Robb linked to a Ralph Peters article about resistance to globalization:

For the billions remaining, globalization and its consort, the information revolution, merely open a window into an exclusive shop they are not allowed to enter. A second-hand Pittsburgh Steelers shirt on a Congolese beggar isn’t globalization, but only the hind end of global trade. The new awareness of the wealth of others is hardly pacifying. On the contrary, it excites the conviction (which local demagogues are delighted to exacerbate) that they can only be so rich because they stole what was ours. The uneven ability to digest the feast of information suddenly available even in the globe’s backwaters doesn’t bring humanity together (even if Saudi clerics and American bureaucrats visit the same online porn sites). Rather, it disorients those whose lives previously had been ordered, and creates a sense simultaneously of being cheated of previously unimagined possibilities while having one’s essential verities challenged. Feeling helpless and besieged, the victim of globalization turns to the comfort of explanatory, fundamentalist religion or a xenophobia that assures him that, for all his material wants, he is nonetheless superior to others.

While Peters feels that this recognition is missing from globalization’s “pop bestsellers,” the first example I thought of upon reading the above paragraph was an anecdote from Friedman’s The Lexus and the Olive Tree regarding a guide Laura Blumenfeld had while she was in Damascas:

My mom and I hired a guide when were in Damascas to take us around. His name was Walid. We got to know each other after a while… he told us that he liked to sit in his office at night, where he had a satellite dish, and watch Israeli TV. As he described the scene, I pictured this man in this dark office, his eyes wide with fascination, watching this TV screen with people he hated but wanted to be like and was jealous of. He said, though, that of all the things that he watched on Israeli TV, the thing that really bothered him was the yogurt commercials - the fact that the yogurt in Israel came in all these different fruit-colored containers - pink and orange, like in America - while in Syria they were just black or white. He eve, dejectedly, pointed out to us the Syrian yogurt containers on the street one day… One day he said to us, ‘It’s not fair that we are a hundred years behind the Israelis and they just got here.’

Reading Peters often leave me feeling schizophrenic. He describes topical dynamics eloquently and I find myself repeatedly nodding in agreement. Yet he bounces between so many topics and tosses out so many assertions that usually finish the article scratching my head and saying “okay, so…?”

To begin with, I’m not sure what definition of globalization Peters is using. He makes passing mention of globalization equating it with homogenization, which I simply do not see. In the 1990s, visions of a global monoculture may have seemed reasonable, but as New Core powers rise it becomes increasingly difficult to envision such a thing. Peters does an excellent job describing the shock response to the rapid influx of foreign media flows that globalization can bring to tribal cultures. During the late 20th Century these media flows were predominately American (with a European bit here and there) because that is where the most advanced media companies were (think Hollywood, the major television netoworks, etc). Now, however, there is media from New Core states like India and China flooding into those newly connected individuals. Think of the the Bollywood and Chinese films you’ve encountered in the past three years, for example. This new content is still disruptive, so Peters account of tribal resistance to globalization is still accurate, but it is hardly homogenizing. More choices emerge. The long tail becomes the model, not the one-size-for-everyone model. If anything, globalization is especially disruptive because it breaks up homogeny. Short term, yes, it can feel as if there is just one coffee shop (Starbucks) or one restaurant (McDonalds), but long term these companies will be overtaken by others drawn from a global market who are better able to deliver local consumers what they want.

Similarly, Peters’ comments on the EU leave me scratching my head. Creation of a European super-identity may have been associated with the increasing flows of individuals, capital, ideas and security between European states, but it is not an essential element of globalization (I can’t place the four flows definition off the top of my head; I know Barnett uses it but I also know he didn’t invent it. Anyone got the reference handy?).

As far as globalization only benefiting the upper crust, I want to see the data. Gapminder has several wonderful graphics that summarize UN development data indicating how much life has improved over the past few decades. This doesn’t prove that globalization has caused this improvement, but it certainly challenges an unsupported assertion that only the wildly wealthy have seen benefit.

So, yes, tribal forces are where we will see the greatest resistance to globalization. But this isn’t strategic vision. Peters offers precious little by way of prescription. How do we respond? How ought we respond? He feels that we ought to better prepare our soldiers for these tribal forces, but what else? This is the source of my “okay, so…?” feeling.