Jihad vs. McWorld
Page 6
Further east, tourists seeking a piece of old Russia that does not take them too far from MTV can find traditional Matryoshka nesting dolls (that fit one inside the other) featuring the nontraditional visages of (from largest to smallest) Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Boy George, Dave Stewart, and Annie Lennox.35
In Russia, in India, in Bosnia, in Japan, and in France too, modern history then leans both ways: toward the meretricious inevitability of McWorld, but also into Jihad’s stiff winds, heaving to and fro and giving heart both to the Panglossians and the Pandoras, sometimes for the very same reasons. The Panglossians bank on Euro-Disney and Microsoft, while the Pandoras await nihilism and a world in Pandaemonium. Yet McWorld and Jihad do not really force a choice between such polarized scenarios. Together, they are likely to produce some stifling amalgam of the two suspended in chaos. Antithetical in every detail, Jihad and McWorld nonetheless conspire to undermine our hard-won (if only half-won) civil liberties and the possibility of a global democratic future. In the short run the forces of Jihad, noisier and more obviously nihilistic than those of McWorld, are likely to dominate the near future, etching small stories of local tragedy and regional genocide on the face of our times and creating a climate of instability marked by multimicrowars inimical to global integration. But in the long run, the forces of McWorld are the forces underlying the slow certain thrust of Western civilization and as such may be unstoppable. Jihad’s microwars will hold the headlines well into the next century, making predictions of the end of history look terminally dumb. But McWorld’s homogenization is likely to establish a macropeace that favors the triumph of commerce and its markets and to give to those who control information, communication, and entertainment ultimate (if inadvertent) control over human destiny. Unless we can offer an alternative to the struggle between Jihad and McWorld, the epoch on whose threshold we stand—postcommunist, postindustrial, postnational, yet sectarian, fearful, and bigoted—is likely also to be terminally postdemocratic.
PART I
The New World of McWorld
1
The Old Economy and the
Birth of a New McWorld
GILLETTE’S CHAIRMAN Alfred M. Zeien has said “I do not find foreign countries foreign.”1 Welcome to McWorld. There is no activity more intrinsically globalizing than trade, no ideology less interested in nations than capitalism, no challenge to frontiers more audacious than the market. By many measures, corporations are today more central players in global affairs than nations. We call them multinational but they are more accurately understood as transnational or postnational or even antinational. For they abjure the very idea of nations or any other parochialism that limits them in time or space. Their customers are not citizens of a particular nation or members of a parochial clan: they belong to the universal tribe of consumers defined by needs and wants that are ubiquitous, if not by nature then by the cunning of advertising. A consumer is a consumer is a consumer.
McDonald’s serves 20 million customers around the world every day, drawing more customers daily than there are people in Greece, Ireland, and Switzerland together.2 General Motors (still the world’s largest company despite its uneven recent sales history) employs more people internationally than live in a number of the world’s smaller nations.3 With $2.4 billion worth of pizzas sold in 1991, the privately owned Domino’s earned enough revenues to fund the collective government expenditures of Senegal, Uganda, Bolivia, and Iceland.4 Toshiba, the General Electric of Japan, boasts in its 1992 annual report that “as good corporate citizens” they “do our part to ensure that progress continues within the world community,” but its citizenship—whether Japanese or global—is hemmed in on every side by limits set by the demands of profitability, which in turn is driven by sales in 1992 of $25 billion, only slightly less than Argentina’s recent government budget.5 Globalism is mandated by profit not citizenship. Fast food goes upscale in the chic new chain Planet Hollywood. And “On planet Reebok,” according to the successful ad campaign of an only nominally “American” athletic shoe company, “there are no boundaries.”6 Ralph Lauren’s perfume for men, Safari, also boasted of “Living Without Boundaries” in its launch campaign in 1992.
A popular protectionist sticker appearing across the nation on American automobile bumpers reads “Real Americans Buy American.” The trouble is, it is hard to know which car is really more “American”: the Chevy built in Mexico from primarily imported parts and then reimported into the United States, the Ford built in German plants employing Turkish workers and sold on the Hong Kong and Nigerian markets, or the Toyota Camry designed by American Peter J. Hill at Toyota’s Newport Beach California Calty Design Research Center, assembled at the Georgetown, Kentucky, Toyota plant by American workers, primarily from American-made parts, and test-driven at Toyota’s twelve-thousand-acre Arizona proving ground.7 These international “Japanese” cars are puzzling: for to remain truly Japanese, the whole must somehow become more than its American parts. Thus, in a fit of schizophrenic self-congratulation, Honda has been boasting about its “made-in-America” roots (that is, parts) even as it revels in its status as Motor Trend’s “Import of the Year.”
So confusing has the question of automotive genealogy become that the United States government enacted an American Automobile Labeling Act that since October 1, 1994, has required that labels be affixed to new autos specifying their “domestic content,” from their engines to their windshield wipers. The labels are unlikely to clarify the situation, however, since they reveal (to take just one example) that Chrysler Corporation’s Dodge Stealth is built by Mitsubishi in Nagoya, Japan, while Mitsubishi’s Eclipse RS is built in Normal, Illinois, and features Chrysler engines.8 Labels can be confusing: the Nissan Altima assembled in America with mostly American parts does utilize radiator hoses manufactured in Paris … Paris, Tennessee.9
The authors of the North American Free Trade Agreement found it particularly cumbersome to decide which products could qualify for tariff-free status in the new zone since so many products “foreign” to North America were nonetheless assembled in the region with local parts. How about Japanese picture tubes installed in Mexican television chassis? Under traditional trade rules they were “domestic;” under NAFTA rules, the picture tubes and electron guns will also have to be domestic to qualify. But since Japanese companies own large shares of both of the “American” glass companies that manufacture tubes, “American” domestic television sets will still be substantially Japanese, even if they qualify as American under NAFTA rules.10 American-made cars will have to have 50 percent of their parts (by value) as well as 50 percent of their labor contributed domestically (rising to 62.5 percent in 2002) but does this really make the cars “American”? Putting identity labels on products turns out to be even more challenging than establishing ethnic identities for people, for products have to be disassembled and labeled part by part by part, by origin of material, nationality of labor force, and cultural identity of designer to arrive at an ad absurdum conclusion about their ethnic identity.11
Historically, there is something prototypically American about the automobile: Henry Ford’s commitment to a mass-produced motorized vehicle that would set every American family free has come to be associated with many of the virtues of American lifestyle and not a few of its vices. The internationalization of automobile culture—what George Ball once called “an ideology on four wheels”—as well as of automobile manufacturing is thus actually a globalization of America, no matter who is making the cars. The Chinese have recently committed to automobile manufacture as a foundation for economic modernization: more than any other decision they have made, this one may commit them to the Americanization they most fear.12
Yet however American cars are in concept, they are hardly American in their manufacture whether measured by parts, design, or even labor. Indeed, increasingly, corporations refuse to define themselves by reference to labor at all, let alone by reference to a particular parochial labor force with a local nation
al character. Ignacio Ramonet argues that in the global economy neither capital nor work nor material is the determining factor, but rather the “optimal relationship between these three,” which pushes us into the world of information, communication, and administration where traditional nation-states can exert little control and are bound to feel more and more uncomfortable.13 Robert Kuttner reports that the state-of-the-art handle for the postindustrial company—which clearly is also the post—nation-state company—is “the virtual corporation” where “the company is no longer a physical entity with a stable mission or location, but a shifting set of temporary relationships connected by computer network, phone and fax.”14
McWorld is a kind of virtual reality, created by invisible but omnipotent high-tech information networks and fluid transnational economic markets, so the virtual corporation is not just a provocative turn of phrase.15 Without even trying, reporter Julie Edelson Halpert gives it concrete meaning in the portrait she draws of Ford Motor Company’s Mondeo project:
Seeking to shave months and millions of dollars from car design, Ford has consolidated management of its European, North American and Asian design operations into a single international network using powerful work stations based on Silicon Graphics Inc. technology linked by Ethernet networking software.
