Jihad vs. McWorld (7 page)

McWorld is a product of popular culture driven by expansionist commerce. Its template is American, its form style. Its goods are as much images as matériel, an aesthetic as well as a product line. It is about culture as commodity, apparel as ideology. Its symbols are Harley-Davidson motorcycles and Cadillac motorcars hoisted from the roadways, where they once represented a mode of transportation, to the marquees of global market cafés like Harley-Davidson’s and the Hard Rock where they become icons of lifestyle. You don’t drive them, you feel their vibes and rock to the images they conjure up from old movies and new celebrities, whose personal appearances are the key to the wildly popular international café chain Planet Hollywood. Music, video, theater, books, and theme parks—the new churches of a commercial civilization in which malls are the public squares and suburbs the neighborless neighborhoods—are all constructed as image exports creating a common world taste around common logos, advertising slogans, stars, songs, brand names, jingles, and trademarks. Hard power yields to soft, while ideology is transmuted into a kind of videology that works through sound bites and film clips. Videology is fuzzier and less dogmatic than traditional political ideology: it may as a consequence be far more successful in instilling the novel values required for global markets to succeed.

McWorld’s videology remains Jihad’s most formidable rival, and in the long run it may attenuate the force of Jihad’s recidivist tribalisms.
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Yet the information revolution’s instrumentalities are also Jihad’s favored weapons. Hutu or Bosnian Serb identity was less a matter of real historical memory than of media propaganda by a leadership set on liquidating rival clans. In both Rwanda and Bosnia,
radio broadcasts whipped listeners into a killing frenzy. As
New York Times
rock critic Jon Pareles has noticed, “regionalism in pop music has become as trendy as microbrewery beer and narrowcasting cable channels, and for the same reasons.”
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The global culture is what gives the local culture its medium, its audience, and its aspirations. Fascist pop and Hasid rock are not oxymorons; rather they manifest the dialectics of McWorld in particularly dramatic ways. Belgrade’s radio includes stations that broadcast Western pop music as a rebuke to hard-liner Milosevic’s supernationalist government and stations that broadcast native folk tunes laced with antiforeign and anti-Semitic sentiments. Even the Internet has its neo-Nazi bulletin boards and Turk-trashing Armenian “flamers” (who assail every use of the word
turkey
, fair and fowl alike, so to speak), so that the abstractions of cyberspace too are infected with a peculiar and rabid cultural territoriality all their own.

The dynamics of the Jihad-McWorld linkage are deeply dialectical. Japan has, for example, become more culturally insistent on its own traditions in recent years even as its people seek an ever greater purchase on McWorld. In 1992, the number-one restaurant in Japan measured by volume of customers was McDonald’s, followed in the number-two spot by the Colonel’s Kentucky Fried Chicken.
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In France, where cultural purists complain bitterly of a looming Sixième République (“la République Américaine”), the government attacks “franglais” even as it funds EuroDisney park just outside of Paris. In the same spirit, the cinema industry makes war on American film imports while it bestows upon Sylvester Stallone one of France’s highest honors, the Chevalier des arts et lettres.
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Ambivalence also stalks India. Just outside of Bombay, cheek by jowl with villages still immersed in poverty and notorious for the informal execution of unwanted female babies or, even, wives, can be found a new town known as SCEEPZ—the Santa Cruz Electronic Export Processing Zone—where Hindi-, Tamil-, and Mahratti-speaking computer programmers write software for Swissair, AT&T, and other labor-cost-conscious multinationals. India is thus at once a major exemplar of ancient ethnic and religious tensions and “an emerging power in the international software industry.”
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To go to work at SCEEPZ, says an employee, is “like crossing an international border.” Not into another country, but into the virtual nowhere-land of McWorld.

More dramatic even than in India, is the strange interplay of Jihad and McWorld in the remnants of Yugoslavia. In an affecting
New Republic
report, Slavenka Drakulic recently told the brief tragic love story of Admira and Bosko, two young star-crossed lovers from Sarajevo: “They were born in the late 1960’s,” she writes. “They watched Spielberg movies; they listened to Iggy Pop; they read John le Carré; they went to a disco every Saturday night and fantasized about traveling to Paris or London.”
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Longing for safety, it seems they finally negotiated with all sides for safe passage, and readied their departure from Sarajevo. Before they could cross the magical border that separates their impoverished land from the seeming sanctuary of McWorld, Jihad caught up to them. Their bodies lay along the riverbank, riddled with bullets from anonymous snipers for whom safe passage signaled an invitation to target practice. The murdered young lovers, as befits émigrés to McWorld, were clothed in jeans and sneakers. So too, one imagines, were their murderers.

Further east, tourists seeking a piece of old Russia that does not take them too far from MTV can find traditional Matryoshka nesting dolls (that fit one inside the other) featuring the nontraditional visages of (from largest to smallest) Bruce Springsteen, Madonna, Boy George, Dave Stewart, and Annie Lennox.
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In Russia, in India, in Bosnia, in Japan, and in France too, modern history then leans both ways: toward the meretricious inevitability of McWorld, but also into Jihad’s stiff winds, heaving to and fro and giving heart both to the Panglossians and the Pandoras, sometimes for the very same reasons. The Panglossians bank on Euro-Disney and Microsoft, while the Pandoras await nihilism and a world in Pandaemonium. Yet McWorld and Jihad do not really force a choice between such polarized scenarios. Together, they are likely to produce some stifling amalgam of the two suspended in chaos. Antithetical in every detail, Jihad and McWorld nonetheless conspire to undermine our hard-won (if only half-won) civil liberties and the possibility of a global democratic future. In the short run the forces of Jihad, noisier and more obviously nihilistic than those of McWorld, are likely to dominate the near future, etching small stories of local tragedy and regional genocide on the face of our times and creating a climate of instability marked by multimicrowars inimical to global integration. But in the long run, the forces of McWorld
are the forces underlying the slow certain thrust of Western civilization and as such may be unstoppable. Jihad’s microwars will hold the headlines well into the next century, making predictions of the end of history look terminally dumb. But McWorld’s homogenization is likely to establish a macropeace that favors the triumph of commerce and its markets and to give to those who control information, communication, and entertainment ultimate (if inadvertent) control over human destiny. Unless we can offer an alternative to the struggle between Jihad and McWorld, the epoch on whose threshold we stand—postcommunist, postindustrial, postnational, yet sectarian, fearful, and bigoted—is likely also to be terminally postdemocratic.

