Forum <i>Global Dis:connections</i>

presidential elections in the US or the Brexit vote on the other side of the Atlantic.He was concerned that due to the liberal, cosmopolitan background of most academics in the field, global history 'favoured stories about curiosity towards distant neighbours' and 'preferred a scale that reflected its cosmopolitan self-yearnings'.Hence, Adelman took the re-nationalising tendencies of the time as a cue to remind us not to 'overlook nearby neighbourhoods dissolved by transnational supply chains' and not to forget 'the left behind, the ones who cannot move, and those who become immobilized because the light no longer shines on them'.Soon after its publication, Adelman's essay was intensively and also critically debated in the field.2 Quite obviously, his points had hit global history in a weak spot.Today, five years on, however, the piece's principal reminders seem rather tame.Too much has happened in the past halfdecade.The Trump administration left a trail of destruction in America's democracy.Brexit has been donewith severe repercussions for Britain's democracy, its supermarket shelves, and the European Union's political stability.In early 2020, a global pandemic of hitherto-unimaginable magnitude brought about travel bans, supply chain break-downs and mass lay-offs that are still crippling numerous sections of the economy.In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine.Months of brutal warfare not only brought death and suffering to countless people, but also stopped a good part of the global trade in wheat and put a massive question mark behind the current global energy regime.While coal-fired power stations are reactivated, Californian and Southern European forests are ablaze.In short, the global political, economic and social developments that had prompted Adelman to write his piece in the first place have tremendously intensified over the last years.Consequently, historians as well as other contemporary observes have duly adjusted their perspectives: after the outbreak of the pandemic and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, one set of questions seems particularly ripe for consideration: Has globalization come to an end?Will the 'shrinking of the world' be reversed?Will global entanglements be disentangled?Are we entering an era of deglobalization?Indeed, it seems that the previous paradigm of globalization and everincreasing global connectivity is currently being substituted with a new focus on deglobalization and global disentanglement.However, as timely as such an adjustment of perspective might seem, it does not really help us to better understand past and/or current processes of globalization.Rather, it reinforces a much too simple, binary understanding of globalization, in which disconnectivity is simply treated as the opposite of connectivity.This tendency is already present in Adelman's original call.When Adelman warns that focusing attention on the connected simultaneously leaves the unconnected in the dark, he is practically reinforcing a dichotomy of the connected versus the unconnected.In reality, though, connective and disconnective processes are deeply interwoven and they interact intensively, which becomes immediately apparent in relation to Adelman's argument.There is an interdependency between the connected and the unconnected in inverse proportions.As places, regions and people around the globe integrate, the corollary is that others cannot (or don't want to) participate in those integrative processes to the same degree, and they will be left behind, relatively speaking.Global networks are lumpy; some branches are especially dense.The denser they are, the more conspicuous the patchy and empty areas become.To invoke another beloved metaphor of globalization research, the world has not been 'shrinking' as a whole; it has been warping. R.

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