…The Ford system … was brought under a single “electronic roof” … based in Dearborn, Michigan. The other main sites on the network are in Dunton, England; Cologne, Germany; Turin, Italy; Valencia, California; Hiroshima, Japan; and Melbourne, Australia. The circuits—satellite links, undersea cables and land lines—are purchased from telecommunications carriers.16
The virtual corporation also exists in the labor market as an employer of “virtual” rather than actual laborers. The ideal virtual laborer is a robot: an interactive, “intelligent,” fully programmed worker capable of working twenty-four hours a day with no sustenance and minimal upkeep. What a poignant marriage: in McWorld’s chilly new cyberspace, yesterday’s invisible hand reaches out to grasp the invisible body of tomorrow’s newly born virtual corporation to guide its spasmodic newborn movements toward an eternity of profits, almost entirely without the intervention of a visible human hand.
Many modern nation-states have generated national industrial policies aimed at strategic coordination of economic policy and domination of international markets by their business corporations on the theory that the nation’s citizens will somehow be benefited by supporting corporations even if corporations decline to return the favor. Yet although full employment is a public good, it is not a corporate good. Business efficiency dictates downsizing, which means capital-intensive production, and capital-intensive production means labor-minimizing job policies. Translated into English this means firing as many permanent workers as possible and eliminating their costly benefit and pension packages. In their place appear machines, robots, and multiplying (so-called) “temporary” jobs, which are actually long-term jobs without long-term contracts, long-term security, or long-term benefits. Unemployment may eventually weaken the market by debilitating potential consumers (you can’t buy unless you earn), but corporations taken one by one are necessarily rabid competitors with (at most) a quarterly earnings horizon. They must be “lean and mean” to prevail. The “fat” here is workers and a corporate diet spells permanent “structural” unemployment for increasing numbers of workers.
American agriculture remains a dominant producer for world markets, but where once it took 80 percent of the workforce to grow crops, today it takes 2 percent. Manufacturing is following agriculture. IBM sloughed off labor fat to the tune of sixty thousand workers in 1993 to the general applause of market analysts, and it secured private advantages in the international computer market whose public costs will not be seen for several years and whose consequences will in any case not be directly borne by IBM.17 Nineteen ninety-three was the year of “downsizing” (a euphemism for layoffs and firings) for many larger corporations, including a number that were in the black and were acting “preemptively.” The only thing laborintensive about modern manufacturing is the cost-cutting. Fearing inroads by generic brand companies, Procter & Gamble announced plans in 1994 to eliminate 13,000 jobs (and to close 30 of 147 plants) over a three-year period, while Eastman Kodak intends to cut 10,000 jobs through 1995 as part of its “restructuring.” In the Common Market, unemployment is over 11 percent and in France, with a declining Gross Domestic Product (GDP), it is higher. The global recession has eased but jobs are unlikely to reappear in prerecession plenitude, as the American recovery of the mid-nineties is already proving. Many of the new jobs are lower paying service positions, often without benefits or safety nets. Downsizing is after all a global market strategy responding to the new economics of the automation/electronic information age, and McWorld’s labor market has little interest in employment per se and even less in protectionist governments monkeying with labor supply and demand.
There are of course timorous and weak businesses (they hardly meet the criteria of capitalist ventures at all) that, like the ailing unions, welcome the attention of an interventionist government. But they belong more to a vanishing mercantilist economy than to McWorld. In recent decades we have witnessed some of America’s largest corporations seeking succor from the state—Chrysler or Amtrak or the savings and loan industry—demanding the socialization of their risk, so that public taxpayers can pay the costs of their business fiascos. In a world where socialism has disappeared, it can still be found lurking in the boardrooms of failing and bad-risk investment companies like those that misjudged the peso that yearn to spread their losses across the backs of long-suffering taxpayers.
