1.
FRIEDMAN'S MODEL
Friedman argues
that, since the fall of the Wall in 1989, a
"globalization system" has come into being
that replaces the old bi-polar Cold War system. (ix)
It represents the unbridled advance of capitalism in
a world no longer divided by political and cultural
walls and no longer served by the alternative
economic system of socialism. Political powers no
longer define the world system as they did in the
prior fifty years. Then, the West, led by the US, and
the East, led by the USSR, largely determined the
alignment of control on either side of the Iron
Curtain. While the US today plays the dominant role
in the world, the dynamics of globalization now are
diverse and uncontrolled by any single hand.
This new world
is not divided; it is webbed together electronically.
Investment capital and transnational business
enterprises develop it across international
boundaries at the speed of electricity. The "Electronic
Herd" of investors and
multinational corporations roam the world searching
for investment opportunities. (112-142) Such
opportunity arises in nations that willingly don the "Golden
Straightjacket" of fiscal
discipline, open markets, and a dependable legal
system. (101-111)
Democratization
in four dimensions has established favorable
conditions for the operation of global capital. Technology,
finance, and information all
have become open and accessible to people within
countries and around the world. (46-67) The fourth
democratization has involved the
decentralization of the power to make decisions.
(77) Together, these movements away from hierarchy,
privilege, and narrow control have made for a
globalized economic system that differs from the
first great wave of globalization that occurred
before World War I. (xvi)
Driven by the
four democratizations, the globalization system is
reaching out and affecting just about every country
in the world. Countries adversely affected by the
arrival of the Electronic Herd, Friedman finds,
suffer from "Microchip
Immune Deficiency."
(73-100) That is, they have not inoculated themselves
against change by equipping their systems with the
technologies on which the Information
Revolution rides. The result for
them is chaotic.
The Information
Revolution, combined with the four dimensions of
democratization, in Friedman's view, brought two
fundamental changes to the marketplaces of the world:
First,
it greatly lowered the barriers to entry into
almost every business, by radically lowering
the costs for new entrants....Second, [it]
brought [companies] closer to their
customers, giving consumers much greater
power to communicate their choices and to
move quickly from companies that won't
deliver them to companies that will. (80)
As a result,
competition radically increased and production and
delivery of products radically speeded up. These
conditions led to the globalized corporation,
responding rapidly to relentless change in a fluid
capital environment where investment flowed quickly
in and out anywhere in the world.
Countries with
the right conditions have seen remarkable growth in
wealth and Western-style prosperity. Those right
conditions include an infrastructure (the
"operating system") to accommodate
investment. They include a mature finance system
("DOScapital 6.0" in Friedman's clever
phrasing). (145-166) This involves donning the
"Golden Straitjacket" that imposes rational
order on business investment and government
regulation. Aspiring countries must be open to "globalution,"
a Friedman neologism. (167-193)
It means being open to a culture of transparent laws
and transactions. It means having standards for doing
business free of systemic corruption. It means
supporting a free press capable of reporting the
realities of business and the social system that
supports it. (Globalution thus seems to deliver the
Rights of Man through an economic rather than an
armed revolution.)
Friedman's view
of the globalization system is anything but
Pollyanna-ish. Countries unready for the Electronic
Herd will either be left behind in poverty or taken
to the cleaners after hasty retreat from premature
investment. Environments are put at risk. Workers do
not have a guarantee of protections and rights. Even
where countries are fully participating in the global
market system, competition is relentless, change is
at ever-increasing speeds, the risk of failure is
constant, and the pace of life for individuals is
hectic. Globalization brings great prosperity to some
people in a country that is ready for it; but it also
widens the gap in income between the prosperous few
and the many who remain impoverished. It leaves
behind many individuals who are unable to make the
transition to a globalized economy (the
"turtles" who are run
over by the Herd that is galloping toward the
prosperity of globalization). (331) It also wounds
many who initially buy into globalization and fail,
ending embittered--these are Friedman's "wounded
gazelles." (342)
Globalization thus breeds "enormous insecurity
as well as enormous prosperity." (336)
The globalized
market system, according to Friedman, is not
infallible, and does not encompass the entire global
agenda. Geopolitics continue
to flourish in the globalization system, for example,
because many peoples have deep yearnings for
traditional identity and roots. (250) In many parts
of the world, in many countries, this moves them to
defend their traditional way of life against the
worldwide commercial culture modeled on that of the
USA. The "olive tree" of
Friedman's title represents this conservative
anti-globalizing urge to hold onto identity (the "Lexus"
of course symbolizes the
globalization system). Economic motives, in other
words, do not drive everyone in this post-Cold-War
period. However, Friedman does argue that even
resistance to globalization is part of the omnivorous
process at work in the world: "globalization
is everything and its opposite."
(406)
The backlash to
globalization comes in many forms, says Friedman, but
a common thread connects them: just
"stop!" (335) He
argues that this worldwide desire to halt
globalization cannot win. His main reason for
believing that is the evidence of the "groundswell--or
the backlash against the backlash." (348)
He sees globalization emerging from below, where
individual people around the world, thanks to the
Information Revolution, see and then desire the
prosperity in the globalization system. They become
enterprising in their small way in search of a better
material life--and together they create a groundswell
against the backlashing nay-sayers. (348)
The United
States occupies the leading position in
globalization. It acquired this role when it led the
Information Revolution after building up its
strategic self-interest on a worldwide scale in the
Cold War. (382) Since globalization in many eyes
around the world is synonymous with Americanization,
US power draws criticism everywhere--from individual
terrorists to state tyrants.
Friedman
suggests that the globalized future is not sure of
success. The backlash may be too great; countries and
individuals may simply be unable to change
sufficiently with the changing conditions. Indeed,
globalization itself may be globalization's greatest
threat. (407) "How will people start to react if
they find this system just too damn hard and too damn
fast for too damn long?" (418) What if
globalization as a system is just too electronically
connected for its own good, leaves human intercourse
just too disconnected, allows just too much intrusion
into private existence, is just too unfair to too
many people, is just too dehumanizing? (418-432).
What if the big three countries--Japan, Russia, and
China--are not up to the daunting difficulties they
face in adjusting to the new system? (409-418)
After posing all
these negative possibilities, Friedman ends on an
optimistic note, characteristically American. We in
the US can lead the globalization system to success.
To do so, we first have to acknowledge that the
globalization system cannot manage itself. A pure
market vision, he believes, "is too brutal and
therefore politically unsustainable." (444) The
world requires a "politics
of sustainable globalization"
and the US has the leverage to lead the world toward
it. Friedman envisions a "balanced way" of
stabilizing globalization by democratizing
it--"by making it work for more and more people
all the time." (444) The free market in this
view would be balanced by a social safety net for
those who otherwise would be done in by the
juggernaut of the globalized market forces.
Here's the logic
that would make the balance work. Social safety-net
supporters would have to embrace globalization
because of its power to raise living standards.
Globalizing free marketers would have to support a
strong social safety net because without it the
peoples of the world would withhold political support
for globalization. (444)
Friedman
concludes by asserting that the US has the best
tradition of balancing free markets and safety
nets--Lexuses and olive trees. He urges us to accept
our role as the hegemon of this remarkable moment in
history. He offers a modified Enlightenment vision of
universal progress. He believes that Americans have
learned how to balance the Lexus and the olive tree
and must show the world how to do it. (475)
End of 1.
FRIEDMAN'S MODEL
comment
2. COMMENT
ON FRIEDMAN
Maddening though
it was, the idea of the Cold War system enabled us to
rationalize the flow of international events for half
a century. Then in 1989, the Wall fell and the Cold
War system disappeared. Now, the idea of a
"globalization system" has emerged to fill
the void and give us a new conceptual framework for
contemporary world events.
But even before
the Wall fell, the new idea of a "postmodern
period" had arisen to explain the transformation
of modernist culture. In the writings of Fredric
Jameson, at least, this new idea of culture gathered
its force from economics. He grounded his 1984
definition of postmodernism in a logic of "late
capitalism." Jameson linked changes in the
"affect" of people in the new culture to
the peculiarities of post-industrial capitalism.
Though the
socialist regimes behind the Wall had not yet ended,
Jameson's formulation minimized the classic
capitalist-socialist economic contest of the Cold War
period. In his formulation, the new day was emerging
out of the new order of postindustrial capitalism.
Thus, by the time the socialist regime of the USSR
and satellites did collapse, a fresh concept for
understanding international events was forming. It
might have had the confusing tag
"postmodern" but inherent in it was an
economic grounding that reached across national
boundaries.
Since then, the
idea of a "globalization system" has
developed to explain the economic and cultural
dynamics of a world scene finally free of the old
East-West standoff. Central to its definition is a
still-accelerating information revolution. Jameson
and his like have tried to develop the idea in more
detail, speaking from within his
"postmodern" formulation. Scholarly
symposia in many venues are looking at
"globalization" as a
"problematic" in need of theorization from
the standpoint of economic, cultural, literary and
other interrelated disciplines. At an empirical
level, corporate strategists have been identifying
the cultural qualities needed by people functioning
in a globalized environment. And transnational
corporations in practice have given
"globalization" a rhapsodic spin as they
have lusted after capital accumulation worldwide.
