Chapter 3

The Cultural Construction of Neoliberal Globalization

ROBERT J. ANTONIO

Honey, … I think the world is flat. (Friedman 2005a: 5)

Globalization is a multi-sided process, but the most intense debates over it have stressed its connections to a new global political economic regime with a distinct ‘American template’ – neoliberalism (e.g. Barber 1996; Gray 1998). Neoliberals champion free-market policy, deregulation and tax cuts. They seek to minimize health, education, welfare and other social spending, and they contend that limited government, free trade and global capitalism offer the only road to reduced poverty and increased prosperity. They hold that neoliberalism is the main engine of globalization per se and that the process’s progress can be furthered only by fuller global implementation of their programme. Social Darwinism has been an important part of US political culture for more than a century; it has been reconstructed during major technological and financial bubbles. Neoliberals have revived it again (Foner 1998; Phillips 2002). They do not identify as social Darwinists, and their views usually lack the nineteenth-century version’s racially tinted Malthusianism. They combine their highly optimistic claims about exceptional wealth creation, global opportunity and hybrid culture with emphases on the free market, unrestricted property rights, and self-reliance and opposition to welfare and redistribution. This chapter will explore the work of the highly influential globalization advocate, Thomas L. Friedman, with the aim of elaborating his tacit social theory, which maps and justifies neoliberal globalization.

NEW AGE GLOBALIZATION AND THE US-LED NEW WORLD ORDER

… America was, and for now, still is, the world’s greatest dream machine. (Friedman 2005a: 469)

By the late 1980s, the Thatcher–Reagan liberalization, new information-communication technologies, freer movement of goods, capital, images and people across national borders and geopolitical realignment stirred globalization discourse. Reported widely in the US media, Francis Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ thesis announced triumphantly a hegemonic, made-in-America, global political-economic regime and new unipolar world arising in the wake of the collapsing Soviet bloc. He argued that the US model of liberal democracy, stripped of its post-World War II era social democratic or welfarist facets, was dominant globally. Fukuyama held that modern peoples can no longer imagine a practical alternative that would ‘represent a fundamental improvement over our current order’ (1992: 51; 1989). Critics from the left and the hard right decried his celebratory view of ascendent neoliberalism, but their broadsides about the ‘end of left and right’ and ‘end of alternatives’ and critiques of the new breed of market-oriented, ‘third way’ politicians (e.g. Clinton, Blair, Schroeder) affirmed his claims about zero options. The first Iraq War, won quickly and decisively by a US-led international coalition, including former Cold War, American arch-enemy, Russia, was scripted by the first President Bush as the opening act of the ‘new world order’. Globalization’s lead nation also had become the lone superpower in post-Cold War geopolitical dynamics.

President Clinton was an outspoken champion of neoliberal globalization. Former Clinton Administration economic adviser and Nobel Prize winning economist, Joseph E. Stiglitz, states that Clinton was elected on a ‘putting the people first’ agenda; he aimed to chart a ‘third way’ between New Deal policy and Reaganomics, but neoliberalism ruled in his Administration. Stiglitz argues that they saw financial markets as a disciplining force that increases efficiency and prosperity. The Clinton Administration’s domestic programme of neoliberal deregulation, privatization and securitization, he holds, constituted the core of their globalization policy, put forward in the US-dominated IMF and G8. Stiglitz asserts that their reigning idea was that ‘what is good for Goldman Sachs, or Wall Street, is good for America and the world’ (2003: xiv–xv, 24–6, 275–6, 281). And their neoliberal strategy seemed to work; the US economy grew rapidly, with low unemployment, low inflation and substantial income growth (especially for the wealthy). Between 1994 and early 2000, the New York Stock Exchange Composite soared over 125 per cent and the NASDAQ rocketed up over 500 per cent, stimulating much wider public discourse about globalization and enthusiasm about its prospects (Phillips 2002: 100; Henwood 2003: 4, 146). The boom in financial markets sparked claims that the Dow was on a ‘permanent high plateau’ and would climb to 30,000. Globalization advocates held that the ‘New Economy’ creates wealth so effectively that a post-scarcity culture is in sight. Clintonians considered the 1990s to be the ‘fabulous Decade’ (Blinder and Yellen 2001). By contrast, New Left Review editor Perry Anderson asserted, critically, that the decade’s chief event was ‘the virtually uncontested consolidation, and universal diffusion of neoliberalism’ (2000: 10).

Framed in the roaring nineties boom, Clinton-supporter Thomas L. Friedman’s best-selling The Lexus and the Olive Tree (2000) has been an extremely influential piece of globalization advocacy. Even after the NASDAQ bubble burst and after 9/11, Friedman has maintained his glowing optimism about the process. His recent best seller The World Is Flat (2005a) builds on the earlier book. Other writers have done parallel works on neoliberal globalization (e.g. Micklethwait and Wooldridge 2000) and more scholarly defences of it (e.g. Wolf 2004). However, Friedman is heralded as the top globalization advocate. His regular column for America’s paper of record, The New York Times, adds force to his views. The back cover of his first globalization book quotes Fukuyama, who declares that the text defines ‘the real character of the new world order’. On the recent book’s dust-jacket, Stiglitz and other notables praise how lucidly Friedman expresses complex processes and makes them accessible to a mass audience. Even his scathing critics stress his importance, i.e. as top ‘publicist of neoliberal ideas’, pundit to ‘presidents, policymakers, and captains of industry’, or as ‘the most important columnist in America today’ (Gray 2005; Gonzalez 2005; Taibbi 2005). Friedman’s copious references to his schmoozing with top corporate and political globalization advocates make it hard to tell who influences whom. For example, he thanks informants, Clinton Administration, Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, World Bank president James Wolfensohn, Cisco Systems head John Chambers and hedge fund manager Leon Cooperman. He also credits Microsoft’s Bill Gates, Rolls-Royce’s Sir John Rose, Dell’s Michael Dell and Netscape’s Mark Andreessen for commenting on draft sections of his latest book. Friedman also thanks intellectuals, such as economist Paul Romer and political theorists Michael Sandel and Robert Kagen (Friedman 2000: 478; 2005a: 472). Many more corporate heads and top globalizers, from diverse regions of the world, appear in his texts as informants. Friedman’s reportage offers insight into the way that they construct and justify the neoliberal regime. Some academic analyses of globalizers, working in transnational organizations and US government, converge, at key points, with Friedman’s accounts (e.g. Hunter and Yates 2002; Stiglitz 2003: 281–319). His critics lampoon his trite terms and lightweight tone, but he articulates what may be the most comprehensive, widely read, influential defence of neoliberal globalization. Perry Anderson (2000: 11) identified The Lexus and the Olive Tree as ‘the most ambitious and intransigent theorization of ultra-capitalism as a global order’.

