Waves of Structural Deglobalization: A World-Systems Perspective

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I reviewed the manuscript you sent me, ‘Waves of Structural Deglobalization: A World-Systems Perspective’, with great interest.  The work is fascinating.  It brings together a number of literatures regarding concepts, measurements, and interpretation, in an interesting and useful manner.  It should be of interest not just to those in its primary orientation, but to other scholars who concern themselves with various elements of the question.  I was especially excited by the terminological discussion which is short, insightful, and effective.  I have some familiarity as well with the data issues involved and thought they were dealt with in an interesting manner. 

There were a few issues that should be attended to.  I did not understand why the term ‘value chain’ was substituted for the earlier term ‘commodity chain’ in the work.  My sense is that the author/s were really talking about commodity chains and not so much about the later concept as appropriated by those in business and economics.  The terms end up being used interchangeably, when many of the issues they wish to highlight really concern the definitional elements of commodity chains.  This could probably be dealt with in sentence or two, or perhaps a footnote, but in the absence of that discussion there is significant room for misunderstanding.  Likewise, there is the suggestion on about page 7 that countries produce goods.  (“If a country fails to produce enough parts on their end…”.)  Countries do not produce – firms do – and the fact that firms are situated in national environments may speak to some issues involved here, but not necessarily all.  Given the terminological care this work takes it would make sense to address these issues.  The term ‘developing countries’ is also used on the same page when I’m certain the term ‘global south’ would be more appropriate. 

The work is badly in need of an edit.  A number of citations are not in the bibliography, and given that some of the individuals (like Bairoch and Kozul-Wright) have passed away, I am betting that it is more than just an attempt to mask authorship.  Some footnotes seem to be misnumbered or conflated (see fn 8).  On page 10 ms laments that some data will not be published until summer 2021 – which was a full year ago.  That data should be found and incorporated, or that sentence should be deleted.  I would also take the very important Figure 4 and convert it to a smoothed line so that the plateaus and downturns are clearer.  As it stands it appears that the first plateau may or may not mean anything, that the first Deglob period ended during an upswing, while the second ended during a downswing.  I’m confused about the timing of Plateau 2 in total.  The narrative helps of course, but the graph and the text should mirror one another clearly.  I would delete the graphic on the top of page 14 as it adds little. 

The summary table is nothing short of brilliant. 

The authors take great care to suggest that it is ‘likely’ that we are at a certain point in a phase, and that is acceptable, but I would urge them to add some short discussion of what we should expect to happen IF we are in the various phases they suggest.  That is, what should we watch for in terms of ongoing trends, what might be the implications of those trends, and what timeframes should allow us sufficient perspective.  These are noted in some cases and not others.  They should be noted in each case for the work to have the appropriate power. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

# Review of Manuscript: "Waves of Structural Deglobalization: A World-Systems Perspective"

This manuscript looks at the increase and decrease in globalization by various measures during the 19th and 20th centuries, ending in the early 21st century.  The paper provides a strong review of the different difficulties and alternate theories through which one might measure globalization.  It then goes on to compare different hypotheses about waves of globalization vs. deglobalization against the historical evidence.  Among the different candidates that seem to match the evidence for deglobalization well historically are: hegemonic decline, rising nationalism, financial crises, economic slowdowns, and anti-immigrant movements.

There is a lot that I liked about this manuscript.  In particular, the existing literature and alternative hypotheses were thoroughly presented.  However, I would like to see the author(s) push a little bit harder on the conclusions.  I felt like the paper left the reader without much of a payoff.  This problem can be worked on, though.

Comments:

1) There were a number of XXXXXXXX markings throughout the submitted paper.  I'm not sure if this was meant to conceal a reference or something like that, but it was distracting to read.

2) In figure 3 on page 11, year is on the vertical axis, whereas it should be on the horizontal axis.

3) Again, however, my biggest suggestion is that, of the different possible theories that are mentioned in the table on pages 17-18 be elaborated a bit more.  Which theory or theories do the authors find to be the most convincing?  It feels like the paper never quite concludes.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

This is an important article on the patterns of structural globalization from a world-systems perspective.  It shows that structural globalization has been characterized by a cyclical and a secular/upward trend.  Cycles of globalization approach suggests that periods of globalization are followed by periods of deglobalization.  Authors successfully document this pattern by calculating levels of trade globalization and investment globalization and presenting the overall trend.  Then, they try to explain these secular and cyclical trends. They suggest that decreasing costs of communication and technology can explain the secular trends but not the cycles.  To explain the cycles, they investigate if there is an overlap between cycles of globalization/deglobalization and other cyclical trends such as world-hegemonic cycles, Kuznets cycles, Kontradieff waves, world wars, etc.  Here, they carefully discuss the presence/absence of an overlap and show that none of these economic/political trends are able to explain the cycles properly. Periods of hegemonic crisis are broadly associated with such periods of deglobalization but in periods of hegemonic crisis there are also new waves of globalization. Moreover, they compare the contemporary deglobalization period with what happened in the 19th century and turn attention to recurrent as well as novel features of the contemporary era. 

I think this is an original and important contribution that needs to be published after some revisions.  There are some issues the authors need to address for publication.

The explanation regarding the causes of deglobalization is not clear.  While the text emphasizes the lack of overlap between trends of globalization/globalization and other cyclical trends (p.16) , the summary table at the end of the article suggests that the key cause of deglobalization is hegemonic decline.  In the text, however, the authors do not discuss this per se but the middle wave of globalization that took place during world hegemonic decline.  So, the relationship between hegemonic decline and deglobalization must be spelled out more clearly in that section. 

Here, I also wonder if Arrighi’s distinction between signal and terminal crisis can help explain deglobalization periods and solve the middle wave of globalization problem. After all “deglob1” seem to have occurred during the signal crisis of the British world-hegemony (1873/96) and “deglob2” during the terminal crisis of the interwar period; likewise “plateau2” seem to have occurred during the signal crisis of the U.S. in the 1973/80,  and the current moment can be seen as the terminal crisis of U.S.  The middle waves of globalization seem to be linked to financial globalization periods that occur in between signal and terminal crisis. What do authors think about this possibility? Does it work or not? Why, why not?

Moreover, there are some sections of the article that would require further elaboration for readers who are not well versed in world-systems literature or economic history.  For example on p.4, the authors refer to Wallerstein’s conception of “game of musical chairs” without explaining how this is linked to uneven development. Likewise on p.5, the authors write that “Maddison’s estimates of total GDP jumped from 1820 to 1870, and then to 1900, 1913, 1929 and then to 1950” without explaining that they are actually talking about the missing data in Maddison’s estimates.  This is obvious to the authors but probably not to the readers. 

As a minor issue, in the summary of the findings table, rising immigration for deglob2 is marked as “no”.  This period, however, is the height of holocaust refugees in the world.  

References section of the paper is incomplete and must be completed.  I think the piece can also benefit from engaging with both more classical and more recent works on globalization/deglobalization.  As classical works, Hirst and Thompson’s discussion of the waves of globalization and deglobalization in the nineteenth century can be helpful. As more recent pieces, Abdal and Ferreira’s  “deglobalization, globalization and the pandemic piece” (JWSR) is directly on this matter. 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf