In our series of long-forgotten posts: a while back I read The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century by the three-time Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Thomas Friedman. The book was recommended to me by several people, and it did turn out to be very thought-provoking reading. The book is Friedman’s account of the process of globalisation in the 21st century, driven by a phenomenon he calls flattening: the replacement of traditional hierarchies with world-wide supply chains and the increasing empowerment of individuals by new technologies.
Friedman’s tale is illustrated with accounts of his travels all over the
world and personal encounters with a variety of people, both the creators and
inhabitants of the flat new world. He also has a message, mainly aimed at
Americans but certainly relevant to anybody affected by outsourcing: evolve or get left behind.
… a country must be willing to think beyond the tribal concept of
“me, my brother, and my cousin against the outsider” to “me and
my brother and my cousin, three friends from childhood, four people in
Australia, two in Beijing, six in Bangalore, three from Germany and
four people we’ve met only over the Internet all make up a single
global supply chain.”
In Friedman’s opinion, we are now in the third stage of the process of globalisation. According to his definition of globalisation, stage one was colonialism, when nation states started worrying about their role in the emerging global marketplace. Globalisation 2.0 arrived with the emergence of multinational companies. And today everybody has to think of themselves as global players, or at least affected by pretty much everyone else.
It’s an interesting thesis, and at least for me the best parts of the book are
the ones where Friedman tries to make it concrete, by hanging out in
Mumbai or China and talking to young people
working in call centres or or trying to get a visa to the U.S. Unfortunately,
Friedman then loses sight of the globalisation-of-individuals idea and
concentrates on mapping out the vast supply chains of big companies like Dell
with obvious glee (although it is interesting to learn that making a Dell
laptop involves 700 separate companies in 14 countries). Somewhat spookily,
Friedman brings up Wal-Mart with
their sinister data
centers as an example
of a successfully flat organisation
I’m not sure flattening is quite the right word for what is happening
(although flattening of hierarchies is certainly a part of it) — it’s more
about getting squashed, networked, woven together and so on. In fact,
increased interdependence — a
word which I heard Bill Clinton use at a talk he gave in Glasgow some months
ago — describes the whole thing pretty well. It might almost be more
appropriate to say that the world has gotten rounder. Although as Friedman
argues, you can fall off the edges of the flat world if you don’t make
yourself what he calls
non-fungible
– specialised, adapted to a particular local niche and immune to replacement
by somebody in a call centre on the other side of the globe. In other words,
be a brain surgeon, or (perhaps not for
long,
one hopes) a writer…
It is easy to take potshots at Friedman’s book, and many people have done so.
Guardian reviewer Richard
Adams
compares Friedman’s optimism to a kind of fundamentalism displayed by Alden
Pyle in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American. His “Dell Theory” of conflict
prevention (no two countries which belong to the Dell supply chain have ever
been at war) certainly fails under closer scrutiny. As Siddharth
Varadarajan
observes, investment relations have never prevented countries from fighting
each other:
Mira Wilkins’s pioneering work on international investment before
1914 and between the two World Wars, for example, has shown that
trans-oceanic flows of capital were significant even then. U.S.
companies invested hugely in Nazi Germany: General Motors bought a
stake in Opel and Standard Oil of New Jersey had an alliance with IG
Farben.
ITT - as Anthony Sampson documented in The Sovereign State of ITT
— not only took a stake in Focke-Wulf, the German firm which made
bombers, but managed to win $ 27 million in compensation in the 1960s
for damage inflicted on its share of the Focke-Wulf plant by Allied
bombs during the war. Nor was inter-war globalisation restricted to
goods alone.
There was outsourcing of services too. “Specialized banks, law
firms, and trading companies that focused on opening the German
market to U.S. capital sprang up on both sides of the Atlantic,”
notes Christopher Simpson in The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law
and Genocide in the 20th Century (Grove Press, 1993). None of this
prevented Hitler from starting World War II. The reason this theory is
so important to Friedman is because “supply chaining” (as exemplified
by Dell) is one of 10 “flatteners” — recent developments that have
made the world “flat”.
Friedman would surely argue that this is still Globalisation 2.0, though, and things have changed since, but it again makes me think that he should have focused more on the effects of “glocalisation” on individual lives rather than sweeping historical trends and glorification of giant corporations.
The title of this post comes from a much harsher review than mine, namely Matt Taibbi’s, who summarises Friedman’s book as:
“Man travels to India, plays golf, sees Pizza Hut billboard, listens
to Indian CEO mutter small talk, writes 470-page book reversing the
course of 2000 years of human thought.”
It’s pretty accurate if unfair. But you should still read The World is Flat: it has plenty of hyperbole, but it’s an important book.