Friedman is a public intellectual aiming to generate support for the neoliberal policy regime. Although his works have been bestsellers, reaching diverse segments of the public, he directs his writing especially at the secure segment of the professional middle class. This highly educated, affluent stratum cuts across political parties and occupations, including corporate managers, entrepreneurs, financiers, advertisers, stock-brokers, technical experts, government officials and many other occupants of influential roles, who belong to the so-called ‘investor class’. Even some higher education leaders find Friedman’s work attractive because he provides a rationale for supporting education. He arguably seeks to mobilize his readers into a public to rally support for neoliberal globalization in the face of mounting domestic criticism about its negative impacts and increasing resistance to it abroad. I will analyze his tacit social theory of neoliberal globalization, mapping its core features and contradictory facets and addressing critically its ideological thrust. Friedman’s theory is not in the foreground of his texts. It must be teased out of his respondents’ points as well as his interpretations and summary arguments.

MR FRIEDMAN’S PLANET: GLOBALIZATION’S EMERGENT CONSUMER-STOCKHOLDER REPUBLIC

We Americans are the apostles of the Fast World, the enemies of tradition, the prophets of the free market and the high priests of high tech. We want ‘enlargement’ of both our values and our Pizza Huts. We want the world to follow our lead and become democratic, capitalistic, with a Web site in every pot, a Pepsi on every lip, Microsoft Windows on every computer and most of all – most of all – with everyone pumping their own gas. (Friedman 2000: 384)

Friedman defines globalization as the unparalleled ‘inexorable, integration of markets, nation-states, and technologies’, which enables ‘individuals, corporations and nation-states to reach around the world farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before, and in a way that is enabling the world to reach into individuals, corporations and nation-states farther, faster, deeper, and cheaper than ever before’ (2000: 9). Below I explain his view of the overall cultural and institutional regime that drives and structures the process. Friedman poses his mapping of the ‘globalization system’ with normative intent; he defends global neoliberalism on the basis of claims about its impacts – its putative, beneficial socio-cultural and economic consequences for ‘what is’ and ‘what is coming to be’.

Post-communist globalism

Friedman holds that a shift from the ‘Cold War system’ to the ‘globalization system’ occurred by the year 2000. He claims that capitalism’s new phase, ‘Globalization 3.0’, will be, at least, as momentous as the two earlier globalization waves (i.e. 300 years of European mercantalist expansion and 200 years of modern capitalist development). Friedman contends that the November 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall was the first of a series of ‘flatteners’ that brought the globalization system into being. He treats the event as a fundamental step that opened the way for the others and as an iconic representation of the overall shift. Employing the metaphor ‘falling walls’ to refer to the chief causes and effects of Globalization 3.0, he argues that the Soviet bloc and East–West split stunted capitalism’s global extension and consolidation; the Soviet state’s monopoly of power, puppet states, secrecy and massive interference in private life, civic associations and, especially, economics generated paralysing fixity and unfreedom. Besides controlling a major portion of the world, Friedman implies, the USSR helped cultivate anticapitalist sensibilities and movements and a global climate favouring statist alternatives. Although not monopolizing power, he holds, Cold War era liberal democracies still concentrated it too greatly and deployed it too widely. Identifying power almost entirely with states, parties and politically motivated individuals, he sees politics to be the main wall or barrier to the flatness that he contends is the globalization system’s prime characteristic and virtue. He believes that the tearing down of the Berlin Wall inspired forward-looking people everywhere to shrink political power’s grip over social life. In liberal democracies, Friedman argues, this meant cutting state regulation, social programmes and redistribution. Stopping far short of declaring the state’s end, he holds that individual states and the nation-state system constitute a necessary infrastructure for capitalism that helps coordinate, provision and defend the globalization system. He and his respondents see state intervention that serves capitalist development, without undue regulatory interference or major business costs, to be virtuous and not politics at all (Friedman 2000: 7–16, 44–6; 2005a: 8–11, 48–55).

