Le Monde diplomatique
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July 1999
PAEON OF PRAISE TO GLOBALISATION
Creation myth of the "geo-architect
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Books celebrating the current economic system and the growing power of
the markets are on the increase. Rarely however have their authors
shown as much zeal as Thomas Friedman, one of the New York Times' star
writers. Apart from its impact, his book expresses in an almost
emblematic way the thinking of the American ruling classes. As well as
that of economic and political leaders elsewhere who dream of
imitating the US.
by THOMAS C FRANK
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By now most readers have heard of globalisation and have understood
that it means something familiar: "capitalism or else." Oh, but it is
so much more than just that, declares Thomas Friedman, foreign affairs
columnist for the New York Times. His goal in his much-celebrated and
best-selling book The Lexus and the Olive Tree (1) is not to describe
globalisation for us but to help us to understand it. By this he
apparently means hammering into our heads the notion that
globalisation is the end object of human civilisation , that
globalisation is loveable and trustworthy, that globalisation will
make us rich, set us free, and generally elevate everything and
everyone everywhere.
In recent years cosmic optimism of this sort has become familiar
stuff, something we have grown used to hearing not only from superstar
journalists but also from CEOs, stock market analysts, politicians,
economists, TV commercials, preachers, and even pop stars. It is very
much the official American faith of the last ten years. Even so,
Friedman's contribution to the subject stands out. After all, he is
among the most respected foreign-affairs commentators in the US, a
two-time winner of the Pulitzer prize, and once so close to the head
of the foreign policy establishment that the American weekly The New
Republic described him years ago as a functionary of the "James Baker
ministry of information". His contribution to the subject of
globalisation can be expected to hew close to official wisdom. What
will surprise readers of The Lexus and the Olive Tree is the massive
escalation of rhetoric in which that official wisdom is expressed, a
tone of arrogance so grandiose that one suspects the author has taken
leave of his senses.
The book's ostensible subject is predictable enough. Friedman intends
to prove that the global triumph of capitalism has brought democracy
to the people of the world. He tells us of the "democratisation of
technology" in which we all get computers and telephones; he marvels
at the "democratisation of finance" in which we all get to invest in
everything; he paints for us a miraculous "democratisation of
information" in which we get more TV channels than ever before. All of
these forces have combined to subvert top-down hierarchies of all
kinds, he asserts, whether Soviet, Indonesian, or old-style American
corporate. It's not long before he's hailing the Internet as both the
most democratic place on earth and the very "model of perfect
competition."
Friedman's path is littered, however, with errors of fact and
interpretation so utterly obvious that one wonders how they made it
past editors at his publishing house, let alone at the New York Times.
For example, he repeatedly and mysteriously implies that the welfare
state and regulatory policies instituted in the 1930s were in fact
somehow brought about by the pressures of the cold war. He incorrectly
asserts that "in the old days" foreign securities "were never traded
on an open market" while now "you and me and my Aunt Bev" can all buy
South American bonds, which of course figures as spectacular evidence
of the democratisation of ownership (Friedman has presumably never
heard about the infamous Peruvian bonds which were sold to all manner
of middle Americans in the 1920s). He erroneously describes Hong Kong
and Singapore as being more "democratic" than South Korea. He
offhandedly blames the first world war on the intriguing of
Austria-Hungary. He devotes an entire chapter to the absurd notion
that no two countries in which there are McDonalds restaurants have
ever warred with each other.
Error is one thing; deliberate propaganda is quite another. Start with
the car and the tree that are counterposed in Friedman's title. These
are meant to refer to excellent globalising economic forces on the one
hand and foolish, backward regionalism on the other. It's not an
original image. One thinks immediately of Benjamin Barber's infinitely
more balanced 1995 treatment of the same subject, Jihad vs. McWorld
(2), but Friedman gives no sign that he has read Barber's book.
Indeed, Friedman gives no sign that he's read any of the sophisticated
expressions of doubt about capitalism or globalisation to appear in
recent years - for example, the books by John Gray, William Greider or
Doug Henwood (3).
Doubt about globalisation is a sentiment he means to crush utterly and
so he insists on attributing it exclusively to dictators, bigots,
politicians, the French, and other traditional targets of American
loathing. Under no circumstances can scepticism about markets be
permitted a reasonable articulation. This is a millennial work in the
fullest sense of the word. The world is changing ever so fast,
Friedman tells us in his gawking, wonder-filled style; no, wait, the
world has changed - in American barbershops they are now talking about
the Thai currency. Individuals everywhere are "super-empowered", the
Japanese are building really fine cars with almost no human labour -
and it's globalorious! The book's cover says it all, with its raised
golden lettering and its picture of orangey dawn breaking over the
globey globe, a bit like a popular religious tract. It's Dianetics for
the new breed of international profiteers.
