Country of Exiles
Page 17
Bhabha’s contribution to the cosmopolitan debate has been to harden the placelessness already present in American academic cosmopolitanism. Uninhibited by affection for any traditions of place, he and his postcolonial colleagues have given more life to the central view that America is not really a place at all but mostly an idea, a state of mind, a condition open to continual amendment, a road rather than a destination.
“OUR VALUES ARE GLOBAL”
As formidable a creation as academic cosmopolitanism is in all its forms, there is another form that surpasses it in reach and power: market cosmopolitanism. Market cosmopolitanism emerged after 1980 in much of the business world. It replaced Marxism (with which it once competed) in the sweep of its internationalist ambitions. This cosmopolitanism, however, is one of money not of workers. It is the thinking of those who, at the very least, are averse to any kind of fixed national boundary, anything that might limit the flow of ideas, money, goods, or people.
Market cosmopolitans share many of the above academic liberal themes. But what distinguishes the market version from the others, however, is, obviously, its aim—money and profit—which inevitably determines how long and to what degree any business might remain committed to any liberal idea.
Many businesses, as well as business journals and consultants, have adopted the new market cosmopolitanism in both its multicultural and fluid forms. Think tanks, too, trumpeting the glories of the cosmopolitan market, have sprouted in the nation’s capital.56 Among the most ideologically unique has been the Cato Institute, a medium-sized organization in Washington, D.C., founded by Ed Crane in 1979 and housed in a blue-glass building on Massachusetts Avenue, ironically just across the street from a bronze statue of labor unionist Samuel Gompers. Market libertarians all, the men at Cato have urged that all obstacles—religion, nationalism, patriotism—be modified or dumped before the god of Productivity. No group has so acclaimed the privatization of everything, the deregulation of everything, the stripping away of most governmental safeguards, the free movement of everything from money to migrants. Their influence has reached into the minds of such leading Republicans as Texans Richard Armey and Tom DeLay.57
Businesses, too, have hoisted the cosmopolitan banner, promoting “diversity” among their workers, and pursuing “multicultural marketing” for their customers. Like their academic contemporaries, they view the United States as a “culture without a center” and pursue niche-thinking in terms of race, gender, and ethnicity.58 Many firms also display the fluid-protean-open-borders approach, none more so than the bankers and financial managers who reaped the most from the deregulation of the world’s money markets, as well as from the spread of electronic and intermodal technologies, which facilitated rapid trading in huge volumes.59
“When I look at a map of the world,” says John Doerr, top venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who arranged the financing for such firms as Netscape and Sun Microsystems, “I don’t visualize it in terms of … countries. Instead I see Internet packages or E-mail messages flowing between various points.”60 “It is a matter of complete indifference to the chief financial officer of any major company whether one sells capital notes in New York, Hong Kong, or London. Decisions are made on the basis of rate and availability, not geography,” writes Walter Wriston, in his 1992 book The Twilight of Sovereignty. Former head of Citicorp, a bank with hundreds of branches around the world, Wriston also argues that new technologies have made “obsolete” “the old political boundaries of nation-states.”61
“Boundaryless behavior is the soul of today’s GE,” said Jack Welsh, CEO of General Electric, in his 1994 annual report. “Simply put, people seem compelled to build layers and walls between themselves and others, and that human tendency tends … to cramp people” and “smother dreams.”62 “The real work today,” observes Whirlpool’s CEO, David Whitwam (sounding rather like Homi Bhabha or Richard Sennett), “takes place at the boundaries.”63 Throughout the nineties, gambling moguls have created “international marketing programs” to bring high rollers from around the world to their casinos. “This is going to be an international clientele,” said Ralph Sturges, chief of the Mohegans, of his Mohegan Sun Casino. We want “visitors from all over the world,” said Steve Wynn of the Mirage Casino-Hotel in Las Vegas.64
As for the major port terminal directors, they have long thought of themselves as efficient businessmen on the frontlines of the “new international world order,” erecting “commercial bridges between nations,” and—through marketing offices around the world—aggressively recruiting new clients to fill berths and terminals.65 Their approach has been inclusive, technocratic, managerial, and cosmopolitan. As far back as the 1940s, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey demanded that “the barriers of provincialism” be thrown down and that a nonpartisan vision come to the fore. Today, that port leads as an evangel for the globalization of the greater metropolitan region.66
High-tech companies have readily accommodated the diverse workforce they helped create, and have forged an ideology to fit the vast markets they command. Among the heaviest users of foreign skilled labor, they have all adopted “boundaryless” multicultural policies.67 “Today,” said Ray Smith, CEO of Bell Atlantic, in 1995, “businesses [seek to claim] citizenship in the global community by replacing the declining significance of place with the ascending significance of people.”68 By 1996 IBM had established thirty-two “global diversity councils,” according to Ted Childs, vice president for IBM’s “global workforce diversity,” to make sure that “we value contributions by people who are not ‘American.’ ” “We are global in scope, our values are global,” said Nicole Barde, Intel’s diversity manager.69