G
ILLETTE’S CHAIRMAN
Alfred M. Zeien has said “I do not find foreign countries foreign.”
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Welcome to McWorld. There is no activity more intrinsically globalizing than trade, no ideology less interested in nations than capitalism, no challenge to frontiers more audacious than the market. By many measures, corporations are today more central players in global affairs than nations. We call them multinational but they are more accurately understood as transnational or postnational or even antinational. For they abjure the very idea of nations or any other parochialism that limits them in time or space. Their customers are not citizens of a particular nation or members of a parochial clan: they belong to the universal tribe of consumers defined by needs and wants that are ubiquitous, if not by nature then by the cunning of advertising. A consumer is a consumer is a consumer.

McDonald’s serves 20 million customers around the world every day, drawing more customers daily than there are people in Greece, Ireland, and Switzerland together.
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General Motors (still the world’s largest company despite its uneven recent sales history) employs
more people internationally than live in a number of the world’s smaller nations.
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With $2.4 billion worth of pizzas sold in 1991, the privately owned Domino’s earned enough revenues to fund the collective government expenditures of Senegal, Uganda, Bolivia, and Iceland.
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Toshiba, the General Electric of Japan, boasts in its 1992 annual report that “as good corporate citizens” they “do our part to ensure that progress continues within the world community,” but its citizenship—whether Japanese or global—is hemmed in on every side by limits set by the demands of profitability, which in turn is driven by sales in 1992 of $25 billion, only slightly less than Argentina’s recent government budget.
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Globalism is mandated by profit not citizenship. Fast food goes upscale in the chic new chain Planet Hollywood. And “On planet Reebok,” according to the successful ad campaign of an only nominally “American” athletic shoe company, “there are no boundaries.”
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Ralph Lauren’s perfume for men, Safari, also boasted of “Living Without Boundaries” in its launch campaign in 1992.

A popular protectionist sticker appearing across the nation on American automobile bumpers reads “Real Americans Buy American.” The trouble is, it is hard to know which car is really more “American”: the Chevy built in Mexico from primarily imported parts and then reimported into the United States, the Ford built in German plants employing Turkish workers and sold on the Hong Kong and Nigerian markets, or the Toyota Camry designed by American Peter J. Hill at Toyota’s Newport Beach California Calty Design Research Center, assembled at the Georgetown, Kentucky, Toyota plant by American workers, primarily from American-made parts, and test-driven at Toyota’s twelve-thousand-acre Arizona proving ground.
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These international “Japanese” cars are puzzling: for to remain truly Japanese, the whole must somehow become more than its American parts. Thus, in a fit of schizophrenic self-congratulation, Honda has been boasting about its “made-in-America” roots (that is, parts) even as it revels in its status as
Motor Trend
’s “Import of the Year.”

So confusing has the question of automotive genealogy become that the United States government enacted an American Automobile Labeling Act that since October 1, 1994, has required that labels be affixed to new autos specifying their “domestic content,” from
their engines to their windshield wipers. The labels are unlikely to clarify the situation, however, since they reveal (to take just one example) that Chrysler Corporation’s Dodge Stealth is built by Mitsubishi in Nagoya, Japan, while Mitsubishi’s Eclipse RS is built in Normal, Illinois, and features Chrysler engines.
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Labels can be confusing: the Nissan Altima assembled in America with mostly American parts does utilize radiator hoses manufactured in Paris … Paris, Tennessee.
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The authors of the North American Free Trade Agreement found it particularly cumbersome to decide which products could qualify for tariff-free status in the new zone since so many products “foreign” to North America were nonetheless assembled in the region with local parts. How about Japanese picture tubes installed in Mexican television chassis? Under traditional trade rules they were “domestic;” under NAFTA rules, the picture tubes and electron guns will also have to be domestic to qualify. But since Japanese companies own large shares of both of the “American” glass companies that manufacture tubes, “American” domestic television sets will still be substantially Japanese, even if they qualify as American under NAFTA rules.
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American-made cars will have to have 50 percent of their parts (by value) as well as 50 percent of their labor contributed domestically (rising to 62.5 percent in 2002) but does this really make the cars “American”? Putting identity labels on products turns out to be even more challenging than establishing ethnic identities for people, for products have to be disassembled and labeled part by part by part, by origin of material, nationality of labor force, and cultural identity of designer to arrive at an
ad absurdum
conclusion about
their
ethnic identity.
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Historically, there is something prototypically American about the automobile: Henry Ford’s commitment to a mass-produced motorized vehicle that would set every American family free has come to be associated with many of the virtues of American lifestyle and not a few of its vices. The internationalization of automobile culture—what George Ball once called “an ideology on four wheels”—as well as of automobile manufacturing is thus actually a globalization of America, no matter who is making the cars. The Chinese have recently committed to automobile manufacture as a foundation for economic modernization: more than any other decision
they have made, this one may commit them to the Americanization they most fear.
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