The world hangs on the outcome of the US presidential elections. Or maybe not. Maybe it doesn't give a damn. Gore or Bush: new face, same old world order.
With Gore we can expect him to continue Clinton's policy of smooth talking, military bombardments and aggressive trade liberalisation. We can expect pretty much the same from Bush, but we can probably expect him to do as much damage to America as he does to the rest of the world (provided he can name the countries).
Whilst apathy may be an unsurprising response to political change within the US it is still important to understand how the premier imperial power perceives and conceives the rest of the world, particularly the global South of which we are a part.
A recent example of popular American thought is a best-selling book that attempts to explain globalisation to Americans. [#1]The Lexus and the Olive Tree[/#] , subtitled Understanding globalization , was written by Thomas Friedman, presently foreign affairs feature writer for the New York Times and a confidant of US Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers.
Fear, loathing and patriarchy
There was a time when East and Southeast Asia were seen as the new threat to US hegemony, pouncing "Tiger economies" or the "yellow peril" depending on where faint-hearted American capitalists looked.
The Asian Crisis of 1997 put an end to that fear and, in a most American way, fear was followed by loathing and not a little recrimination. Accusations of contagion and economic myth were fired off by the likes of Paul Krugman. Closer to home "corruption, cronyism and nepotism" drew on a longer held analysis.
It seemed more difficult to strike out at the shadowy financial speculators and hedge fund managers since it was they who were propping up the markets in most affluent countries (so much so that Long Term Capital Management was bailed out by the US following its collapse to prevent market disaster).
Despite that detail, the crisis was a much-needed shot in the arm for certain theorists who smugly dangled before all the question of why non-western capitalism has been unable to displace western capitalism.
This line of thought often draws upon not fear and loathing, but a new racism, itself based upon an older tradition of patriarchal condescension and not a little historical amnesia. Although he hails from a more moderate liberal position, Friedman often lapses unconsciously into this racism.
New world order, new racism
This is not a biological theory of racism, that is long discredited. After all, doesn't globalisation offer an open system of competition where the best man wins, no matter what his race?
Entrepreneurs have emerged in all the colours of the human rainbow; CEOs are the new rock stars. The development of an entrepreneurial capitalist class has often been a key tool in dispelling biologically-based racial myths; just like blues, soul and jazz music bridging the racial divide in America.
With biology declared a ground of no-contest, this new racism falls back instead onto lines of cultural difference. It draws essentialist barriers between cultures and emphasises non-compatibility.
And where some cultures are identified as more "successful" than others it begins to reconstruct orders of hierarchy.
Like the racist epochs of imperialism and colonialism that preceded it, the present age of globalisation incorporates a new yardstick to measure and demarcate those unable to match up to its 'challenge'.
This is not simply a prerogative of the 'white westerner' but of all proponents of neo-liberal globalisation who belittle the ability of cultures (sometimes their own) to "adapt before they die."
Keeping up with the Fast World
Mr Friedman boasts an impressive pedigree: a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, ex-chief economic correspondent, ex-White House correspondent, ex-diplomatic correspondent and educated at Brandeis and Oxford.
A globe-trotter par excellence, Friedman is in Davos one moment, Egypt, China and Beirut the next, and it is this privileged roving view that he brings to bear in his analysis.
He is unashamedly pro-globalisation, pro-multinational and pro-liberalisation because he sees any attempt to derail globalisation as presenting "a huge cost to human development" (he has expressed intense dislike for anti-globalist US Green candidate Ralph Nader).
Although he is to all appearances a New Man, Friedman reformulates Kipling's "white man's burden" for the present day by asserting the universal appeal of the American way of life: pension-fund speculation and credit-card profligacy, and its duty to uphold that worldwide through a system of multilateral trade diplomacy and military-naval power much like the British in the imperial era.
It is globalisation, represented by the Lexus, that holds out the promise of an integrated world where free-market capitalism has neither barriers nor boundaries, a world that allows individuals, corporations and nations to reach out "further, faster, deeper, cheaper" than ever before. This is the Fast World of the Lexus.
Thrown up against this is the slow world populated by what Friedman terms as "turtles" who are, for various reasons, unable to deal with the Lexus and retreat to the shelter of their Olive Trees, a metaphor for older forces of culture, geography, tradition and community.
Turtles who are unable to catch up to the Lexus' Fast World become "road kill".
In Egypt land I found a man ...
On a authors tour in Egypt earlier this year, Friedman was struck by two experiences which led him to form particularly striking and, in my mind, racist assumptions.
The first was encountering the massive technology gap in Egypt. Trapped on a train buzzing with cell phones of middle and upper-class Egyptians, Friedman diverted his attention outside where villagers were tilling fields with simple tools and water buffaloes.
"Inside the train it was AD 2000, outside it was 2000 BC."
The second experience occurred on a visit to Yousef Boutrous-Ghali, Egypt's MIT-trained minister of economy. Friedman was rather surprised when Boutrous-Ghali's elevator operator, described as a "peasant", paused to recite the prayer "In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate" before closing the door.
For Friedman, a self-described "Westerner", it was a shock to hear a prayer on a visit to the "most creative, high-tech driver of globalisation in Egypt".
By assigning the prayer to "cultural habit, rooted deep in tradition" and simultaneously using it to rationalise Egypt's supposed inability to get into the Fast World, Friedman betrays a subtle racism.
He cannot accept that within an Islamic society such as Egypt, religious practice can extend to everyday acts in an everyday way, or the possibility that the prayer was one of blessing and not of fear.
Writ large, this becomes a justification for the demarcation of non-Western societies comfortable with such tradition as somehow unfit: "road kill" for the Lexus.
