Globalization and Its Discontents

When I first heard about the Muhammad cartoons and the boycott that laid off so many Danes, I thought about how wrong the cartoons were but how more wrong the reaction was. How it threatened free speech, and how orchestrated it seemed by the governments involved.

Somewhere along the way, however, a traitor thought crept in: “Wouldn’t it be neat if a boycott against Chinese sweatshops worked that well.?”

My mind went back into practical grooves as to why that would never happen (and as to how it would be a much better cause). Still, that thought provoked others. And it let me to this.

We have tended to think of globalization as having a single direction culturally. As such it’s been the story of a largely secularized Western culture pushing out through media, through new products, through the old grooves left from European imperialism and the new grooves dug by multi-nationals.

Now another culture is pushing back. It is not secular but religious. It is not dedicated to the free flow of information come what may but to the shaping of information to fit dogma and the more cynical agendas of the political leaders. Unlike say 9/11, the force behind the push is not simply or even predominantly violent (though the threat lurks), it is economic. And unlike the oil embargo of 1973, it is not a sledgehammer disrupting the world economy at a blow.

Instead by encouraging and manipulating real outrage, Saudi Arabia and some other Arab countries, using the grooves carved by western globalization, have brought chaos to the lives of Danes who had nothing to do with the cartoon beyond living in a country that believes in free speech.

It’s a powerful threat and perhaps harder to resist than we may imagine. Consider as an example Detroit. Imagine if such a cartoon had come out in the Free Press, and a boycott could threaten a few thousand jobs there? How many people there would want to tell that paper, shut up! Even if they hated themselves while doing it? And how many of us would want them to suffer?

The most important point I want to make here actually does not involve this particular issue or these particular governments and religious leaders at all. Both supporters and opponents of corporate globalization had assumed that globalization as it was occurring was inherently Western in the values it spread.

Perhaps it’s not.