Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [24]
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