Extreme capitalism

Perhaps misleadingly, Friedman claims to be a ‘technological determinist’ and ‘not a historical determinist’. After communism, he holds, nine flatteners (i.e. Netscape’s IPO, work flow software, open-sourcing, outsourcing, offshoring, supply-chaining, in-sourcing, in-forming and wireless innovations) forged a new ‘flat world platform’ that greatly accelerates, intensifies and extends global capitalism. Friedman’s flatteners combine business and technological innovations. He considers neoliberal policymaking to be the decisive force that gave rise to third-wave globalization, albeit not its singular, sufficient cause. He portrays the new information-communication technology as a core, necessary facet of the process. Friedman sees this electronic connective tissue to be the enabling mechanism for realizing the potential of the unparalleled ‘opening, deregulating, and privatizing’ of the economy that drove the move to Globalization 3.0 (2000: 9–16; 2005a: 374–5). Other globalization analysts argue that deregulation and new technologies produced world-shrinking, spatial-temporal compression, generating much speedier, much more extensive and much freer global movement of capital, goods, messages, images and people (e.g. Harvey 1989). However, Friedman holds that Globalization 3.0 provides unparalleled democratic access to the means of communication and collaboration; the new ‘playing field’ allows enterprising individuals from all over the globe to plug in and to employ their creativity, skills and disciplined work habits to engage unregulated capitalism’s vast opportunities (2005a: 8–11, 173–200). Friedman quotes Netscape’s Marc Andreessen’s assertion that ‘a 14-year-old in Romania or Bangalore or the Soviet Union [sic] or Vietnam has all the information, all the tools, all the software easily available to apply knowledge however they want’ (Friedman 2005b). Friedman contends that nations obeying the globalization system’s free-market rules and employing its new technologies don a ‘golden strait-jacket’ that makes their economies grow and politics shrink; ‘political choices get reduced to Pepsi or Coke’ (2000: 101–6). He holds that the flat world accelerates greatly the later twentieth century’s already sweeping deregulation; Darwinian-like selection compels serious players to remove more and more sources of ‘friction’, or regulatory, redistributive and other social blockages that limit capitalist property rights and exchange. Friedman and his respondents imply that the consequent flat playing field is the heart of a knowledge-based economy with nearly frictionless, transnational capitalist intercourse and drastically reduced transaction costs. Tepidly qualifying the argument, however, he defends a minimal social safety-net and modest protections for certain highly valued public goods, which have inherent worth and secure the public trust that sustains markets. Still Friedman sees New Deal programmes and European-style social democracy to be moribund; social policy must rely almost entirely on market-centred strategies and public–private cooperation (policies largely already in operation) (2000: 276–305, 437–40). He considers Globalization 3.0’s unparalleled prosperity and consumer freedom to be far too beneficial for informed publics to allow statist backsliding. In his view, neoliberal globalization has so much momentum that its further worldwide expansion and consolidation is inevitable (Friedman 2005a: 204–5, 469).

Fluid networks

Breaking radically from the Cold War system’s ‘frozen’ structures, Friedman argues, today’s globalization is ‘a dynamic ongoing process’ (2000: 8–9). Many other thinkers argue that complex organizations have been restructured to fit the imperatives of globalization’s new technological, economic and regulatory environments. They argue that the postwar era’s vertically integrated firms have been made more flexible, more dispersed and leaner. However, they stress that slightly modified bureaucracies operate successfully in most major business sectors and that more sweepingly transformed organizations often retain key elements of postwar firms and rationalize more rigorously and in new ways vertical ownership structures, managerial hierarchies, work relations and technical controls (e.g. ‘neo-Fordism’ replaces ‘Fordism’ – Prechel 2000). By contrast, Friedman portrays a dawning post-bureaucratic era in which new technologies forge lateral collaboration rather than hierarchical control. He claims that the new flat world platform supplants rigid, coercive, vertical organizations with flexible, voluntary, horizontal networks; lateral communication and collaboration replace the mechanical obedience demanded by hierarchical line-authority and constrictive roles, jurisdictions and offices; and multitudinous individual decisions and initiatives establish dynamic ‘non-linear’ patterns of association. Although Cold War-type organizations remain, Friedman and his informants imply that a flat, seamlessly integrated Web, fashioned on the model of Internet, is the globalization system’s ascendent organizational logic (2000: 8). This loosely coupled, flexible system is shaped by innumerable rational choices, myriad individual responses to vast complexes of shifting local conditions. In constant aleatory flux, it allows players to gravitate to locations that best fit their abilities and characters, and, thus, generates legitimacy and social integration. The new network offers enormous opportunities to enterprising people and penalizes severely free-riders. Highly talented, motivated individuals find more felicitous locations and work better deals, while unskilled, undisciplined players, who do not adapt readily to constant changes, are left to drift on their own without handouts. Friedman holds that Globalization 3.0’s ‘unique character’ derives from ‘the newfound power of individuals to collaborate and compete globally’ and that globalization is ‘increasingly driven by the individual’ (2005a: 10, 183).

