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.