Unions too hide behind protectionist policies, trying to insulate their members from the often unfair discipline of international markets like NAFTA. But as Robert J. Samuelson has said, “the drive of big companies to win world markets and maximize sales overwhelms all but the most draconian protectionism.”18 Social justice makes little more headway against market ideology than national self-interest. Markets are by their nature unfair, and when confronted with state-generated public interest issues like justice, full employment, and environmental protection they seek above all to be left alone. That is what a market is: an unobstructed set of exchange relationships among individual consumers and individual producers that is allowed to take its course; and McWorld is nothing if not a market. Market proponents insist that, like a river kept from its natural flood plain by engineers bent on containing its occasional rampages, a market hemmed in by government levees and regulatory dams will in the end create far more havoc than one left to follow its own cycles.
Government has a perfect right, indeed it has a duty, to intervene in the economy in the name of justice, ecology, strategic interests, full employment, or other public goods in which the market has and can have no interest. But it cannot expect the denizens of McWorld to welcome such intervention or to demur from trying to obstruct government through their own political interventions. This is the major reason why trade sanctions and embargoes generally fail. Market-driven profit has little tolerance for policy-driven punishment. With the rare exception of a country like Iraq with a leadership so obnoxious that it provokes unanimity among its adversaries and induces national governments to actually prosecute private companies that breach the cordon sanitaire, embargoes are little more than noisy nuisances. South Africa, Serbia, Iran, Israel, Chile, Argentina, and, until recently, even Cuba have at different times weathered embargoes with remarkable equanimity; many have sustained economic growth with the help of market exchanges that simply do not respond to coercive national policies or international law. Even Iraq managed to acquire a nuclear weapons capacity via secret trade well after it had become an outlaw country.19
Modern transnational corporations in quest of global markets cannot really comprehend “foreign policy” because the word foreign has no meaning to the ambitious global businessperson. Like Gillette Chairman Zeien, they do not find foreign countries f
oreign: as far as production and consumption are concerned, there is only one world and it is McWorld.20 How can the physical distinction between domestic and foreign have resonance in a virtual world defined by electronic communications and intrinsically unbounded markets? World trade in 1950 stood at $308 billion. By 1968 it was over a trillion and today it has passed $3½ trillion; meanwhile, tariffs—as potent a symbol of national boundaries as there is—have declined from 40 percent of average product prices to about 5 percent.21 If world trade is comprising an ever greater percentage of world GDP, currency exchanges are in turn outstripping trade—some say by as much as three to one.
During the 1980s, Japan scoffed at American companies that moved manufacturing facilities overseas to take advantage of cheaper labor, to get closer to markets, and to avoid dependency on an expensive dollar. In the nineties, the Japanese are themselves moving manufacturing outside of Japan. Seventy percent of “Japanese-made” televisions and 30 percent of VCRs are now manufactured overseas. And while General Motors produces over 40 percent of its cars beyond American shores, Toyota’s extranational production is up to 20 percent of its total.22 Mabuchi Motors, which controls a remarkable one-half of the world market in those tiny motors that power toothbrushes and zoom lenses and car windows, employs thirty-three thousand workers—but only one thousand of them work in Japan; the rest are offshore foreign laborers at plants in cheap labor markets like China.23
Likewise, while it makes sense for nation-states to create incentives for exports and tariff disincentives for imports, corporate producers and individual consumers start from a very different vantage point: literally speaking, producers are universal “exporters” (they export everything they make in their factories “out”) and consumers are universal “importers” (they import from “outside” their home everything they consume); this universalism means in practice that the idea of imports and exports has little or no meaning for market players. The American textile company that moves its factory to Indonesia and, using cheaper labor, sends cheaper dresses back across the border incurs no trade deficit, only greater profitability. The American consumer who purchases that dress does not lose a job, she gains a bargain. Trade deficits belong to nation-states alone. Individual American workers may lose jobs and individual American citizens may have to deal with interest rate changes induced by their nation’s trade deficit, but American consumers and American producers, qua consumers and producers, couldn’t care less.