Rejoinder to Crouch

Abstract

I am grateful for the opportunity to respond to Colin Crouch’s essay. To avoid being too long, I will address only one of the issues raised, that of “globalization” and “deglobalization”—a quite central one of course. Beholding the reactions to my book, scholarly and otherwise, I was struck by how often readers, Crouch included, accused me of calling for “globalization” to be reversed, in favor of a “return” to isolated—in German: abgeschottet, best translated as “sealed off”—nations and national states. How could that be? Probably I did not expect that reasonable interlocutors, even with polemical intent, would attribute such nonsense to the author of the book at issue, so I failed to hedge against it. When I still had students, I used to tell them that “globalization” has been around for a long time, as an irreversible stage of world history. Its beginning may be dated to October 14, 1492, when Columbus’ fleet landed on the island of Guanahani, later called San Salvador. This was the moment when the two wings of the human race, which had migrated from Africa to Eurasia some 60,000 years earlier, met again and reunited forever. One had moved west, where for many thousands of years, until they understood how to sail against the wind, they had to stop at the Atlantic. The other went east to the opposite coast where they ended up settling the two Americas. With the Spanish fleet’s landing, humankind was “globalized.” The political organization of the now earth-spanning human species changed continuously, from the empire of Charles V, in which the sun never set, through a variety of intermediate forms to the post1990 U.S.-centric world capitalism, the New World Order of the elder Bush. What I discuss in my book is the merits and demerits, not of globalization as such—this would be utterly foolish—but of the economic and political form it has today taken, a form that—fortunately, I believe—is currently about to break down, after it has proved neither technically nor politically sustainable. What exactly is it that we are talking about as we discuss the kind of “globalization” that existed at the turn of the 21st century? As a political-economic project it was associated with the post-communist “end of history” period of the early 1990s. Then already undergoing its neoliberal transformation, capitalism ruled supreme. On the part of the sole remaining superpower, it invited confident hopes for a “New American Century,” a borderless world of free markets under American law, unhampered by the petty politics of nation or class. It was no longer countries competing with countries that would make 1187110 JCS0010.1177/1468795X231187110Journal of Classical SociologyResponse to review review-article2023