Nomadic subjects

A Goldman Sachs vice-chair tells Friedman that it is useful to think about globalization from the standpoint of an ‘intellectual nomad’, because the process lacks fixed grounds (2000: 27). However, Friedman implies that nomadic qualities are necessary for everyone navigating Globalization 3.0. Stretching from Nietzsche to postmodernist thinkers, cultural theorists have long predicted the arrival of the postmodern subject; this post-traditional individual usually is described as a many-sided, hybrid nomad, uprooted from fixed space, multi-perspectival in purview, at home with otherness, and, thus, free to create his or her own values, identities and cultural forms. Friedman contends that third-wave globalization has added more than one and a half billion new global players; millions of these exceptionally diverse people already communicate and collaborate instantly, flexibly and regularly via new computer and telecommunication technologies. He argues that players must be ready to move to new positions in an instant; lifetime job security and long-term social contracts between firms and employees ended with Globalization 2.0. Friedman and his respondents see flexible labour laws, allowing untrammelled hiring and firing with maximal speed and minimal cost, to be essential to the flat world’s open competition and voluntary integration. Friedman holds that its multi-sided nomads thrive on the consequent challenges and opportunities; they are formed to operate in uncertain, ever changing circumstances and, thus, lack any sense of entitlement. He touts them as human equivalents to ‘Swiss Army Knives’ (i.e. famous for their multiple blades and other retractable tools fashioned for different tasks). Friedman argues that these brave new workers make themselves ever more multiple as the situation demands and that they constantly upgrade their capacities so that their skills cannot be easily outsourced. Replacing the Cold War era’s inflexible specialists, these ‘versatilists’ welcome the fresh experiences, relationships and activities entailed by new jobs. Friedman implies that being fired and having to move to a new position makes talented people more multifaceted and, thus, ultimately, more successful (2005a: 238–49, 290–3). He quotes an Asian business writer’s portrayal of globalization’s techno-capitalist, postmodern subjects, or ‘Zippies’ – ‘Belongs to generation Z. Can be male or female, studying or working. Oozes attitude, ambition, and aspiration. Cool, confidant, and creative. Seeks challenges, loves risks and shuns fear.’ Friedman adds that they are guilt free about ‘making money or spending it’ (2005a: 181–4). In his view, Globalization 3.0 not only produces the type of subjects that ensure system reproduction, but it also nurtures multicultural sensibilities, tolerance and even cyberspace spirituality. Stopping just short of the fully deterritorialized subject, Friedman asserts, islands of tradition survive (e.g. religion), constituting another side to the globalization system’s multiplicity and providing alternative sources for sustenance of the self (2000: 468–75). He seldom mentions consumption directly and does not even list the term in his indexes, but brand names suffuse his storytelling. For example, he says: ‘globalization often wears Mickey Mouse ears, eats Big Macs, drinks Coke or Pepsi, and does its computing on an IBM PC, using Windows 98, with an Intel Pentium II processor and a network link from Cisco Systems’ (Friedman 2000: 382). Unlimited consumer freedom and pleasure is the unspoken presupposition and chief virtue of the golden straitjacket and its irreversible, post-political globalized world. His postmodern nomads constitute their dynamic, largely deterritorialized, plural subjectivity by consuming global commodities as well as by multitasking and telecommuting. On Friedman’s planet, accumulating ‘More’ and consuming it is the main inspiration for choosing a path that entails so much frenetic competition, intense work and profound uncertainty. Declaring that ‘culture matters’, Friedman holds, ‘outward looking’ nations ‘glocalize’, absorbing the best foreign ideas, practices and commodities into their local cultures (2005: 324–9). His brand-name world is so thick with commercial messages and commodities that the borders between markets and extra-economic institutions are porous or obliterated. Celebrating unabashedly this blurring as another facet of falling walls, Friedman does not hesitate to ponder critically self-formation by participation in niche markets or reflect seriously how traditional institutions can reproduce in such a fluid, materialistic world.

Legitimate inequality

Friedman’s flat world has skill and reward hierarchies, based on divergences in character (e.g. work habits, flexibility, ambition), intelligence and, in part, good or bad fortune. However, his idea of flatness implies a nascent just meritocracy based on ample opportunity in a worldwide free market. Friedman holds that the globalization system generates so much wealth that nearly everyone benefits; even if inequalities grow sharper, the ever larger basket of commodities available to consumers means that the process is not a zero-sum game. He implies that wealth gushes towards the globalization system’s most talented people and delivers substantial rewards to almost all disciplined, motivated and, at least, moderately skilled people. Friedman points to NBA superstar, basketball player Michael Jordan’s $80 million yearly income. However, he argues that marginally skilled, substitute Joe Klein’s hefty $270,000 NBA minimum salary was buoyed by Jordan’s worldwide popularity and consequent growth of the league’s global market. Friedman holds that players, such as Klein, know that they benefit enormously from Jordan’s success and, thus, do not begrudge his wealth (2000: 306–24). Friedman implies that this type of mutually beneficial inequality, although usually involving more modest rewards, pervades Globalization 3.0. He acknowledges that extreme inequalities and misery exist outside the flat world (i.e. poor nations and even unskilled, non-wired sectors of wealthy nations), and admits that flat world growth will not soften all inequalities or eliminate all poverty. However, Friedman holds that hope for a better life rides on joining the globalization system and benefiting from its technology transfers, free trade and market-based growth. He says that ‘there is no alternative’ except ‘to go backward’ to a Cuban-style command economy that impoverishes and oppresses everyone. Friedman contends that oil-based command states, such as Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, spread wealth a bit more widely than other statist regimes, but at the cost of very substantial waste, unfreedom and backwardness (2000: 318, 355–7; 2005a: 309–36, 460–3). Advocating ‘compassionate flatism’, Friedman argues that Globalization 3.0 nations should provide some welfare for their poorest, sickest, weakest people. For others, he advises ‘portable’ pensions and healthcare plans that do not discourage work and that go with workers to new jobs (2005a: 284–93). However, Friedman neither suggests that sharp economic inequality is problematic per se nor advocates redistribution or other programmes to reduce it. He implies that empowering individuals results in inevitable inequalities; not everyone can master Globalization 3.0. But Friedman portrays its intense international competition as a ‘race to the top’ for the vast majority of participants; its successful players’ enterprise and productivity have significant spillover benefits for those on its margins (2005a: 233; 2005b).