Friedman actually categorises this cultural difference as a "systematic misunderstanding" where differences in conceptual frameworks prove so insurmountable that no matter how much two cultural strangers try to communicate with each other they never reach an understanding.
Does the turtle then remain road kill forever?
His respect for those external to his culture is nonetheless based upon their ability to engage with it, to emulate what he sees as the American-led grapple with globalisation.
Thus, the accolades for the MIT-educated Mr Boutrous-Ghali. Thus, his shock at the contrast of his elevator operator. Friedman in his own way is a turtle trying to grapple with a non-western reality, a different rationality. In this he is not far from the imperialists of 50 years and more past.
Historical amnesia
There is, as suggested earlier, a certain historical amnesia at work in Friedman. His dual shock at the Egyptian villagers using tools from the "Pharaoh's time" and admiration for the cell phone elite is not far from the belief of colonial Christian reverends who bemoaned the "laziness of the uncivilised peoples to leave idle indefinitely the wealth which God has confided to them".
If only they would trade the hoe for the cell phone!
Those unable to join the cell phone brigade (and leave the shelter of their Olive Tree) become the objects of Friedman's liberal lamentations over their fate as turtles doomed to repeat the vicious cycle of under-development.
The European philosopher Renan, a key humanist voice in the colonial period, once wrote: "The regeneration of the inferior or degenerate races by the superior races is part of the providential order of things for humanity ... Nature has made a race of workers, the Chinese race, who have wonderful manual dexterity and almost no sense of honour ... ; a race of tillers of the soil, the Negro ... ; a race of masters and soldiers, the European race ... Let each one do what he is made for and all will be well."
Renan's racist biological division of labour is re-formulated into a racism of cultural difference. There is a patriarchal pride in watching the non-western Other progress on the path of development.
In Friedman there is also the father's anguish at sons who fail to flower. "Systematic misunderstanding" suggests that if Egyptians are unable to grasp globalisation then they will remain "peasants".
The world is not 10 years old
Friedman's amnesia extends to the debilitating consequences of colonisation on the colonised. In his humanist fretting about how Malaysia contends with KFC on the cultural battlefield and Japan unconsciously naturalises McDonald's, he seems to forget about the historical, and consequently, political legacies left by colonisation and its subsequent mutations.
This is largely due to his decision at the outset of the book, in a prelude entitled 'The world is ten years old', to describe the new era of globalisation that has emerged in the decade since the fall of the Berlin wall.
He thus neglects to understand how this new globalisation is an expansion of the previous global era of brutal colonial imperialism.
Friedman correctly identifies the common denominator between globalisation and imperialism as the key driver of the new era: "free market capitalism".
To that I would also add the "preservation of social order" in the "advanced" countries, since keeping America's share of the global pie of wealth and happiness is also the concern of both Friedman and his American readership.
Exporting misery, keeping the peace
Lest the reader be in any doubt, I shall let another expert speak for me. Cecil Rhodes, the quintessential British imperialist said, "My cherished idea is a solution for the social problem, i.e., in order to save the 40,000,000 inhabitants of the United Kingdom from a bloody civil war, we colonial statesmen must acquire new lands to settle the surplus population, to provide new markets for the goods produced by them in the factories and mines.
"The Empire, as I have always said, is a bread and butter question. If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists."
Thus, order and sovereignty are preserved at home whilst class struggle and civil war are exported. Following the establishment of European settler colonies and consequent population stabilisation, this strategy has in modern times changed to one of flexible labour importation and a Third World workforce that can be hired, fired and deported without causing social tension.
In Cecil's shadow
There is an ineluctable relationship between capitalism and imperialism. It is not, as Friedman suggests, a simple case of the South leaving its Olive Tree and buying stocks, saving and working hard as he sees shoeless Thai hawkers doing.
It is not simply a new era of equal opportunity, for an ethnic rainbow of wealth and prosperity. There is the precipitous playing field of the US-dominated WTO.
The World Bank projects that encourage dependency more than development, that preserve the racism, patriarchy and sham humanism of the bloodiest few centuries in history.
(It is interesting to note here that Treasury Secretary Summers, formerly of the World Bank, is infamous for suggesting that pollution be exported to developing countries where natives have less utility-value for their land).
It is a world where the South has seized upon spurious notions of development that are based on a model of being "developed" as exemplified by Europe and America. A notion that ignores the imperialist bloodbath that paved the way for that "civilisation".
Development is mock-imperialism, the people are ruled by Little Emperors who wait for the sceptre to fall from Emperor Sam's stiffening digits.
Imperialism within Malaysia?
This is the danger in the rhetoric of globalists everywhere, the unconscious re-inscription of the fatal narratives of the past as Friedman does.
The danger of becoming imperialists ourselves, to look upon other lands with hungry eyes and seeing only wealth to appropriate, people to exploit, spirits to crush and nature to despoil.
Capitalism in the new era of globalisation is not bound to the petty limits of racism. It seeks only expansion (at a manageable rate, a non-capitalist periphery is ever essential for surplus labour).
When it finds geographical and social limits as it did in Europe in the 19th century, as it does around the world now - in Asia, the Middle East, the Americas, Africa and Europe - it resorts to the imperial method.
Does colonialism and imperialism exist within Malaysia? Does labour migration, wage misery and south-south exploitation followed by deportation of workers exist in Malaysia?
Is there social tension due to such events, if they occur? Will the knowledge economy make turtles of fellow citizens and erect new barriers of cultural difference, of systematic misunderstanding, pity and contempt?
Such questions, such difficult questions, can only be answered by looking with fresh and piercing eyes at our society and ourselves.
If we would lay claim to the notion of humanity then it is beholden upon us to ask these questions and in so doing honour the suffering of the millions who did not and still do not have the freedom to do so.
YIN SHAO LOONG is taking cultural studies in London.