Along with these companies are many business newspapers and magazines, notably The Economist and the Wall Street Journal, both with editorial offices around the world, and both in tune with the cosmopolitan view. To be sure, the Wall Street Journal is schizoid about cosmopolitanism. It endorses both the multicultural and the transborder approaches, the former found mostly in its B section, where the paper’s regular column “Business and Race,” written by Leon E. Wynter, often discusses the latest data on group niche-marketing. On its editorial page, however, the Journal, led by editor Robert Bartley, reviles multiculturalism. Bartley recommends instead a pure vision of “free markets, free trade, and open immigration.” In 1993 he wrote scathingly about “cosmopolitan elites,” by which he meant the “do your own thing” people who thrust on the American people the “selfish” values of the “1960s.” Three years later he bemoaned the “decline in standards” and warned that “the very rationality of capitalism”—if left unchecked by “economic necessity or religion”—“will eat away its ‘bourgeois’ moral underpinning.” Around the same time, however, and in a way that ate away at his own moral underpinning, he said that “the big trends of the age transcend national boundaries and national sovereignty.” “In the end, newly empowered individuals throughout the world will make their own decisions minute by minute, expressing emotional demands and creating financial markets.” “In the 21st century, we will be ruled not so much by the writ of politicians but by the logic of markets.”70
American Demographics, a slick magazine published for over twenty years by Dow Jones, publisher also of the Wall Street Journal, seems to inflect nearly every article in a cosmopolitan direction.71 Its editors, who claimed to have brought demography “out of the shadows,” have advocated “multicultural marketing.” They have published handbooks on how to squeeze the most out of the group niches, offering material on practically every lucrative identity market from singles who refuse to have children to lesbians and gays who, according to a recent piece, constitute “a separate tribe” with “distinctive mores and fashions.” At the same time, the magazine has showcased the fluid culture of America’s new class of young “self-navigators,” professionals who boast a “new value structure” and “who seem to ‘drop in’ on and migrate between different ways of living.”72 In a fall 1997 piece
, “Matters of Culture,” it argued “conclusively” that “cosmopolitan Americans outnumber those with less open cultural views.”73
Finally, there are the individual consultants, who through their writings have done a great deal to popularize market cosmopolitanism. Among them are Joel Kotkin, a ubiquitous business consultant and senior fellow at the Pepperdine University School of Business and Management in Malibu, California; and Rosabeth Kanter, professor at the Harvard Business School and popular consultant to America’s biggest companies.
Kotkin, a frequent contributor to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal, asserted in 1995 that the future belongs to the “rich and affluent voters” who work in the mobile “new economy,” hate “small town culture,” and believe that “economics, not morality, is the key challenge facing society.”74 Kotkin believes that “borders” are the centers of the new order of things, and he is attracted to what he calls “global tribes” or the world’s most ambitious emigrés set loose from their homelands to float about in quest of alliances with transnational firms. “These global tribes,” he wrote in his 1993 book Tribes: How Race, Religion, and Identity Determine Success in the New Global Economy, “are today’s quintessential cosmopolitans, in sharp contrast to narrow provincials. As the conventional barriers of nation-states and regions become less meaningful under the weight of global economic forces, it is likely such dispersed peoples—and their worldwide business and cultural networks—will increasingly shape the economic destiny of mankind.”75
These groups, he observes, are “diasporic,” in touch with their “homelands” only in their fantasies, and they make ideal entrepreneurs because they possess “the traditional diaspora values of enterprise and self-help.”76
Like Appadurai and Bhabha, Kotkin sees America as merely one node in a network of global diasporas, not as a country in any conventional sense. He even thinks that the British settlers on this continent were not settlers at all but the “most important and enduring diaspora” in American history, never connecting with America and never ceasing to dream about Westminster Abbey or the white cliffs of Dover.77
A few years after writing Tribes, Kotkin dealt directly with the changing character of place in America, recognizing that some kind of adjustment had to be made if people were to accept the cosmopolitan order. “For ten years, the idea of place has taken a beating,” he said in a 1997 op-ed piece for the Los Angeles Times, yet “many Americans still crave some sense of identity unique to the places where they live”; and today, only big cities, rather than homogeneous suburbs, have the wherewithal to supply this sense of identity. But Kotkin has almost no historical imagination, and his approach resembles the strategies of the tourist industry. The Old World is dead, according to him, so we must create a “new sense of place” out of “the new economy,” not out of the past. Here Los Angeles especially shines for its many “place options,” including “Koreatown, Little Tokyo, the San Gabriel Valley and Westminster’s Little Saigon,” “the Latino shopping districts,” Venice Beach and Burbank, and such “shopping areas” as “the Fashion District, Los Feliz Village, and Sherman Village in the Valley.”78
Rosabeth Kanter, besides advising firms and teaching at Harvard, has written many books of guidance for businesspeople. In her 1995 World Class: Thriving Locally in the Global Economy, perhaps the most tendentious statement of business cosmopolitanism of the decade, she attempts to prove that global companies do not destroy local communities so much as build them up.79 She also distinguishes “cosmopolitan” businessmen from what she calls “the locals” (people with unneeded skills) and “the isolates” (the unskilled), both of whom have experienced the pain of dislocation and layoffs.
