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Dueling Globalizations
By Thomas Friedman and Ignacio Ramonet*
DOScapital
by Thomas L. Friedman
For the last 10 years, we have talked about “the post-cold-war world.” That is, we have defined the world by what it wasn’t because we didn’t know what it was. But a new international system has emerged: globalization. The integration of markets, finance, and technologies has enabled each of us to reach around the world farther, faster, and cheaper than ever before. It is not just an economic trend, nor is it just some fad. Globalization is directly or indirectly shaping the domestic politics, economic policies, and foreign relations of virtually every country.
As an international system, the cold war had its own structure of power: the balance between the United States and the U.S.S.R. In foreign affairs, neither superpower would encroach on the other’s core sphere of influence; while in economics, less developed countries would focus on nurturing their own national industries, communist countries on autarky, and Western economies on regulated trade. And the cold war had its own dominant ideas: the clash between communism and capitalism, as well as détente, nonalignment, and perestroika. When taken all together, this cold war system didn’t shape everything, but it shaped many things.
Today’s globalization system has some very different attributes, but it is equally influential. The cold war system was characterized by division, symbolized by a single image: the Wall. The globalization system also has one overarching characteristic: integration. Today, both the threats and opportunities facing a country grow from who it is connected to. This system is also captured by a single symbol: the World Wide Web.
Most importantly, globalization has its own defining structure of power. The cold war system was built around nation-states, balanced at the center by two superpowers. The globalization system, by contrast, is built around three balances.
The first is the traditional balance between nation-states. This can still explain the containment of Iraq in the Middle East or the expansion of NATO against Russia in Central Europe. The second critical balance is between nation-states and global markets. Who ousted Suharto in Indonesia? It was not another superpower, it was the supermarkets. The third balance in the globalization system is between individuals and nation-states. Because globalization has brought down walls and simultaneously wired the world into networks, it gives more direct power to individuals than at any time in history.
So, we are no longer in some messy, incoherent “post-cold-war world.” We are in a new international system, defined by globalization. It’s time we recognize that there is a new system emerging, start trying to analyze events within it and give it its own name. I will start the bidding. I propose that we call it “DOScapital.”
A New Totalitarianism
by Ignacio
Ramonet
We have long known that globalization is the dominant phenomenon of this century. No one has been waiting for Thomas Friedman to discover this fact. What is new in Friedman’s work is the dichotomy he establishes between globalization and the cold war: He presents them as opposing “systems.” His constant repetition of this gross oversimplification reaches the height of annoyance.
The term “cold war” is shorthand for a period of contemporary history characterized by geopolitical and geostrategic concerns. However, it was not a system. It does not explain a number of events that shaped that era: the expansion of multinational corporations, the rise of air travel, the decolonization of Africa, or the development of computers and high-tech industries.
Friedman is right, however, to argue that globalization has a systemic bent. Step by step, this two-headed monster of technology and finance throws everything into confusion. Friedman tells a tale of globalization fit for Walt Disney. However, the chaos that seems to delight our author so much is hardly good for the whole of humanity.
Friedman forgets to remark that there are groups from every nationality, religion, and ethnicity that vigorously oppose the idea of global unification and homogenization. Furthermore, he appears incapable of observing that globalization imposes the force of two powerful and contradictory dynamics on the world: fusion and fission. Whereas many states pursue fusion with others to provide strength in numbers, several multinational communities are falling victim to fission.
The social and political consequences have been ghastly. In the Balkans and the Caucasus, these tensions unleashed open wars. Meanwhile, poverty, illiteracy, violence, and illness are on the rise. The richest fifth of the world’s population owns 80 percent of the world’s resources, while the poorest fifth owns barely 0.5 percent. That, it seems, is the brave new world of globalization.
Dazzled by the glimmer of fast profits, the champions of globalization are incapable of anticipating the needs of man and healing social fractures. Indeed, according to Friedman, all of these problems will be resolved by the “invisible hand of the market.” Almost everywhere, university economics departments, journalists (such as Friedman), and political leaders take up this new dogma and repeat it until they are blue in the face. And of course, in our media-mad society, repetition is as good as proof.
So what are we told to believe? Only an economy disencumbered of social speed bumps and other “inefficiencies” can steer clear of regression and crisis. The constant repetition of this catechism in the media gives it such an intimidating power that it snuffs out every tentative free thought.
Thanks to globalization, only activities possessing four principal attributes thrive—those that are planetary, permanent, immediate, and immaterial in nature. These four characteristics recall the four principal attributes of God Himself. And in truth, globalization is set up to be a kind of modern divine critic, requiring submission, faith, worship, and new rites.
