Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [48]
Even Africa, although it is falling off the world’s economic charts, is to be gathered into McWorld’s fold. For in the gunsight of Coke’s ambitions, it is not the home of endless poverty, rampant AIDS, and ongoing authoritarianism, but rather a 568-million-person soft-drink market featuring “warm climates, youthful populations and governments moving toward market economies.” The same is true of Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina in ex-Yugoslavia where a “successful bottling system (is) in place.” Where ordinary observers see hell in the making, Coke sees a 24-million-person market, which surely can be “targeted for more investment when territorial/political tension subsides.” After all, when Coke trucks first appeared in Warsaw, crowds lined the sidewalks and cheered.
Creating the world in its own image also lets Coke redefine political and social reality. Uncontrolled, economy-wrenching birthrates modified only slightly by the plague of AIDS become “youthful populations” ripe for consumer exploitation. Ethnic cleansing, rape as policy, and genocide become “territorial tensions” that, though they may diminish the market by a couple of million consumers, give or take a million Muslims (less likely prospects for Western-style consumption in any case), will eventually yield to less tumultuous, more profitable forces of globalization. From this perspective, the journey from AIDS, starvation, and genocide to just plain fun American-style seems far shorter than anyone could have imagined.
It is perhaps unfair to hold corporate companies chasing maximum sales, bottom-line profits, and shareholder satisfaction to some vision of global diversity or international justice or world democracy. Yet their strictly economic ambitions turn out to be anything but strictly neutral. As we have seen, they themselves wade into Big Social Issues, if only to stroke a new age middle class they want to target for the same old little economic reasons. And even where multinational companies claim to be interested exclusively in production and consumption figures, increasingly they can maximize those figures only by intervening actively in the very social, cultural, and political domains about which they affect agnosticism. Their political ambitions may not be politically motivated and their cultural ambitions may not be the product of cultural animus, but this only makes such ambitions the more irresponsible and culturally subversive.
Consumer sales depend on the habits and behaviors of consumers, and those who manipulate consumer markets cannot but address behavior and attitude. That is presumably the object of the multibillion-dollar global advertising industry. Tea drinkers are improbable prospects for Coke sales. Long-lunch traditions obstruct the development of fast-food franchises and successful fast-food franchises inevitably undermine Mediterranean home-at-noon-for-dinner rituals—whether intentionally or not hardly matters. Highly developed public transportation systems lessen the opportunity for automobile sales and depress steel, rubber, and petroleum production. Agricultural lifestyles (rise at daylight, work all day, to bed at dusk) are inhospitable to television watching. People uninterested in sports buy fewer athletic shoes. Health campaigns hurt tobacco sales. The moral logic of austerity contradicts the economic logic of consumption. Can responsible corporate managers then afford to be anything other than immoral advocates of sybaritism? Or to act as irresponsible citizens in these new, mostly less developed, worlds of opportunity? Are they not bound as good businesspeople to emerge from the cocoon of the free market and to try to influence cultural and lifestyle habits, some