GLOBAL SCHM013AL
Anne Applebaum says forget the Net, forget
McDonald's, forget CNN: we still live in a world of foreigners
YOU hear it on the news, you see it in the press, you hear it in the conversation of clever bankers and Australian backpackers; but to get a real feeling for the ubiquity of the word `globalisation' type it into your favourite Internet search engine. I did, and got 144,000 references. Browsing through the first several dozen, I discovered 'web seminars' on `Globalisation .and Interna- tional Trade Law', university courses in `Globalisation and Development', business- school conferences on `Globalisation Man- agement Strategies', OECD papers on `Globalisation in a Knowledge-based and Interdependent world'. The word appeared on Islamic sites (`Globalisation and Eco- nomic Integration among Arab Countries'), Marxist sites (`the Globalisation of Produc- tion), Central European sites (`Globalisa- non and Hungarian Identity'), African sites (Africa Can Harness Globalisation'). Something called www.freespeech.org appears to be against globalisation. Some- thing called www.oneworld.net seems to believe that the military is sponsoring it. The very act of sitting there, online, star- ing into the computer screen, reading the references to globalisation websites in Cape Town and Havana and New Delhi, did indeed make me feel that I was part of, well, a globalised world. And I am not the only one who has had this feeling while using the Internet. Thomas Friedman, a New York Times columnist, has written a book about globalisation which spent many weeks on the American bestseller lists. In the first chapter, he calmly states that: `Today's era of globalisation, which replaced the Cold War, is a similar interna- tional system, with its own unique attributes,' Among these unique attributes are the fact that new technologies are allow- ing even ordinary people to have access to reach further, faster, cheaper and deeper around the world'. As an example of one such ordinary person, he cites his mother, who lives in Minneapolis and plays bridge on the Internet with three Frenchmen.
Britain also has its globalisation gurus, who have also become convinced that the Internet is bringing us all together. Among them are the admirable John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, whose book, A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalisation, appeared last month, and whose generally rosy views on the subject were recently printed in this magazine (`The Market Shall Set You Free', 24 June). Denouncing the nay-sayers, from Prince Charles to Clare Short, they, too, lauded the possibilities that globalisa- tion offers of 'breaking down barriers', the new freedoms globalisation creates, and the fact that Mission Impossible 2, rather than being a wholly American trash film, is, in fact, an international trash film, with a director from Hong Kong, two British co- stars and distributors all over the planet.
What Micklethwait and Wooldridge don't do, however, is question the basic premise of the pro-globalisation v. anti- globalisation debate; namely, whether the most controversial aspect of globalisation — the increasing similarity of everyone and everything; that feeling you get online — is in fact real. Neither, for that matter, do Prince Charles or Clare Short, Thomas Friedman or www.oneworld.net ever ask whether what they are denouncing, or advocating, actually exists.
Up to a point, of course, you can see why: some things have actually changed since the `new era' of globalisation began. A few years back, no restaurant in London would have served you Tahitian mahi-mahi doused in Vietnamese chilli sauce, accompanied by out-of-season Kenyan baby aubergines and followed by Israeli pomegranates. Nowadays you might find just such a meal not only in London, but also in any one of a number of major metropolises, all of which, it is per- fectly true, are coming in some ways to resemble one another. I happened to run into The Spectator's editor in Moscow a fort- night ago, and he noted correctly how that once bizarre city now seems much like any other European urban area. Not only can you find McDonald's in what used to be the capital of the anti-capitalist world, but there are also branches of Chanel and Pizza Express, Donna Karan and Baskin-Robbins. You can also meet paid-up members of the global elite in Moscow; people who speak English, talk the language of global eco- nomics, and use the same websites as you.
And yet how sure are we that all this sup- posed cultural convergence is no more illu- sory than the flickering computer images which engender it? By asking this, I don't mean just to suggest, as many others have done, that some of the world is now glob- alised and some is not, that there are still people in sub-Saharan Africa not tuned in to CNN, or that a few Bornean tribesmen have not heard of Madonna. What I mean is that it seems, increasingly, that the real effect of the Internet, and of the homogenisation of the world's high streets, is to make us, the world's globe-trotting, English-speaking elites, incredibly provin- cial. Far from allowing individuals to 'reach further, faster, cheaper and deeper around the world' than ever before, using the Internet makes us feel as if we are part of a `globalised world', whereas in fact we are not. Cyberspace creates an illusory sort of homogenisation, allowing us to avoid the hard truth: foreigners really are different. Or, to put it differently, just because you can play cards with a bunch of Frenchmen on the Internet doesn't mean you have any inkling of the deep peculiarity, the weird- ness, that is France.
The illusion is bolstered, of course, by the effect of English having become the global language. Nowadays, if we don't visit other places, we can log on to their government websites, in English, or read web versions of their national newspapers, in English, or watch Internet videos of their national cere- monies, also in English. The shallow impact of international capitalism helps as well; if we do bother to visit other countries, we are so easily cushioned by the presence of Pizza Hut that we experience nothing out of the ordinary. As a result, we no longer try par- ticularly hard to understand other places, because they all seem alike — and this is what makes us more provincial.
