Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [29]
The invisible hand thus takes on new significance in the setting of invisible cyberspace, where virtual corporations defeat real nations. Now the space in which they operate is as invisible as the market’s phantom hands. I underscore the importance of these new market hyperrealities here for two reasons: because the free market ideology they rehabilitate is a battering ram against the walls of the nation-state, exposing McWorld’s antagonism to nationalisms of every kind; and because they challenge and ultimately rewrite the traditional account of markets in terms of free trade in raw materials, manufactured goods, and services. For in the economics of McWorld, the traditional dominance of raw materials and goods yields to a novel and distinctive new realm of activity—what I call the infotainment telesector—that redefines the economic realities of McWorld and reorders the relations of nation-states in ways that neither Francis Fukuyama nor Paul Kennedy could anticipate.
2
The Resource Imperative: The Passing
of Autarky and the Fall of the West
TRADE IN NATURAL resources and the fruits of the land, whether animal, vegetable, or mineral, is among the oldest and most prosperous and profitable sectors of the economy, dating back to the beginning of economic time. Slave/master societies as well as agricultural and feudal societies were grounded in the discovery, processing, and use of these primary goods. Agriculture and trade in natural resources represents the first rung on the economic ladder, and in the modern economy they have been the Third World’s principal door to development. It is here we find those dozen or so corporations on the southern side of the North/South divide that have clawed their way onto the list of the world’s five hundred largest industrial monoliths.1
Agriculture, the other subsector of the traditional resources category, also dominates the Third World in terms of labor investment (two-thirds of the labor force in many Third World nations work in agriculture), although not, unfortunately for such nations, in terms of production. For First World nations using advanced technology from the information/technology sector can produce goods efficiently while employing only a tiny fraction of their labor force.2
When we compare the percentage of GDP devoted to agriculture to the percentage devoted to goods and services in Third World nations, the First/Third World division is strongly reinforced. Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries devote on average only 2.8 percent of their GDP to farming, 33 percent to manufacturing, and a whopping 57.6 percent to services while the percentage for agriculture rises to 17.2 percent in Eastern Europe, to 21.8 percent in sub-Saharan Africa, and to 34 percent in south Asia, with a corresponding decline in the service sector to 38.5 percent for Eastern Europe, and to 18 percent for sub-Saharan Africa and south Asia.3 A number of impoverished nations lack not just manufacturing capacity but elementary natural resources and agricultural potential, and are likely to belong in perpetuity to what realistically should be called not the Third World but the Terminal World. Others are “Third World” only on the way to being Second and First World—much in the manner of the United States compared to Britain a couple of centuries ago.4 The bleak prospects of many sub-Saharan countries is epitomized by Ghana. Paul Kennedy has noted that at the beginning of the sixties,