One dollar, one vote
Friedman's rhetorical strategy is the literary version of the United
States' recent stock-market mania. Like day-traders running up the
price of Amazon shares, Friedman has simply identified the various fad
ideas of the last ten years and bid them up a little more. Take
Friedman on countries other than the US. He repeatedly asks readers to
imagine their humiliation at the hands of what he likes to call "the
electronic herd", otherwise known as buyers of securities, and invents
all manner of pithy putdowns that the "herd" might deliver as it
leaves a country in the dust. In one chapter he imagines the nations
of the world spread out before him like so many stock listings in the
daily newspaper; he recommends that we "buy" some and "sell" others.
Or take his definition of democracy. It is not a thing of citizenship
and the common good but a simple matter of money. It is "one dollar,
one vote" - a system in which the market and corporate interests
rightly and naturally dictate to everyone else. Thus even as Friedman
whoops it up for the People, he takes pains to warn us that the real
boss, the market, will not tolerate any sort of political activity
beyond its very narrow spectrum of permissible beliefs.
No country that wishes to participate in the global gloriosity will be
allowed to regulate its markets or provide for its unfortunates beyond
what Friedman deems appropriate. Their "political choices get reduced
to Pepsi or Coke - to slight nuances of taste, slight nuances of
policy ... but never any major deviation from the core golden rules".
He even describes the various punishments that the wrong sort of
voting would bring down on a country, as investors "stampede away" and
stock markets crash.
Most revealing is Friedman's understanding of the US itself, the
country in whose image markets quite naturally wish to remake the
world. In a closing chapter he asks us to wonder with him at how "a
visionary geo-architect" (ie, God) would go about designing the
ultimate nation, how He would insist that it had "the most flexible
labour market in the world", how He would ensure that all manner of
rebellions and zany lifestyle accessories would be tolerated in the
boardroom as the signs of creativity that they are. But also (only a
few sentences later) how He would be sure to allow corporate
managements to "hire and fire workers with relative ease".
Evidently it is no longer enough to see providence in our "fruited
plains" or even to claim, as Rockefeller did, that "God gave me my
money". In passages like these Friedman is virtually asking us to
imagine God descending from the heavens to draft the script for
management, send in the strikebreakers, and make Manpower the
fastest-growing employer in the land.
In stylistic terms the book seems to belong to that genre of madly
triumphalist TV commercials that the software and brokerage industries
have been running in recent years. Not coincidentally, Friedman quotes
such commercials throughout his book -not as examples of transparent
corporate PR or efforts to sell something, but as particularly
compelling, particularly truthful bits of shamanistic soothsaying
which he evaluates only by appending his fervent Amens.
Thomas Friedman may write like a TV commercial, but he proudly informs
us that he thinks like a "hedge fund manager", one of those
high-powered international investment bankers. This is because, as he
puts it, he finds it helpful to think about the world in six different
"dimensions" while everyone else except for him and his friends, the
hedge fund managers, thinks only in five, or four, or three (5).
Friedman calls his method of cultural reasoning "arbitrage".
When future students of the 1990s seek to categorise his book they
will be tempted to understand it as a contribution to that popular
genre of business writing known as "futurism," a literature marked by
its wonder-filled talk about the ever-increasing rate of "change"; its
ranks of neologisms; its homegrown "metanarratives" destined to
replace archaic or pitiful categories like social class; and its
telltale charts, purporting to explain geopolitics or management
strategies or consumer enthusiasm according to some calculus of
pop-psychology categories.
But what Friedman has actually written is a veritable dictionary of
the shibboleths of our time, awesome in its inclusiveness. They are
all there: enthusiasm for the "rebranding" of Britain, casual
badmouthing of France for its efforts to retain its welfare state,
facile equating of Great Society America with the Soviet Union. Each
of them is monstrous, foolish, and preposterous in its own way, but
thrown together here they make a truly dispiriting impression. I can
only compare the sensation of reading The Lexus and the Olive Tree to
the first time I heard Newt Gingrich speak publicly and it began to
dawn on me that this is what the ruling class calls thinking, that
this handful of pathetic, palpably untrue prejudices are all they have
to guide them as they shuttle back and forth between the State
Department and the big thinktanks, discussing what they mean to do
with us and how they plan to dispose of our country.
* Editorial director of the Chicago magazine The Baffler
(http://www.thebaffler.com) and author of The Conquest of Cool
(University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1997)
1. Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding
Globalisation, Farrar Strauss and Girouz, New York, 1999, 416
pages, $27.50.
2. Jihad vs. McWorld, Ballantine Books, New York, 1996.
3. John Gray, False Dawn, New Press, New York, 1998; William Greider,
One World, Ready or not: the Manic Logic of Global Capitalism,
Simon & Schuster, New York, 1997; and Doug Henwood, Wall Street,
Verso, London 1997.
4. See Thomas C Frank, "France, an unforgivable exception", Le Monde
diplomatique, English Internet edition, April 1998.
5. These "dimensions" are politics, culture, national defence,
financial markets, technology and environment.
Original text in English
<http://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/en/1999/07/?c=07frank>