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McWorld The market imperative Quest for markets pushes against national boundaries Gives rise to multinational corporations (Coke), international trade organizations (GATT), Transnational lobbying groups (OPEC or Greenpeace) Reinforces the quest for peace and stability Common markets demand common language, currency and common behaviors Eastern European revolutions (fight for freedom or Big Macs) The resource
imperative Not every country had good soil, lots of minerals Every nations needs something another nation has Some nations have almost nothing they need The
information-technology imperative Science is a search for universal solutions + and embrace of objectivity and impartiality Science depends on open discourse and exchange of information Banking and commerce all depend on information flow and new communication technologies Individual cultures speak different languages Commerce and science increasingly speak English The whole word speaks binary code Pursuit of society forces open societies – faxes, modems, satellite dishes don’t know borders Entertainment can reach even farther (through the 1980s in South Africa the most popular show was The Cosby Show) Entertainment culture has become more important than armaments McDonald’s in Moscow will do more to create a global culture than will military colonization The ecological
imperative Ecology is global German forests can be destroyed by Swiss and Italians driving leaded gasoline cars Brazilian farmers burning the Amazon could affect greenhouse gasses A mill shutting down here, means a mill somewhere else opens So what does McWorld mean? McWorld tries to create a peaceful, prosperity and unity – breakdown of national power Homogenized and depolitisized (how few young people vote) Lends itself to surveillance as well as liberty New kinds of participation as well as new forms of manipualtion Greater productivity as well as skewed, unjust market outcomes No guarantee of democracy -- Diminishes community, independence and identity Closes down public policy options (being able to buy 100s of car models deprives the options of mass transit) Sees people not as citizens but as consumers Social justice and equality only needed so far as to produce efficient producers and consumers In trading partners, predictability is of more value than justice Jihad Forces against uniformity and integration (religious- Islamic fundamentalists, ethnic- hutus and tutsis, cultural- French) Very destabilizing as war becomes a instrument of identity and expression of community (former yugoslavia) A quest for ever smaller community A breakdown of civility in the name of identity So what does Jihad mean? Vibrant local identity, sense of community, solidarity with people like you – breakdown of national power Founded on exclusion Solidarity often means obedience, fanaticism and the obliteration of the individual Clearly not very democratic May be the last sigh before the eternal yawn of McWorld
Is Barber correct? James Poniewozik, editor of Salon.com, argues “no” in “Fallen Arches” Refers to Barber and New York Times’ Thomas Friedman Friedman argued that “no 2 coutries that both had McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other” When a country has a big enough middle class to support a McDonald’s it starts having roughly that same vested interests as other McDonald’s nations (then of course NATO started bombing Belgrade which has numerous McDonalds) Or consider the boy in a Chicago Bulls baseball cap dancing on the wing of a downed NATO jet So in Yugoslavia we see both ethnic hatred and commodity culture seemingly existing side by side |
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