Ownership society and stockholder direct democracy

Besides the new possibilities for collaborative work and consumption, Friedman and his respondents hold that Globalization 3.0 offers unparalleled opportunities for owning financial assets and participating in an electronic stockholders’ democracy. Friedman describes a four-faceted democratization: ‘democratization of technology’ dispersed the means of communication, information and wealth creation (e.g. miniaturization, digitalization, telecommunications, computerization and compression technologies) to a much greater number of diverse people over wider spaces than ever before; ‘democratization of finance’ ended insurance companies’, investment banks’ and commercial banks’ monopoly control over financial instruments and provided inexpensive easy access to credit and means of investment (e.g. cut-rate brokers, online trading, 401K pension plans); ‘democratization of information’ made the tools for creating, gathering, storing and transmitting information (e.g. cable TV, satellite dishes, DVD players, mobile phones, e-mail and, especially, Internet and its hyperlinks) nearly universally available and much cheaper, faster and more efficient than ever before; ‘democratization … of decision-making and the deconcentration of power and information’ opened the way for the other flatteners and year 2000 flat world platform (2000: 44–72, 86; 2005a: 48–172). These conditions, Friedman contends, allow a highly dispersed, inclusive ‘Electronic Herd’ of investors to drive financial markets and ultimately direct politics and socio-cultural development. For example, he holds that their purchases and sales in currency markets constitute daily ‘votes’ on the management of entire nations, which discipline political leaders’ actions and sometimes lead to their removal. Stressing Gobalization 3.0 deregulation, financialization, privatization and securitization, he suggests that the Electronic Herd’s ‘votes’ ensure that stockholder interests determine policy trajectories in more institutional domains than ever before. Friedman does not deny electronic democracy’s inequalities or ‘one dollar, one vote’ processes (i.e. the extent of participation and influence depend on ownership share – large investors’ access and clout overshadow that of small investors and non-investors have no voice at all). He also acknowledges that financial speculators sometimes start stampedes, causing national or regional crises. However, Friedman holds that, in Globalization 3.0’s nearly frictionless, transparent markets, large investors and small investors react to the same signals, share common information and have parallel, if not equal, outcomes. He and his respondents propound the rationality of stockholder democracy – that the Electronic Herd’s decision-making power operates, on average, in the best interest of nearly everyone, including vast numbers of people from the unflat world, who do not own stock or ‘vote’ (2000: 112–42). He contends that stockholding is growing rapidly as more people benefit from the flat world platform and neoliberal reform. Friedman sees electronic traders to be radically dispersing power, turning the ‘whole world into a parliamentary system’. Globalization’s ‘most basic truth’, Friedman declares, is that ‘No one is in charge’ (2000: 112; also pp. 72, 137, 168; 2005a: passim).

Self-regulation

Friedman acknowledges that Enron, Tyco and WorldCom used the new information and communications technologies to fleece their stockholders, workers and customers. The leadership of these firms took advantage of a control and regulatory environment that lagged behind the extremely rapid development of new financial instruments, information technologies and means of communication. Prior to the scandals, Friedman mistook Enron as a model fast company. He now portrays it as a prime example of a firm led by enterprising, super-empowered crooks, who exploit the resources of Globalization 3.0. However, he sees predations by occasional corporate violators to pale by the side of statist regimes’ top-to-bottom corruption. Moreover, he holds that the self-regulating system adjusted to the new conditions rapidly and worked; US financial markets’ exceptional transparency and regulatory mechanisms facilitated identification and punishment of the corporate criminals (Friedman 2000: 387–8; 2005a: 198, 245). Friedman also holds that the globalization system fosters geopolitical self-regulation within its borders; countries with McDonald’s franchises or branches of Dell supply chains do not want to go to war with each other; linked by trade and foreign direct investment, they avert conflicts that upset global interdependence and economic security. He argues that Globalization 3.0’s seamless webs of collaboration and consequent affluence raise the potential costs of war to the highest level ever and act as a deterrent to it. Friedman asserts that people, wearing the golden straitjacket, want to preserve the system that delivers the goods; their engaged work habits and comfortable consumer lifestyles reduce tolerance for disrupted lives and weaken the will to fight bloody battles and suffer casualties (2000: 248–56; 2005a: 422–9).

Backlash

Stressing an inherent tension between capitalism and tradition, Friedman refers to Karl Marx’s famous passages, in the Communist Manifesto, about how globalization knocks down ‘Chinese walls’ and pulverizes the traditional world (i.e. ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned … ’). Friedman also mentions twentieth-century economist Joseph Schumpeter’s argument, inspired, in part, by Marx, that ‘creative destruction’, or constant economic change, is capitalism’s essence (Friedman 2005a: 201–4; 2000: 11, 213). He holds that Marx’s and Schumpeter’s points about capitalism’s exceptionally powerful, restlessly creative, productive forces and ever more extensive markets constantly making obsolescent its own products, creating new ones and transforming the wider culture pertain more to today’s third-wave globalization than to Globalization 2.0. Friedman’s repeated references to ‘falling walls’ and ‘flatness’ imply that barriers to capitalism are being smashed more rapidly and completely than ever before. He suggests that the tension between capitalism and tradition is manageable within the flat world and that it even produces laudable hybridity. However, he contends that sudden inclusion of vast unflat areas of the globe into fast capitalism generates resentment, anger and resistance within traditional cultures. Friedman also holds that the new flatteners extend unparalleled opportunities to, or super-empower, talented individuals who want to cheat, oppose or destroy the globalization system; Globalization 3.0’s new technologies are as important to outliers’ practices as they are to the system’s legitimate, honest players. Thus, he is not surprised that corporate scandals, antiglobalization protests and 9/11 occurred at the moment that the flat world platform came into being. Friedman implies that Globalization 3.0’s political and cultural enemies pose much more dangerous threats than violators, motivated by personal economic gain. Holding that the anti-globalization movement exploits capitalism’s tensions with tradition, he argues that it is a reactionary backlash by people lacking the discipline, courage, energy, imagination and skill to adjust to post-Cold War realities. He says that anti-globalization critics offer no programmes that can reduce poverty or protect the environment. Contending that their political successes deprive the poorest people of Globalization 3.0’s bonanza, Friedman asserts that they need a ‘policy lobotomy’ or simply to ‘grow up’ – accept the golden straitjacket as the only path to a prosperous, peaceful world. He contends that Third World opposition to globalization and related anti-Americanism manifest wounded pride, humiliation and unreason. He claims that especially strong backlash comes from middle-class segments of former statist regimes, who, under neoliberal reform, lose the security and benefits of their old bureaucratic positions. Friedman criticizes most emphatically the globalization system’s radical, violent, anti-modern opposition. Prior to 9/11, he warned presciently about grave threats posed by Osama bin Laden and other anti-American, ‘super-empowered angry men’. He holds that the new flatteners make such individuals all the more dangerous; telecommunications technologies provide them with better means than ever to incite anti-Americanism, acquire vital information about weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), link global terror cells and coordinate terrorist acts. Believing that Globalization 3.0 reduces poverty, fosters openness to difference and leaves spaces for tradition, Friedman argues that its extension and consequent empowerment will defuse humiliation and resentment in now unflat parts of the world and that their peoples will overcome the shock of de-traditionalization and embrace globalization (Friedman 2000: 327–47, 395, 405; 2005a: 197–200, 429–38).