Despite the
popularization of the concept, many thinkers are
still struggling to give "globalization"
its appropriate theoretical foundations. Its overlap
with "postmodernism" is at issue for some.
Still others see the concept as a convenient though
ill-defined net for capturing the otherwise random
dynamics of a world that lost the old discipline of
Cold War.
Jameson's
summation of a conference
about globalization captured the difficulty
of saying satisfactorily what it is: "What
seems clear is that the state of things the word globalization
attempts to designate
will be with us for a long time to come;...and that
its theorization necessarily uniting the social and
cultural sciences, as well as theory and practice,
the local and the global, the West and its Other, but
also postmodernity and its predecessors and
alternatives, will constitute the horizon of all
theory in the years ahead." (xvi)
Thomas L.
Friedman's book, The Lexus and
the Olive Tree, is thus timely.
Friedman attempts to fit into his journalist's model
much of what is taking place economically,
politically, and culturally as a result of the
post-Cold-War capitalist transformation.
The book has
many problems, to be sure. It may have a few more
illustrative anecdotes than necessary. Its clever
analogies and phrases tend to oversimplify. It may be
a little too breezily journalistic and
self-congratulatory.
The book's
biggest strength, though, is its biggest problem. Its
clarity as a model makes that model seem monolithic,
as if nothing in the world is happening that does not
flow from the economic dynamics of transnational
capitalism. Friedman's powerful
"metanarrative" allows him to explain just
about any development in the world in global economic
terms.
To Friedman's
credit, his symbol of the deeply rooted olive tree
does confer critical importance on the indigenous
forces that apparently flow from non-economic
motives--the felt need for identity and community.
(pp. 31-34) He certainly gives the olive tree a major
role in his global drama: "The challenge in this
era of globalization--for countries and
individuals--is to find a healthy balance between
preserving a sense of identity, home and community
and doing what it takes to survive within the
globalization system." (42)
The Lexus/olive
tree dualism, however, becomes a simplistic
opposition that overrides the complex sources of
human motivation throughout a still-diverse globe.
"Balance" is easier to express than to
explain. Too often Friedman seems to take at face
value the dramatic title of his opening
scene--"the world is ten years old." Human
experience in the world is thousands of years old,
the appearance of a new frenzy of transnational
business in the last decade notwithstanding. The
roots of the olive trees are deeper even than he
acknowledges. And his metaphor, like any metaphor,
misses nuances and shadings of meaning surrounding
traditional forms of agency around the world.
There is a final
problem with Friedman's model. He thinks that
democracy based on US values will somehow make a
country comfortable with Lexuses while at the same
time it preserves the value of its local olive trees.
It is a big stretch of a concept, left to the end of
his book. He advances the good old USA as the agent
able to model a "politics of sustainable
globalization" throughout the developing world. "For
globalization to be sustainable America must be at
its best--today, tomorrow, all the time. It not only
can be, it must be, a beacon for the whole world. Let
us not squander this precious legacy." (475).
You want to
believe, with Friedman, that liberal democratic
values, grounded in the Enlightenment, will somehow
be essential forces for good as globalization
continues in developing countries. You also want to
believe that they will operate going forward without
perpetuating Western hegemony. But Friedman fails to
examine the implications of his view. His book simply
is not the place to learn how the West can escape its
historical urge to dominate and yet foster individual
freedom and democracy in the ongoing drama of
globalization.
End of 2. COMMENT ON
FRIEDMAN
geertz
3.
GEERTZ SEES THE WORLD IN PIECES
Economic
development is not the main issue of the post-1989
world to preoccupy anthropologist Clifford Geertz.
After a lifetime of studying cultures and theorizing
on society, Geertz ponders the deeper disciplinary
roots of our approach to understanding globalization
(not his term). When he surveys the post-1989
situation, what meets his eye fundamentally differs
from the converging economic system that drives the
global society in Friedman's vision.
In a pair of
essays in his collection, Available
Light, Geertz sees "a world
in pieces." He has no confident answers to the
question of what is going on. But he ruminates on it
with the insight gained from a lifetime of
anthropological practice at the outer edges of
disciplinary boundaries.
A reading of
Geertz confirms my sense that Friedman's model is too
neat. Geertz looks at cultures and nations not as
residual roots to be nurtured while Lexuses fill
global highways; rather, he looks at them as complex
social organisms now lacking clear definition in a
fragmented world. The need for individuals and groups
to identify themselves in the conditions of
globalization leads Geertz to look into processes
glossed over too easily in Friedman's journalistic
sweep.
