1 - Introduction: giving up on globalization?

Summary

The terms “globalization” and, as a corollary, “deglobalization” defy easy or straightforward definition. They can refer simply to trade or exchange. Or they can describe the ways in which the production of commodities takes place across different countries. Or they can go beyond economic arenas and refer to the speed and ease of communications across much (but certainly not all) of the globe and the extent to which national borders are broken down.

If we turn to more formal definitions these reproduce the everyday usages but put them in more rigorous terms. Globalization has for example been defined as “the freer movement of goods, services, ideas, and people around the World” (Micklethwait & Wooldridge 2003: xix). Put another way, it “is a process that erodes national boundaries, integrates national economies, cultures, technologies and governance, and produces complex relations of mutual interdependence” (Gygli, Haelg & Sturm 2018). Or it can be understood as “the widening, deepening and speeding up of global interconnectedness” (Held et al. 2004: 67). It might also be defined as “the growing interdependence of the world’s economies, cultures, and populations, brought about by cross-border trade in goods and services, technology, and flows of investment, people, and information” (Peterson Institute for International Economics 2022). Or we can again go well beyond markets and flows and understand globalization as “a spatial concept referring to a set of social processes that is transforming our present condition of conventional nationality into one of globality” (Steger 2023: 3).

Some definitions go a stage further and spread from processes to effects. Globalization, it has been argued, has had decisional, institutional, distributive and structural impacts (Held et al. 2004: 70). It has for example reconfigured decision-making by changing the architectureof potential costs and benefits while also changing the overall policy agenda. At the same time, globalization has led to shifts in the distribution of power and wealth and in the character of the economic and political structures within which individuals, interests and constituencies are located (ibid.).

Efforts have also been made to operationalize and measure the extent and scale of globalization and, in more recent years, deglobalization. As with the definitions that have been proffered, they inevitably struggle to establish the bounds of the concept.