Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [39]
Yet despite attrition, the United States remained a formidable industrial power, gradually building a base for its new ventures in the service economy. Its GDP approached $5 trillion in 1993—better than one-fifth of gross world product, produced by only one-twentieth of its population. Of the world’s 500 leading industrial corporations in 1992, 161 were still American, including five of the top nine and all of the top three (General Motors, Exxon, and Ford).8 But a surprising number of the nation’s leading corporations are newcomers. Founded in 1968, Intel Corporation had sales of $8.8 billion and thirty thousand employees in 1993. Nike was born in 1972, Microsoft in 1975, Apple Computer and Gene Tech in 1976. These corporations are not only new, they represent a new form of economic power.
The real story of America’s vicissitudes as the global manufacturing nation is in fact not the story of power shifting from one country to another, but of the gradual erosion of the very meaning of national predominance in industries that year by year are becoming ever more transnational in their corporate makeup, multinational in their parts acquisition, international in their job allocation, and global in their consumer marketing strategies. Just look at Nike or Intel or Apple. American manufacturing leadership simply is not any longer American, anymore than Japanese manufacturing leadership is Japanese. Manufacturing corporations have become as global as the markets they ply. This is why Paul Kennedy’s book on the rise and fall of the great powers might more appropriately have been titled “On the Rise and Fall of the Very Idea of a Great Power.”
Of course in speaking of global companies and global markets, the globe encompasses only designated players in the game. The geography of the whole planet is not at issue. Excluding oil and mining concerns, there is not a single African, South American, Middle Eastern, or Indian company among the top five hundred corporations, and the story is not much better with respect to patterns of consumption since the primary producers turn out to be the primary consumers as well. In 1991, for example, the United States exported $85 billion in goods to Canada, $48 billion to Japan, $33.3 billion to Mexico, $22 billion to the United Kingdom, and $21.3 billion to Germany. These top five export markets comprised almost $210 billion in exports or way over half of America’s 1991 exports globally.9 Of America’s top five supplier countries, four are also top five export markets. Of the top ten importers, eight comprising over 77 percent of America’s total are top export markets.
Country Ranking as Supplier (U.S. imports from) Ranking as Export Market (U.S. exports to)
Japan 1 2
Canada 2 1
Mexico 3 3
Germany 4 5
China 6 16
United Kingdom 7 4
South Korea 8 6
France 9 6
Italy 10 12
Americans worry about their trade deficit: the United States runs significant deficits with seven of the ten on the list, all save France, the United Kingdom, and Mexico. Nonetheless, its deficit trading partners are also its export partners. The only non-European, non-Pacific Rim countries among the top twenty-five U.S. export markets are its Latin American neighbors (with whom America also runs trade deficits): Brazil at number 17 and Venezuela at number 20. Nearly half of the world’s exporters or nearly seventy of the world’s nations listed America as the first, second, or third largest destination for their exports in 1987–88. Forty put America first including all of Latin America