Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [27]
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 foreign: 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.