the field of globalization (Sage). That collection is the most comprehensive and systematic representation of the field of globalization studies, comprising 7,000 pages or 3.5 million words.

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