This paradoxical truth was brought home to me on recent trips to Washington, capital of the globalised world, and to Aya- monte, a small city on the southern Span- ish coast. In the former, I happened to meet the editor of a leading political jour- nal, one of the few that comments regular- ly on foreign policy, who laughingly compared his own attitude to Abroad with that of his parents. He reads, he told me, no foreign newspapers, except perhaps the occasional British one, and that only on a very, very slow day. He meets few of his foreign counterparts, political-magazine editors in other countries, and speaks none of their languages; he doesn't have to. By contrast, his parents, New York intellectuals, once interested themselves in the political debates going on in France, the fate of Eurocommunism in Italy, the progress of communism in Rus- sia. They read foreign newspapers and had foreign friends with whom they exchanged visits and engaged in active debate. This, I would wager, was because they feared themselves to be American provincials, just as all Americans once felt themselves to be provincials (read Henry James). Then the Internet was invented and the world became superficially Americanised. As a result, English-speakers, and espe- cially English-speaking, Internet-using Americans, are convinced that they already understand the world, and needn't learn more by meeting foreigners — para- doxically this makes them far more provincial than in the past.
In Ayamonte, I discovered this strain of provinciality in myself. During an other- wise unadventurous holiday, my husband and I arranged to sample a provincial bull- fight. Before this trip, I had thought, in a vague sort of way, that I knew about Spain. After all, I have known some English- speaking Spaniards, have read Hemingway and Cervantes, have seen Almodovar's films, have even followed, in a vague sort of way, the fight against Basque sepa- ratists, the romances of the Spanish royal family and the construction of the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. Besides, we had booked our flights and our rental car over the Internet: clearly Spain was part of the globalised world.
I began to have my doubts about this only when suddenly surrounded by 4,000 roaring Spanish peasants and factory workers, all baying for bulls' blood, all cheering on the efforts of matadors who looked, to me, like men dressed for a women's Olympic ice-skating competition. Did I speak the language? No. Did any of the rituals have any meaning for me? No. Did I know what was going on? No. Had any of my glibly acquired knowledge about Spain prepared me for this moment? No again. It might have been Kurtz's Africa, for all I knew.
More seriously, unless you are prepared to recognise how little you know about a place, you risk making quite serious mis- takes about it. I distinctly remember, in the early 1990s, the waves of Western invest- ment bankers who day-tripped through Dresden and Warsaw, confident that we had reached the end of history, that global capitalism had arrived, that a company was a company wherever it was based, that 48 hours was plenty of time to stop off in Prague on the way to Frankfurt. Now they have all melted away — one of my acquain- tances was a victim of Czech corruption, another was ripped off by his Russian busi- ness partners, yet another was personally responsible for losing $100 million in the Russian financial collapse. Only those remain who ignored the apparent similarity of all major companies, hadn't heard that history had ended, and hung around grubby post-communist cities for months on end, working out precisely how the locals, in a most unglobalised manner, were swindling foreign investors with complex accounting procedures.
The same sort of illusions were also responsible for skewing Western judg- ments about the progress of Russian `reforms' over the past decade. To follow what was going on, no one bothered to visit Irkutsk or Samarkand. Nor did any- one pay much attention to those odd details of Russian life that didn't seem to fit the pattern of progress and develop- ment, such as the large number of crimi- nal cases involving cannibalism, another one of which has just occurred. Instead, Western journalists and politicians met frequently and regularly with that famil- iar-seeming, English-speaking Moscow elite. But while they parroted the lan- guage of free-market liberalism and made confident references to the Chicago School of economics, other politicians or sometimes the same ones, unobserved by their friends at the IMF — were quiet- ly spiriting gold bullion over the border. Based on what the same free-market lib- erals told us, we offered moral and finan- cial support to Boris Yeltsin largely so as to prevent bad, unglobalised people, such as former KGB agents, from taking charge. The result: a former KGB agent has now taken charge, with the full sup- port of the Russian people, few of whom speak English, even fewer of whom are familiar with the Chicago School, and most of whom have followed the advance of cannibalism in their country with far greater interest than the changes in tax law.
But Russia is no exception. In fact, the world is, and I suspect will remain, chock- full of people and events' that cannot be understood simply through the possession of a good grasp of English, a decent modem and a subscription to the Interna- tional Herald Tribune. The Rwandan mas- sacres, for example. Or the Middle East conflict in general, and the bitter dispute over a few hundred square yards of Jerusalem in particular. Or, for that mat- ter, Spanish bullfighting, French courtship patterns, German attitudes to German his- tory. For better or for worse, even the most familiar cultures retain elements of irredeemable otherness; in dealing with them, a touch less hubris, a touch more humility, might be in order.
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