Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [37]
3
The Industrial Sector and
the Rise of the East
HOW DIFFERENT IS the story when we move from the domain of raw resources to manufactured goods—supposedly the foundation of any national economy? Manufactured durable goods constitute the traditional industrial sector by which the rise of capitalism has generally been measured. Until recently this sector has been regarded as the engine of all developed economies. The decline of American manufacturing in traditional domains like steel and automobiles has thus been closely associated with a putative erosion in world economic leadership. America’s “rust belt” has turned America into a vast rust bucket. The “American Century” celebrated by Life’s Henry Luce in 1941 ended without ceremony sometime in the 1970s when America crossed the midway point on its sad journey from being the world’s largest creditor nation to being its largest debtor nation and when Europe and Japan, well recovered from the war, began to eat away at America’s leadership in automobile, home appliance, electronics, and computer manufacturing. Paul Kennedy, David Calleo, and other pessimists have concluded that the American epoch, scarcely half a century long, is over.1
By the same logic, the emerging economic powers to whom the future supposedly will belong have been identified in recent decades by their emerging industrial manufacturing potential. The multiplying “tigers” on the Asian side of the Pacific Rim like Japan, the Koreas, Taiwan, Singapore, and China (with Hong Kong) have thus caught up to and even surpassed European powers like Germany and France as major economic players. Smaller and less noticed specialists in manufacturing like Israel, Iraq, Cuba (before the demise of their Communist patrons), Botswana, Kuwait, and Libya have also come to exercise an economic influence disproportionate to their size while Chile, Turkey, and even Mexico may yet achieve extraordinary rates of growth in this decade.2 All of the above countries devote over half of their GDP to industry.3 Yet these trends prove little. Projections based on manufacturing capacity are fundamentally flawed because they miss the direction in which the evolving economy is moving. Economic strength in the era of McWorld has passed to the domain of services, and here new and distinctive measures of leadership have emerged quite separate from the traditional industrial sector.
Joseph Nye has written persuasively about the shift from the kind of “hard power” that is rooted in the coerciveness of command structures—military and machine power—to a novel form of “soft power” that leads by consent and is rooted in “the universalism of a country’s culture and its ability to establish a set of favorable rules and institutions that govern areas of international activity.”4 He suggests that politically soft power is supplanting hard in the modern world, and I will argue that there has been a parallel evolution in the economy from the hard manufacturing to the soft service (information and communication) sector, and that economic power is likely to follow this evolution in the coming decades, upsetting the grim predictions of the declinists about the United States.5 The United States, no longer the dominant manufacturing entity it once was, nonetheless has a sure command of the softer powers that are forging McWorld, which positions it to recapture global leadership. What this suggests is that the story of America’s rise and decline as a manufacturing power is only part of a larger, not yet finished, journey.
In 1950 not long after the end of World War II and before the burgeoning Cold War began to challenge American strength and divert its attention from rebuilding a demobilized peacetime economy to restarting a cold wartime economy, the United States had already overtaken England and Germany as the global power. Military and political factors seemed primary, but underlying them was demonstrated economic power. This unprecedented strategic hegemony rested almost entirely on the American