Friedman tends
to see the end of the Cold War as a clearing of the
ground for a definable project in global economic
integration. Geertz sees the same end as a
cluttering of the ground with
cultural and national fragments that do not fit
together into anything like a world system. In his
view, the power relationships of the Cold War kept
the corners of the globe in some kind of political
balance even after the former colonies of European
empires acquired independent political status in the
1960s. With their disappearance "a proliferation
of autonomous political entities" led to
fractures in groupings and loyalties of all kinds,
with profound effects on public religious and
cultural identities. ("Pinch," 176)
This
"disassembly of the post-Wall world"
brought on a fervent backlash
against the fall of the Wall itself--a
deep desire to find an alternative to "the
magnificent simplicities of the Cold War" (177)
in religious and other cultural forms. (For Friedman,
by contrast, "backlash" means the
opposition of indigenous people against the
consequences of economic globalization--a fundamental
difference of perspective between the two writers.)
It is worth
following the thread of Geertz's thought in "The
World in Pieces." Doing so confers the
corrective needed to Friedman's vision of global
convergence. At the same time, it shows that Geertz
agrees with Friedman in believing that Western
liberal democracy has something to contribute to the
globalization system--although Geertz surrounds his
affirmation of it with a saving sense of caution we
do not find in Friedman's panegyric to the USA.
In Geertz's
view, the post-Wall world in a sense has become less
globalized rather than more so. The Cold War tension
between powerful autocracies cast a net around the
world and held in check nationalist and ethnic
enmities. (220) After 1989, that international net
fell away, releasing a multiplicity of local social
and political oppositions. Geertz dwells on the
resulting raggedness, "scatteration,"
fragmentation, disassembly of the world since then.
His voice almost sounds nostalgic for the political
orderliness we knew under the threat of mutual
East-West annihilation. What Geertz notes most is the
"shattering of larger coherences" between
the global and the local political order. (The war in
Vietnam, I note, for example, was a local civil
conflict elevated to global significance because of
those larger Cold War coherences--or "seeming
such.") (221)
The problem of
this breakdown in global order, for Geertz, is at
bottom an intellectual problem.
When the Cold War was in place, we were able to
conceptualize the way the world was organized. Its
disappearance left us not only a world in pieces--it
also left us without a meaningful way of
conceptualizng the pieces. "Some general
notions, new or reconditioned, must be constructed if
we are to penetrate the dazzle of the new
heterogeneity and say something useful about its
forms and its future." (221)
Friedman's book,
The Lexus and the Olive Tree,
of course is one person's effort to give us a general
notion about the new heterogeneous world. Its
limitation lies precisely in its embrace of a
panoptic, homogeneous explanation--the economics of
global development. Geertz, by contrast, feels
compelled to embrace the variousness at hand. He
seems certain that it will be a long while before the
pieces begin to cohere. And that, in his mind, calls
for "ways of thinking that are responsive to
particularities" that, nonetheless, allow us to
derive some "sense of connectedness." (224)
In the remainder
of his essay, Geertz goes about looking for such ways
of thinking. He does so by exploring the confusion
that has grown up in the meaning of key explanatory
concepts and their interrelationships. He asks:
"What is
a country if it is not a nation?"
(224)
"What is
a culture if it is not a consensus?"
(246)
Social
scientists once may have felt certain in answering
that a country is a nation and a culture is a
consensus. Geertz explores the reasons why they
cannot do so today. Canada, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), and
the former Yugoslavia offer him examples of the
tensions now surrounding the notion of country as
nation. (238-245) The people of Indonesia exemplify
for him how cultural identity now does not represent
a consensus but rather creates a "field of
differences confronting one another at every
level." (255)
Exploring the
loss of the clear-cut notion of culture as consensus,
Geertz expresses an important axiom. It deals with
the interplay of globalizing cosmopolitanism (the
Lexus) on one hand and parochialism (the olive tree)
on the other. He finds them not oppositional but
linked and reinforcing. As cosmopolitanism increases,
so does parochialism. (246) He thus marks out a disintegrative
effect of global information technology that Friedman
minimizes. The influx of globalizing modernization on
the wings of electronic technology precipitates a
reworking and intensification of local cultural
demarcations; it does not cause their disappearance.
(247) As Geertz tersely asserts,
"The more things come together, the more they
remain apart." (248)
Can social
science or philosophy provide a way of thinking about
this situation that will enable us to gain
understanding and control of a process that is
engendering cultural fragmentation amid global
economic convergence?