Globalization’s lead society and its ‘quiet crisis’

Friedman has moderated recently his earlier triumphant declaration that ‘Globalization is Americanization’, and he no longer refers to ‘Americanization-Globalization’ (2000: xix, 293–4, 379–84; 2005a: passim). The sobering impacts of the NASDAQ crash, 9/11 and, especially, China’s and India’s ascendence in the global economy have tempered his tone. But he still touts the United States as the globalization system’s lead society and Globalization 3.0 as an American invention. He does not retreat from his earlier claims that ‘there is no better model … on earth today than America’ and that even a ‘visionary geoarchitect’ could not have imagined a better regime to ‘compete and win’ in global economic competition (Friedman 2000: 368, 475). In his view, the United States is the globe’s flattest spot; it has the best regulated, most efficient capital markets, most transparent firms, strongest protections for private property rights, best designed tax and regulatory laws, most creative entrepreneurial culture, most flexible labour laws, largest consumer market, best political system and most open society. He sees neoliberal ‘downsizing, privatizing, networking, deregulation, re-engineering, streamlining, and restructuring’ to have given the United States a substantial edge over other rich nations, which often have bloated welfare systems, overly powerful labour unions, excessively regulated work-places and markets, and inflexible labour laws. However, Friedman warns that tough new competitors, especially India and China, may soon challenge US global economic leadership. He argues that individuals from these and other developing nations, now climbing onto the flat world platform, share exceptional intensity, discipline and motivation. Friedman holds that many of them are well educated and skilled, and nearly all are driven by the will to escape poverty. Referring to the pitiful performance by pampered American NBA stars in the 2004 Olympics, Friedman concurs with a sportswriter who attributes the US fall from basketball dominance to its players’ insouciant attitude about its competitors’ progress and lack of ambition and discipline. He employs this example to illustrate a broader ‘quiet crisis’ – Americans feeling entitled to their affluence, being complacent and expressing insufficient effort, discipline and preparation. He warns that there may be taints of truth in the crude generalization that younger Americans ‘get fat, dumb, and slowly squander it all’ (i.e. US wealth) (Friedman 2005a: 250–2). Friedman asserts that: ‘I am now telling my own daughters, “girls finish your home work – people in China and India are starving for your jobs” ’ (2005b). Still he hopes that competitive pressure will push younger Americans to study harder (e.g. stress maths, science, engineering), work more intensely and abandon any sense of entitlement. Friedman implies that they must become the brave new nomadic, worker bees described above (2000: 368–75; 2005a: 243–75, 469).

Unipolar geopolitics

Friedman holds that the United States leads geopolitically as well as economically and that the lone superpower after communism is not an imperialist power. Before 9/11, Friedman declared the United States to be the ‘Michael Jordan of geopolitics’, identifying it as the globalization system’s ‘benign hegemon and reluctant enforcer’ and legitimate leader to ‘most of the world’. He acknowledges that foreign views of the United States have darkened in 9/11’s militarized aftermath, but he sees this negativity to derive, in good part, from the Bush Administration’s execution of the Iraq War and War on Terror. Friedman supports the Iraq intervention and employment of US power to democratize the region. He also holds that the US defence of the globalization system must not be deterred by allies, such as France, who refuse to contribute to conjoint actions. However, he contends that Clinton-style, American-led multinationalism would be much more effective than Bush’s unilateralism. Friedman argues that the long-term solution for global problems is integration of all unflat parts of the world into Globalization 3.0, but even if this ideal condition were to be achieved, he implies, the globalization system would still benefit from US strategic leadership (2000: 389, 464–6; 2003: 4–5, 290–9, passim).

MODERNIZATION THEORY REDUX: ELECTRONIC SOCIAL DARWINISM

Liberalism stands for the freedom of the individual versus the control of the state. (Spencer 1912: 585)

