6 - Conclusion: counting the cost

Summary

As different chapters of this book have argued, the jury is still out on the debate around deglobalization. This is because much of the empirical evidence presents us with a highly variegated picture. There is no metanarrative – whether it be continuing globalization, deglobalization, slowbalization, reglobalization without China or de-risking – that adequately captures the totality of processes and developments over recent years. Instead, all these processes are evident alongside each other. Indeed, they overlap and interweave.

“Deglobalization” should therefore be understood as a conglomerate or composite of different processes each with its own pace and governing logic. Some “fit” alongside each other and are complementary whereas others clash and abrade against others.

Polanyi's double movement

To the extent that there were slowdowns, reversals, rollbacks and efforts to counter the effects of globalizing forces, these can be seen, as has been argued by growing numbers of commentators, through the prism of the “double movement”.

The concept of the “double movement” is tied to the work of Karl Polanyi. In his 1944 book The Great Transformation, Polanyi charted the ways in which the spread of industrial capitalism and the “disembedding” of the economy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, so that it was seemingly self-regulating, broke up traditional English communities. These had, it was argued, offered a degree of security and social protection, which were then displaced by wage labour and commodification (Polanyi 2001 [1944]). For landless labourers and the emerging proletariat, working-class life was brutal. The relentless logic of the unregulated market would leave individuals isolated, poor, vulnerable to disease and the business cycle and locked into endless uncertainty: “man was detached from home and kin, torn from his roots and all meaningful environment” (ibid. 2001: 87). Put another way, market forces would, if unchecked, lead to the annihilation of “the human and natural substance of society” (ibid.: 3).

Polanyi argued, however, that the self-regulating market economy could never be fully realized (Block 2001: xxiv–xxv). This was because processes of “marketization” inevitably and necessarily spurred a double movement in which industrial capitalism and market liberalism gave rise to counterforces that offered shelter from the storm of market forces.