Vol. 21 No. 17 · 2 September 1999
pages 11-14 | 5813 words
Like a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader
John Lloyd
- The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas Friedman
HarperCollins, 394 pp, £19.99, May 1999, ISBN 0 00 257014 9
- Global Transformation by David Held and Anthony McGrew
Polity, 515 pp, £59.50, March 1999, ISBN 0 7456 1498 1
Thomas Friedman is so much the kind of American that the rest of the world likes to despise that it’s a fair assumption he has, at least in part, adopted the pose consciously. He calls himself a ‘tourist with attitude’ and his attitude is that of the know-it-all, ‘wise up, you dumb cluck’ American journalist who is here to tell you your economy is blown, your politics stink and you haven’t a hope in hell of making it in today’s world. Given that he is writing about the most important political-economic development in the world today – globalisation – it is a shame that he spoils his case by wrapping it in the Star-Spangled Banner.
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Letters
Vol. 21 No. 18 · 16 September 1999
From Michael Prior
John Lloyd dislikes the smug, in-your-face style of Thomas Friedman's celebration of US-led globalisation in The Lexus and the Olive Tree, but in the end does no more than shrug his shoulders in a helpless, 'it's inevitable' kind of way (LRB, 2 September). Those of us who have travelled as consultant economists on the same route as Lloyd from Prague and Warsaw to Beijing, with detours to Kampala and Delhi, will recognise Friedman's anecdotes as just a racier version of the blundering and factually ill-founded advice given by IMF/World Bank/ USAID advisers and consultants. This advice, as Lloyd hints, simply boils down to supporting US financial interests wherever they choose to go by giving up all control on matters as diverse as capital movement, tariffs, taxes, public expenditure and labour law. Those who have no controls lose control.
The issue is not one of denying globalisation but of ignoring the fact that each of the various globalising forces derives from a separate source and, in its own way, is subject to national control. Globalisation of culture (primarily by television), of information (primarily now by the Internet), of production, of political organisation and ethics, and of finance are all different. Lloyd makes the mistake (as Friedman does) of assuming that globalisation of finance is the most important and the least controllable. But take the Chinese and Indian economies, by far the largest in Asia: they avoided the financial cataclysm South-East Asia suffered (and probably saved the world economy) by relatively crude controls over capital movements and exchange rates. Despite these controls, China still sells into world markets and multinationals still build factories there.
In refusing to square up to the central hollowness and partiality of Friedman, Lloyd adopts one of the loneliest positions in the world: that of the integrationist safety-netter. I have sat in on meetings in a dozen capitals and heard the US and British acolytes of the IMF integrationist school pour scorn on just about every conceivable version of a national safety net.
Michael Prior
Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire
