Free Jihad vs. McWorld by Benjamin Barber

nations are even part of the calculation. The North/South split overshadows the East/West split. It is reflected in almost every economic report available on central Asia, the Middle East, and—most dauntingly—sub-Saharan Africa, which as a “human and environmental disaster area” totally “peripheral to the rest of the world” can hardly be thought of as occupying “the same historical time.” 12
    Ironically, global economic forces weaken the nation-state in developed areas where it is most democratic and strengthen it in the Third World where it is least democratic, imperiling liberty in both cases. Democracy loses at both ends of the developmental spectrum. Free societies with expansive economies gradually sever the ties that hold a people to traditional religion and nationhood and corrode the state institutions that make democracy and a free economy possible in the first place. Despotic nations offer no such solvent to nationality and religion, which are strengthened in ways obstructive to modernization and democratization. Not only do the rich get richer and the poor poorer, but the rich get freer while the poor are enslaved.
    Of course in the long term, democracy is served by these ironies in neither the First nor the Third Worlds. In the Third World too much state coercion steals liberty from peoples poised potentially for economic takeoff; and in the First World too little state coercion leaves individuals unprotected from market forces over which they have no rational or collective control. Dependency on global markets by virtue of global largesse may be a better deal than dependency by virtue of poverty on local despots, but both constitute a kind of subjugation and neither staves off that common servitude in which disparities are increased as common liberty is diminished.
    These manifold ironies, while contributing powerfully to the story of growing global injustice and shrinking the prospects for global democracy, are only footnotes to our primary focus here: the internationalization of markets and the companies that serve them. In the developed world that “counts,” where liberty has (at least in theory) been minimally secured, the erosion of nationality as a significant conditioner of corporate business remains the most important feature of the manufacturing sector. For the decline of democratic control over markets at the level of the nation endangers both justice and social policy
and
the prospects for global democratic control overthe economy. Among the top twenty-five U.S. companies (for 1992) with the largest non-U.S. sales can be found not only energy giants like Exxon (77 percent of sales outside America), Mobil (68 percent), and Texaco (53 percent), and chemical companies like Dow (50 percent) and DuPont (47 percent), but Philip Morris, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, and Eastman Kodak. 13 Dow Chemical earns nearly $4 of every $10 in sales overseas and has nearly twice as many plants abroad as in the United States. Goodyear Tire and Rubber earns 43 percent of its income from abroad and sites more than half of its eighty-three plants outside the United States in twenty-five different foreign countries.
    One need knock on only a few doors of corporate entities that carry the name “American” in their company titles to hear how hollow their patriotism rings. Consider American Greetings Corporation (cards and gift items), which earns 14 percent of its sales revenues abroad; American Express, which gets over 20 percent of its earnings beyond America; American Home Products, which earns 24 percent of sales far away from home; the American International Insurance group, which gets 46 percent of its revenue from its international rather than its American side; American Standard (plumbing), which earns 49 percent of revenue on someone else’s currency standard; American Cynamid, which like most American chemical companies earns more than half its revenue (51 percent) abroad; and finally American