Quoting Crane Brinton, Talcott Parsons (1968 [1937]: 3) began his magnum opus with the parenthetical question: ‘Who now reads Spencer?’ Parsons held that Herbert Spencer had been cast into history’s dustbin. Opening the prologue to the ‘creative destruction’ argument, Schumpeter (1962 [1942]: 61) asked: ‘Can capitalism survive?’ He declared: ‘No. I do not think it can.’ He was no fan of socialism, but he thought that increased public management of economic affairs was becoming the rule in liberal democracies and communist regimes. In the wartime command economy, renascent classical liberalism was hard to imagine. Although conservative opposition grew after the war, liberal-democratic modernization theories, including the dominant Parsonsian model, advocated Keynesian state regulation and redistribution to correct market failures and provision of health, education and welfare. This trend peaked, in the United States, with the mid-1960s wave of social legislation and argument that greater attention be given to ‘equality of conditions’. However, splits over race, welfare and the Vietnam War festered, the New Deal coalition crumbled and postwar growth slowed. Libertarians argued that restoring economic growth and vitalizing democracy hinged on the United States recovering its laissez-faire roots. In this climate, the Reagan Administration instituted the neoliberal policy regime. When the Soviet bloc was collapsing, Fukuyama vindicated modernization theory and its core claims that history is progressive and that liberal democracy is its endpoint. Reversing New Deal policy, neoliberals held that the state’s regulatory, redistributive and welfare arms must be eliminated or reduced. They also argued that all nations, aspiring to be modern, must adopt this US model. The New Democratic Coalition and Clinton Administration offered a moderate sounding version of the market fundamentalism advocated by the Republican right. This bipartisan, stripped-down, neoliberal modernization theory revived Social Darwinism with free-market ideology.

Friedman’s flat world is a global, electronic version of the classical liberal equation of the laissez-faire, ‘regime of contracts’ with direct democracy. Arguing that Globalization 3.0 empowers individuals as never before, Friedman updates Spencer’s market-based individualism. The quote from Spencer, at the head of this section, illustrates his view of states as the realm of compulsion and power and markets as the sphere of liberty and choice. Classical liberals argued that capitalist firms’ vertical facets do not compromise voluntary cooperation, because they are embedded in competitive markets and are based on contractual relations (i.e. employers can hire and fire at will and employees are free to seek other jobs). Classical liberals sometimes spoke sympathetically about the workers’ plight, but they opposed redistribution and welfare, holding that such policies impose statist oppression, violate property rights, the foundation of individual liberty, and encourage worker sloth. At least implicitly, classical liberals saw full citizenship to be anchored in property ownership. Friedman’s stockholder’s republic converges with their view. His individually negotiated, contractual, fluid webs are today’s version of Spencerian ‘spontaneous’ orders. Friedman contends that the flat world’s transparency, readily available information, ‘weightless’ goods, instant exchanges, vast numbers of players and low transaction costs approximate neoclassical economics’ ideal of frictionless, perfect markets. He suggests that nearly all disciplined, educated individuals can succeed by plugging into the Internet, forging collaborative ventures, employing their skills online and accumulating resources needed for full citizenship in the ownership society. By contrast to the state’s command structure, classical liberals saw markets to be horizontal systems of voluntary association, which suffuse market-like, contractual relations throughout associational life. They believed that these webs of voluntary cooperation forge integrative interdependence across class lines, liberating individuals, eliminating violent conflicts and cultivating people’s better angels. Friedman concurs heartily.

Affirming mass consumption, Friedman has a sunnier view than nineteenth-century social Darwinists, who held that ‘poverty is the best policy’ (i.e. to discipline profligate workers) (Sumner, 1883: 13–27). However, even leading twentieth-century classical liberal, Hayek (1944: 120) advocated ‘a given minimum subsistence for all’, implying more generous provisioning of the least talented, infirm and aged than the minimal safety-net proposed by Friedman. Portraying Americans’ beliefs in capitalism, he stresses that, ‘most of all’ [emphasis added], they want ‘everyone pumping their own gas’, or making it on their own, without dependence on public support (2000: 384). Friedman shares the classical liberal view that capitalism’s class hierarchy is the product of a meritocratic struggle that rewards individual achievement and punishes free-riders, and, thus, is a legitimate, even pivotal facet of democracy. Friedman says that being middle class is a ‘state of mind’ in the United States, shared by low-wage (even ‘$2 a day’) workers, which spurs their drive for success (2005a: 375–6). His assessment of the American class situation and ‘quiet crisis’ (i.e. with its driven, low-wage, Indian tech workers and slacker, nouveau riche, Afro-American NBA players) manifests taints of classical liberal beliefs in the virtue of poverty and danger of affluence. Like his predecessors, Friedman does not fret about great wealth compromising his fabulously rich corporate respondents’ motivation. He sees the astronomical compensation enjoyed by top CEOs and the Electronic Herd’s biggest investors to be a fast capitalist version of what William Graham Sumner (1883: 52) called ‘wages of superintendence’; copious rewards for directing investment capital to the most important areas. Friedman implies that this hard-earned income seldom corrupts these driven innovators.

Neoliberal promises about tax cuts and growth fuel hopes about getting rich or, at least, improving substantially one’s lot. However, while some Americans have flourished, many more have been forced to work more hours for lower wages in top-down, dead-end workplaces and to face much increased costs for healthcare, homes and education. While the stock market soared, incomes, benefits, vacation time and security of less advantaged workers shrank. Productivity gains, from the technological innovations lauded by Friedman, have been captured largely by people in the upper brackets, like himself, who also benefited enormously from huge tax cuts (e.g. Phillips 2002). Friedman insists that neoliberalism’s sharply divergent economic outcomes have legitimacy and do not diminish globalization’s supposed seamless integration. However, he stresses mostly technical connections, especially telecommunications links, and procedural equality, which have enormously divergent outcomes for different strata and hardly constitute per se the voluntary collaboration and substantive freedom that he implies. Émile Durkheim’s and John Dewey’s classic critiques of ‘forced’ or ‘mechanistic’ interdependence remain timely – undemocratically regulated ‘free markets’ and high levels of intergenerational inequality erode the socio-cultural integration needed to cultivate the smooth, uncoerced cooperation that Friedman claims rule. His rhetorical celebration of the flat world does not address the grossly unequal opportunities faced by poor Americans, especially minority children in underclass schools, and others on the margin. Substantive injustice is a chief breeding ground for ‘super-empowered angry men [and women]’. However, it also spurs humane criticism, alternative visions of the future, and democratic resistance and reconstruction. Friedman dismisses as mere resentment all but the most tepid, market-friendly opposition to economic injustice. Although expressing keen insight into some facets of neoliberal globalization, his celebration of ‘flatness’ and ‘democracy’ transfigure and sanctify the plutocratic tendencies signified in his own portrayal of the United States as a ‘winners take all’ society (Friedman 2000: 306–24). The world is unflat!

Friedman argues that Globalization 3.0 has added 3.5 billion people and 1.5 billion new workers to the global economy since the mid-1980s (150 million skilled workers). He holds that the flat world platform ensures continuing rapid growth of worker numbers and increased exportation of portable skilled tasks to India and other rapidly developing regions with educated workers and lower wages. He also implies that technical rationalization and automation will continue to accelerate with no end in sight. Friedman stresses that American workers have to ‘work harder, run faster, and become smarter’ to get their share (2005a: 182–3, 469). He quotes a business leader’s assertion that grasping the employment problem takes ‘a leap of faith based on economics’. As in past capitalist technical transformations, Friedman holds, new jobs will arise to meet the demand (2005a: 232–3). Can we trust his assessment if we accept his own portrayal of Globalization 3.0 as a sea change altering the rules of the game? Hundreds of millions of people, in China alone, remain on peasant plots, in unprofitable state enterprises and in the informal economy, or they lack jobs. Given Friedman’s scenario, why will the ever larger pool of global workers not far outstrip the demand for them? In neoliberal labour markets, why should wages for less skilled workers not drop below subsistence? Arguably, this is the case already for US minimum-wage workers. And how will economic well-being increase without well-organized countervailing power? Friedman dismisses strong unions and reform politics as sources of friction. However, historically, they have been the counterforces that have pushed for higher minimum wages, safer work conditions, shorter hours and better benefits. What happens if the ranks of low-wage, US workers continue to grow and their wages decline further? Can US consumption, which drives global production, be maintained? If China and India greatly expand their domestic consumption to generate demand, how can the pressure on global resources and the environment be mediated? How can Friedman be so sure that the neoliberal policy regime and massively expanded global labour force are ‘racing us to the top’? Friedman mentioned Marx’s points about capitalism’s awesome productive powers and worldwide markets. However, he also should have addressed Marx’s related prediction that advanced capitalist globalization, driven increasingly by sophisticated technology and scientific knowledge, would expand greatly the global proletariat, accelerate automation and create a permanent, massive ‘surplus army’ of underemployed, unemployed and unemployable workers. If this scenario is emergent, neoliberal policymaking hastens the probability of a fundamental social, political and environmental crisis.

Friedman declares that he is ‘a journalist, not a salesman for globalization’ and that he is ‘keenly aware of globalization’s downsides’ (2000: xxii). However, he does not engage globalization’s non-corporate participants and, essentially, dismisses its critics. He contends that neoliberal restructuring is the greatest source of socioeconomic good and that it does little or no harm. Seeing Globalization 3.0’s major problems to be exogenous, he holds that universalizing neoliberalism is the only way to mitigate or eliminate them. Friedman’s kinder-gentler sounding market fundamentalism ironically plays into the hands of virulently anti-liberal forces that Friedman opposes (i.e. the European New Right, US paleoconservatives, many fundamentalists and some radical leftists); they see his sanguine scenario to be proof of the tendencies that they detest. Equating neoliberalism and globalization, they hold that US-led global capitalism is a runaway locomotive that homogenizes everything in its path; genuine culture, community and politics are flattened by untrammelled, deracinated individualism, economism and consumerism. Arguing that neoliberalism inheres in liberalism per se, they aim to scuttle liberal democracy with globalization. Liberal approaches that deny alternatives to neoliberalism, celebrate uncritically shareholder power and conflate democracy with free markets and consumerism should be addressed critically. We need social theories that decouple neoliberalism from globalization per se and that formulate paths to socioeconomic reconstruction and visions of global capitalism ‘with a human face’. The burning theoretical and cultural question for those who value liberal-democratic institutions, substantive freedom and the planet’s survival is how to cultivate a more just, democratically embedded, socially regulated, environmentally sustainable capitalism. This means coming to terms with social Darwinism, addressing environmental limits, re-engaging critically postwar versions of democratic socialism, social democracy and other liberal democratic models, and formulating post-neoliberal visions of democracy and modernization. After 9/11 and after the War on Terror, Americans must rethink prudently and more modestly the US role in the world. Reigniting American political vision and sociological imagination might begin with critical reconstruction, for a globalist era, of what Dewey called the prophetic side of US democracy, which once called out to the world something much more substantial and inspirational than ‘political choices … reduced to Pepsi and Coke’!

References

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Fukuyama, F. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. London: Penguin Books.

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Further reading

Dicken, P. 2003. Global Shift: Reshaping the Economic Map in the 21st Century, 4th edn. New York: Guilford Press.

Frank, P. 2000. One Market under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy. New York: Doubleday.

Friedman, B.M. 2005. The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Friedman, T.L. 2005. ‘The world is flat: A brief history of the 20th century’, Carnegie Council on Ethics and International Affairs, 6 May <http://www.cceia.org>.

Harvey, D. 2003. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pink, D.H. 2005. ‘Why the world is flat’ (interview with T.L. Friedman), Wired Magazine, 13.5 (May) <http://www.wired.com>.

Ritzer, G. 2004. The Globalization of Nothing. Thousand Oaks, CA: Pine Forge Press.