Kanter’s cosmopolitans have all the characteristics mentioned above, especially “flexibility, mobility, and change.” They “value choices over loyalties,” seek to “tear down the invisible walls between countries,” and long to “break through the barriers” that limit choice. They “respect differences” and understand “the elusive” and “elastic boundaries of identity.”
The locals, on the other hand, “value loyalties over choices,” “define” themselves “primarily by particular places,” and pursue “opportunities confined to their own communities.” Opposed to letting the outside inside, they “try to preserve and even erect new barriers, most often through political means.”
Kanter shows little sympathy for the locals, and even less for the isolates, those without any skills at all. These people, she says, are “provincial.” They “fear invasion” and “dread the power of cosmopolitans, they fear their mobility.” The locals “take pride in being Americans,” which only masks “envy” of “outsiders or foreigners,” who “are seen as doing better than insiders.” The locals and isolates also seem to want to deny themselves what “most people” desire—“quality goods,” the “best goods” from “the global shopping mall.”
Kanter claims that communities throughout America, if they want success, must yield to the power of the cosmopolitans. Firms, too, of course, should contribute to their communities and be good “citizens”; but the larger burden falls on the locals. “Stay-put workers” who have “dug in roots” “must” accommodate “the migrant managers who are comfortable moving operations—and themselves—anywhere.” The locals must, in other words, make way for those who do not value context except as a means for achieving more and more wealth.
Kanter believes that everywhere, not just somewhere, must be cosmopolitan. “Cities need their own foreign policy.” They “must open their connections to the world” and “destroy” the “walls in the mind.” “Those who lack the mental flexibility to think across boundaries,” Kanter concludes, “will find it harder and harder to hold their own, let alone prosper.”
UNPRECEDENTED ALLIANCE AGAINST PLACE
Corporate executives, academics, and postcolonialists have together brought cosmopolitanism into the mainstream. They seem unified in their views—above all, in their phobia for place. They see place and everything associated with it (memory, the past, tradition) as confining and as negatively discriminatory. In every case, they prefer weak fluid boundaries that exclude no one and encourage transgression to the maintenance of old neighborhoods or the protection of established communities, both local and national.
The multicultural side of cosmopolitanism appears to support place, but what it supports is not place but communities based on “essences” that pretend to “unite” people into identities only vaguely or uncomfortably tied to place.
In light of the new cosmopolitanism, America emerges more than ever as a transparency without a history and as a land of free-floating individuals without strong loyalties who view life as a theater of never-ending options. So, too, the apostles of this approach tend to look on Americans who have “too much interest” in their own localities as intractable and limited, if not dangerous. These cosmopolitans, in other words, form an ideological threat to the interests and well-being of most Americans.
This convergence of views is remarkable, but what is even more remarkable is how both liberal and left-wing thinkers concede to market dominance and, in the process, bring into question some of their dearest positions. Liberal cosmopolitan academics have espoused views worth defending: inclusion of those peoples unjustly shut out from positions of power; compassion for strangers ruthlessly torn from their homelands; historical study of those groups (working-class, minority women and men) who have been ignored by historians and other analysts in the past; and respect for the cultures and philosophies foreign to our own. A great deal, too, is worth saying in defense of moving across boundaries (both in and over time) to experience the unfamiliar, the new. All these qualities keep us alive as well as humble; they need to have (and do have) a place in nearly every conceivable sphere of life, from politics and business to music and sex. Cosmopolitanism generally, especially when cultivated within specific places, or when harmonized with traditions of place, can only enrich the character of the whole
culture in which it exists.
But many liberals and leftists have often seen nothing but this side of the equation and sacrifice too much to market ideology, because that ideology, as many of them know, has become the vehicle for the realization of their dreams. Their emphasis on difference and identity, insistent as it is, has helped undermine the assimilationist achievements of the period between 1920 and 1975. Liberal academics have also worked to abolish the very category of the outsider, to say nothing of the condition itself. Some outsiders, however, should remain outsiders, not only the obvious ones (criminals) but all those who have felt like outsiders and who might wish to remain outsiders if only because such a perspective might make them critics, observers, or artists. (The problem is, of course, outsiderness cannot be created or managed into existence.)
By the late nineties the constant drumbeat for flexibility and self-invention had gone too far, not only because it blotted out the merits of place but because it failed to address how few Americans could really invent themselves and to what degree their “mobility” and “flexibility” had nothing to do with their own free will but had been imposed on them by others. Nationalism, without a doubt, had menaced the world, especially in the hands of centralizing elites or, as historian John Lukacs has said, in the fascist case, as it was “rooted in the racial and tribal bonds of the people.”80 But love of country or patriotism “rooted in a particular place” (rather than in any race or biological grouping) was quite another matter; it was a necessity for social health. Patriotism at its best, inspired by a history of shared sacrifice in a shared country, was not racist or exclusionary; it was democratic, civic-minded, and inclusive, devoid of the hatred that so often arises out of communities based on race or ethnicity.