As foreign affairs columnist for The New York Times, Thomas Friedman travels all over the globe to cover events. And the more he travels, the more he finds that the nations of the world are all beginning to look alike.
That a city street in a Middle Eastern country could resemble one in America or Southeast Asia is "scary," Friedman told the audience that packed the auditorium of the Whitney Humanities Center on Jan. 21 to hear him talk on the topic "Globalization and U.S. Foreign Policy." This sameness across the globe amongst once-distinctive geographic locales (now sharing the same views of Taco Bell, McDonald's and Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants), is just one of a number of unfortunate byproducts of globalization, said the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
Describing himself as a "tourist with an attitude," Friedman discussed the positive and negative effects of globalization in a speech filled with anecdotes from his travels and tongue-in-cheek "theories" on global issues that he has written about since becoming the Times' foreign affairs columnist in 1995. He described globalization as "the integration of markets, information and technology in a way that is knitting the world together into a single market, a single global village and, in some ways, a single culture," and said it has had a major influence on all countries' national agendas and foreign policies, and now poses critical challenges for some.
Once a nation becomes a competitive player in the global economic market, it is forced to put on what Friedman calls "the golden straitjacket": While its economy grows, its dependence on the "rules" of the global economy force its political choices to shrink. Political issues basically boil down to "a debate about the tailoring of the golden straitjacket," according to the columnist -- so much so that there is hardly any difference between national political candidates. "What was the difference between Bob Dole and Bill Clinton, will someone remind me, or between John Major and Tony Blair [in England] or between the Socialists and Conservatives in France?" Friedman asked.
This intrusion of economics on politics has also had a major impact in the international arena, according to Friedman. For example, in 1960 China cut off relations with what was then its only ally, the Soviet Union, "without having a second thought." Today, however, China's reliance on foreign investment and economic trade forces its leaders to shrewdly calculate its every move with respect to other nations because the economic stakes are so much higher, he noted.
Although globalization has not put an end to geopolitics, the world is now vastly different from how it was during the Cold War era, Friedman said. Then, the competition between the two superpowers turned every regional conflict into one of global proportions, whereas today, regional conflicts are "ghettoized" rather than globalized, he stated.
"We've moved from a world of superpowers to a world with one superpower and the rest 'super markets,'" he said. "So what happens is we have a new iron curtain today. It's the iron curtain we build around Albania, around Nigeria, around Angola, around Bosnia and around Algeria." The winner in today's conflicts, Friedman stated, are those who "get their people out the fastest and furthest" from the hot spots of regional conflict and who don't get stuck spending their citizens' tax dollars to contend with those crises.
One of the biggest issues facing today's globalized world, according to Friedman, is that its stability depends upon nations' ability to keep their "software" -- their lawmaking and judicial systems --in line with their "hardware" -- free markets. "We live in a world where everyone today has the same hardware for the first time: Russia, China, India, Japan, Mexico, Chile, even Albania has free markets," he says. "The question is: Who will get the courts, the rule of law, that takes a free market and moves it at least in the direction of a democratic free market? ... See, it's very easy to declare a free market but very difficult to build a Securities and Exchange Commission to keep your market free ...."
The financial crises in Southeast Asia is a perfect example of countries that "are integrated with the global economy at the hardware level but not at the software level," Friedman explained. And all the world should closely watch China, which possesses "faulty software and hardware without the judicial and legal system to moderate
it," Friedman said. "How China -- which means one-
fifth of humanity -- responds now is one of the most interesting questions in foreign policy," he added, noting that the direction China takes in its reforms has global repercussions.
The process of globalization carries its own repercussions, which is evident in the "backlash" it produces from groups "not in the game" or who do not stand to benefit from it, according to Friedman. "This backlash takes different forms in different countries," he explains. "In our country it's manifested in Pat Buchananism; in the Middle East it's Islam fundamentalism; in Israel it's Jewish fundamentalism; in Russia it's the communists; in France it's the labor unions."
And in countries all over the world, Friedman said,
he has observed varied levels of resentment against the United States, "because globalization is in many ways Americanization -- Coke and Pepsi, Big Macs and Burger King, computing on Windows 95 -- so for many other people, it can be a real assault on their cultural traditions."
"The churning of this process of globalization, and the impact that it will have on us, as well as the success of Americans in dealing with this" are important topics for the future, Friedman commented.
Friedman's campus visit was under the auspices of the Coca Cola World Fund and was cosponsored by the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, the Law School and the School of Management.
-- By Susan Gonzalez