Geertz tries to
offer some tentative assertions for such a way of
thinking. Foremost among them is his acceptance
of parochial assertiveness as a legitimate form of
participation. A new politics,
he says, will not regard such assertiveness as
irrational or mad. (244) A new politics will open
itself to specific cultural and national situations
that heretofore have been glossed over in
generalities--or dismissed in the hegemonic practices
of Western liberalism and social democracy. (246) (In
this Geertz sounds a note that harmonizes with
Fredric Jameson. Jameson too believed that the processing of Identity
and Difference required a situational
approach. Where do we locate the differences? How do
we position them?)
Agile and
insightful as this sounds, Geertz does not help us
see how such a stance would work in practice. As I
write, the Islamic Taliban fundamentalists are
demolishing priceless Buddhist statues. The UN
Secretary General has talked to them with no effect.
It would be interesting to send Clifford Geertz as
the world's plenipotentiary to bring their
assertiveness into the "practical politics of
cultural conciliation" (256) that he envisions.
A second
assertion from Geertz looks to his field of
anthropology for a conceptual tool to handle the new
situation. Despite its "elementalism," he
thinks that it has a capacity for developing some
theoretical foundations for such a practical politics
of cultural conciliation. (251) He commends
anthropology's "determination to look beyond the
familiar, the received, and the near at hand" in
its search for a deeper understanding of cultural
phenomena. (251) He suggests that this determination
allows us to see the post-colonial alterations of
countries in a fresh light.
Traditionalists
thought that the division of the former Third World
into various independent entities replicated the way
nations came into being centuries earlier in Europe.
The colonies, in this view, replayed the national
development of their imperial models. Looking through
the lens of anthropology, Geertz sees a quite
different process. The new countries have developed
in a transparent way, visible to all eyes and not
shrouded in history. Moreover, they have haphazardly
collected heterogeneous peoples into their domains.
They have come to operate not as simple
"cultures" or "nations" but as
"modes of involvement in a collective life that
takes place on a dozen different levels, on a dozen
different scales, and in a dozen different realms at
once." (254) The object in this situation is not
to discover consensus but "a viable way of doing
without it." (255)
And here Geertz
turns the traditional imperial-colonial relationship
on its head. He suggests that this new picture of
cultural identity as a "field of
differences" (255) applies not only to the
former periphery but to the former Western master
nations as well. Given the flows of people bearing
different cultures in all directions, and no longer
only from a center to a periphery, the Western
nations with their cultural tensions now resemble
their former colonies. (256)
Finally, Geertz
asks what social democratic liberalism can contribute
to this world of cultural fragments that needs a new
polity. Like Friedman, Geertz believes it can
contribute something. However, he thinks that it can
do so only if its Western advocates radically
reconceive it. (260) They must purge it of its
universalistic claims. They must advance it for what
it is and no more--a culturally specific set of
concepts that have worked for us. They must expect
competing conceptions to come forward in opposition
to it. (259)
If all this
sounds pretty inconclusive and points to continuing
discord, Geertz concurs. "The prospect of a new
synthesis...seems to me quite remote," he says.
(260) And yet Geertz feels a need to end on an upbeat
note that sounds as all-American as Friedman's. Our
most central commitment, he concludes, is "the
moral obligation to hope." (260)
It strikes me
that Geertz is remarkably taken by the fragmenting
effects of the Cold War's end. Does he underestimate
the power of transnational corporations, in league
with democracies committed to the rule of law and
sound banking, to impose a new kind of hegemony
across borders? Could this hegemony come to function
like the East-West power standoff of
old--subordinating parochial conflict again more
successfully than he is allowing?
Perhaps. No one,
certainly not I, can prove one argument or the other
in this complex question. Geertz's final opting for
"hope"--an echo of Friedman's huzzah for
the USA way--may be the best strategy for resolving
the issue for the time being.
Looking for
deeper stirrings, I remember William Butler Yeats's The
Second Coming, where he
contemplated the fragments left after the First World
War. Christ, he imagined, was coming again after
twenty centuries, to reestablish the ancient circle
of authority that modernism broke. Yeats imagined a
mysterious Sphinx-like being with lion body and human
head, terrible and mysterious, who "slouches
toward Bethlehem to be born." Yeats's prediction
has yet to come true after eighty years; the gyres of
twentieth century history simply widened further and
"the blood-dimmed tide" rose higher. While
I have my doubts about the eventual coming of Yeats's
"rough beast" of the desert, I do want to
suspect that a more comprehensive accommodation of
the present fragmentation will sometime lurch out of
the darkness of our minds to help us understand and
manage postmodern globalization. Meanwhile, practical
politics and hopeful countenances--along with a whole
lot of investment capital--will have to serve.
End of 3. GEERTZ
SEES THE WORLD IN PIECES
