Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [38]
In that postwar moment when America dominated the world economically, the world it dominated was a far more diversified place culturally. While America exercised hard power hegemony, soft power was scattered and insubstantial, a matter of many different insular local cultures. Semiotic systems were fragmented, while cultural symbols were the possessions of parochial peoples with colorfully distinctive self-images. In the fifties and sixties, there was no “Europe” in Europe. In the world before McWorld, the Swedes drove, ate, and consumed Swedish; the English drove, ate, and consumed English, and the rest of the world’s inhabitants either mirrored their colonial masters or developed domestic consumption economies around native products and native cultures. In France one ate nonpasteurized Brie and drank vin de Provence in cafés and brasseries that were archetypically French; one listened to Edith Piaf and Jacqueline Françoise on French national radio stations and drove 2CV Citroëns and Renault sedans without ever leaving French roadways—two-lane, tree-cordoned affairs that took you through half the villages in France on the way from, say, Paris to Marseille. An American in Paris crossed the waters to get away from Tastee-Freez, White Castle, and Chevrolet pickup trucks and once in France could be certain they would vanish. A German studied in Italy to imbibe Mediterranean, not Atlantic, culture. Americans dominated the economic world in the abstract, but the French dominated France, the English England, and the Italians Italy.
Yet two rival worlds of industrial power evolved inside and outside of the Cold War. While the United States and the Soviet Union focused their energies on defense-and aerospace-related heavy industry, Germany and Japan homed in on consumer products where, ironically, the ideal American mobile, autonomous, choosing consumer who would define the future economy was the natural target. Where defense and aerospace industry were closely associated with hard power and state command structures, the new consumer economies privileged the private sector and pointed toward soft power.
America’s postwar economic hegemony was reinforced by its decision to focus on automobiles. The choice of roadway over railway and the construction of the huge interstate highway system meant that the industries on which automobiles depended (steel, aluminum, chrome, petroleum, rubber, concrete, asphalt, and electronics) would be continually nurtured not just for public sector defense spending but for private sector consumer spending. Automobiles facilitated the suburbanization of America and thus had a vital impact on the housing and construction industry as well. Suburbanization required improved communications and home entertainment and gave television a new role as the national medium. This domestic productivity combined with heavy industrial production in the defense sector sent the economy surging and secured America’s global economic leadership. The arms race allowed (forced) the Soviet Union and suppliers like East Germany to build powerfully competitive industrial economies as well, but it was to those nations that could concentrate on consumer goods that the future really belonged. The United States and the Soviet Union were in effect arms-racing themselves right out of the leadership. The USSR would eventually bankrupt itself in the competition, and America would survive economically only by securing an elephantine national debt, a wrenching trade deficit, and the unwanted status of the world’s largest debtor nation, uneasy in the 1990s with the McWorld its postwar economy has created.
Innovations in electronic and computer technology that had originated in American defense research facilitated developments in consumer goods that the new manufacturing powers in Europe and the Pacific Rim could take advantage of. The smaller throw capacity of America’s underpowered