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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 Jan. - 2 Feb. 2000 Issue No. 466 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 27 Jan. - 2 Feb. 2000 Issue No. 466
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Profile Travel Living Sports People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Who will plant the olive trees?
By Mona Makram-Ebeid *
Last week, the ambassador of the United States and Mrs Daniel Kurtzer held a delightful and thought-provoking "Millennium Evening" to discuss globalisation with Thomas Friedman, the well-known columnist for the New York Times and author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree. The book had been distributed beforehand, courtesy of the American Embassy, which allowed the guests to engage the speaker on many of his controversial statements.
Friedman explains that globalisation is the international system that replaced the bipolar world of the Cold War. It is the integration of capital technology and information across national borders in a way that is creating a single world market and, to some degree, a global village. This system threatens to destroy the rich diversity of culture and environment. The central conflict Friedman probes is between the drive for wealth, symbolised by the Lexus (a Japanese luxury car), and the human need for identity and community, symbolised by the olive tree. While he sees globalisation as inevitable, if not indomitable, he views America as a model for hope, seeing this nation as embodying a living balance between these two great forces of the new and the old.
There is no doubt that Mr Friedman's analysis of present-day globalisation was accurate and sound. He writes clearly, with humour and wit -- yes, global investment acts as an invisible hand to direct historically domestic political and social concerns; and surely if a country wants to participate in this market it must adapt its social framework as well as its "hardware" and "operating system" to the capitalist values, principles and networks, which are spreading to the remotest corners of the globe, what Friedman calls the "Golden Straitjacket". In other words, if a country wants to prosper then it has to accept the "capitalist straitjacket", low taxes, privatisation, deregulation, free trade and free capital movement too. The "straitjacket" is policed by the "Electronic Herd", the financial markets, which will invest in a country and support its currency as long as it accepts the straitjacket, but flee in panic if it does not. As the metaphor of the Golden Straitjacket implies, Friedman sees every country as having to conform to the same model, with little room for national variation based on local culture.
Friedman is an unabashed advocate of the interconnected global economy: he more or less accepts that unfettered worldwide capitalism is a fait accompli; and suggests that those who resist it are fools or cowards. The open question is whether the process is as beneficial as he insists. One cannot detect a trace of anguish about the risks entailed; he sounds no alarm with regard to the fate of the 4.7 billion people who live at the starkest level of subsistence, for whom globalisation has no meaning because the markets cannot reach them in time.
Lest cynics in this brave new world argue that this has nothing to do with them, consider the following. Economic decline inevitably translates into political instability and social unrest. Sporadic rioting and looting, with attacks on ethnic and religious minorities, tear at Asia's social and political fabric.
On the other hand, does globalisation really mean that each developing country must adopt US-style institutions to survive? Friedman, of course, is entitled to write a book celebrating globalisation as a good thing and suggesting, as he does with verve and sincerity, various programmes designed to make the globalised world a better place. What he fails to do is to develop the implications of globalisation for the 80 per cent of the world's population who cannot sell their services in a global market and whose governments today are incapable of funding social programmes. In these cases, globalisation, if it is not redirected, will corrode social cohesion not just by challenging cultural and religious values but by allowing a winner-take-all society to generate unprecedented inequalities. In fact, what he is really describing is a winner-take-all world of global competition, open only to the swiftest, the strongest, the smartest and the richest, and dominated by American capital and corporate interests. By doing so, he underrates the very real dangers such a world poses to a large group of potential losers; more importantly, he absolves proponents of globalisation from the need to search creatively for a new system that places more emphasis on the human spirit and sustainability and less on money as such.
I believe that the Seattle "fiasco" constitutes the first powerful backlash from those "supranational forces who feel brutalised or left behind by this new system". I also believe that, in the history of globalisation, we will differentiate between two phases -- before and after Seattle -- and between two different concepts: Mr Friedman's, which is "Profit over People" and that of the demonstrators, representing the new super-empowered NGOs as well as the new global civil society, whose slogan was "People Before Profits", and "Fair Trade, Not Free Trade". Such supranational assaults on globalisation excesses, on globalisation without a human face, may be the wave of the future. One of the greatest achievements of Seattle is that it put a brake on the mad rush to be integrated into globalisation without pondering its implications.
Friedman, on the other hand, advocates a world view based on the following sentence: "Globalisation is us -- the Americans. We are the people most adept at riding the tiger and we are now telling everyone else to get on or get out of the way." Such a statement is probably doing the US a great disservice, for it makes it far more difficult to make policy, taking into account that other people may not see the Americans as rosily as they see themselves. We all acknowledge that the United States is a great power and, like any great power, it acts and will always act out of a combination of interests and principles. At the same time, the United States cannot accomplish any of its admirable international goals -- fomenting peace, stability, human rights, democratisation, the expansion of trade and markets, environmental protection, the stabilisation of population growth, an end to hunger and extreme deprivation -- without equitable, sustainable development, which means that poor-country access to rich-country markets is crucial both for long-term development and for pulling the hardest-hit emerging markets out of their current crisis. Wealthy countries should make it their joint responsibility to absorb developing countries' goods, even if this implies temporarily skewing their trade balance. In an interdependent world, international cooperation must be an integral part of public policy, as the costs of neglecting the rapidly growing international class divide will be immense.
For the past years, I have considered Tom Friedman one of the savviest and shrewdest reporters on the Middle East and thought that From Beirut to Jerusalem, which he wrote in 1988, was a superb piece of reporting. Lest this article be read as completely negative, I want to repeat that Mr Friedman does a terrific job explaining the process of globalisation. While explaining the process is definitely important, however, how do we make it more equitable? He would have done himself, and his book, a great favour if he had taken the trouble to highlight the key issues that concern us all, and indicated how globalisation could be redirected to achieve societal as well as economic needs. Who is going to plant the olive groves, Mr Friedman, while you are driving the Lexus?
* The writer is a former member of parliament currently teaching political science at the American University in Cairo.