Friedman warns us that straying from these laws will bring us to ruin and decay. The Bolsheviks said, “All power to the Soviets!” Thomas Friedman demands, “All power to the market!” The assertion is so peremptory that globalization has become a kind of new totalitarianism.
DOScapital 2.0
by Thomas L. Friedman
Ignacio Ramonet makes several points in his impassioned anti-globalization screed. Let me try to respond to what I see as the main ones.
Ramonet argues that the cold war was not an international system. I simply disagree. To say that the cold war was not an international system because it could not explain everything that happened during the years 1946 to 1989—such as aerial transport or apartheid—is simply wrong.
I know that globalization is hardly all good, but unlike Ramonet, I am not utterly blind to the new opportunities it creates for people. Ask the high-tech workers in Bangalore, India, or Taiwan, or coastal China what they think of the opportunities opened by globalization. Don’t they count? Or do only French truck drivers count?
Ramonet says I am “incapable of observing that globalization imposes the force of two powerful contradictory dynamics on the world: fusion and fission.” Say what? Why does he think I called my book The Lexus and the Olive Tree? It is all about the interaction between what is old and inbred—the olive tree—and the economic pressures of globalization, represented by the Lexus.
Ramonet assumes that the rest of the world hates globalization as much as he does, and so he will be surprised in the end when the so-called little people are ready to stick with it. My dear Mr. Ramonet, the fact is the wretched of the earth want to go Disneyworld, not to the barricades. They want the Magic Kingdom, not Les Miserables. Just ask them.
Do I believe that market forces will solve everything? Absolutely not. But Ramonet, who clearly doesn’t know a hedge fund from a hedge hog, demonizes markets to an absurd degree. He may think governments are powerless against such monsters, but I do not.
Ramonet confuses my analysis for advocacy. My book is not a tract for or against globalization. Ramonet treats globalization as a choice. I, however, view globalization as a reality. I want us first to understand that reality and figure out how we can get the best out of it and cushion the worst.
Thomas Friedman’s Magic Kingdom
by Ignacio
Ramonet
It is truly touching when Thomas Friedman says, “The wretched of the earth want to go to Disneyworld, not to the barricades.” Such a sentence deserves a place in posterity alongside Queen Marie-Antoinette’s declaration in 1789, when she learned that the people of Paris were revolting and demanding bread: “Let them eat cake!”
My dear Mr. Friedman, 1.3 billion people live on less than one dollar a day. Going to Disneyworld would not displease them, but I suspect they would prefer to eat well, to be better educated, and to have a job. To obtain these basic needs, millions of people are without a doubt ready to resort to violence.
If we are wise, we will never let it come to that. Rather, why not allocate a miniscule part of the world’s wealth to the most unhappy of our human brothers? But globalization is deaf and blind to such considerations.
If you would agree to come down out of the clouds, my dear Mr. Friedman, you could understand that globalization is a symptom of the end of a cycle. It is not only the end of the first capitalist revolution, but also the end of an intellectual cycle—the one driven by reason. Almost all that modern reason constructed—the state, society, industry, nationalism, socialism—has been changed forever. Since ancient times, humanity has known two great organizing principles: the gods, and then reason. From here on out, the market succeeds them both.
Now the triumph of the market and the irresistible expansion of globalization causes me to fear an inevitable showdown between capitalism and democracy. Capitalism inexorably leads to the concentration of economic power in the hands of a small group, marginalizing the majority of the world’s population.
How do we keep half of humanity from revolting and choosing violence? I know your response, dear Friedman: Give them a Big Mac and send them all to Disneyworld!
References
Frances Cairncross’ The Death of Distance (Cambridge: Harvard Business School Press, 1997)
William Greider’s One World Ready or Not: The Manic Logic of Global Capitalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997).
David Korten’s The Post-Corporate World: Life after Capitalism (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1999)
Robert Reich’s The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for the 21st Century (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991)
Dani Rodrik’s “Sense and Nonsense in the Globalization Debate” (Foreign Policy, Summer 1997)
David Rothkopf’s “In Praise of Cultural Imperialism” (Foreign Policy, Summer 1997)
Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (London: Harper, 1942)
Malcolm Waters’ Globalization (New York: Routledge, 1995)
Rigorous critiques of Thomas Friedman’s new book, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1999) can be found in the New Yorker (May 10, 1999), The Nation (June 14, 1999), Financial Times (May 15, 1999) and New Statesman (July 5, 1999).
Endnotes
*: Thomas L. Friedman is foreign affairs columnist for the New York Times and author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1999). Ignacio Ramonet is editor of Le Monde diplomatique. Back.