Disjunctive Globalization in the Era of the Great Unsettling Manfred B. Steger and Paul James 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 capitalism to disrupt social routines around the world. Most national borders have been closed to travellers other than those returning home. The value of stock-market 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 cities, 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 economic globalization and its uneven slowing down in the area of trade, 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 Culture (Featherstone, 1990), published in the formative years of Theory, Culture and Society (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 ‘global studies’ (Steger and Wahlrab 2017): Arjun Appadurai, Zygmunt Bauman, Peter Beyer, Ulf Hannerz, Jonathan Friedman, Anthony King, Roland Robertson, Bryan Turner and Immanuel Wallerstein. 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 memes 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 ideologies (Steger, 2020b). At the same time, economic inequality 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 social media, 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 ‘deglobalization’—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