the Middle East where he had been a long-time correspondent. Then it hit him. He realized that that ‘half the world seemed to be … intent on building a better Lexus, dedicated to modernizing, streamlining, and privatizing their economies in order to thrive in the system of globalization.And half of the world – sometimes half the same country, sometimes half the same person – was still caught up in the fight over who owns which olive tree’.[1]
According to Friedman, unless they fit themselves into a particular set of economic policies that he calls the Golden Straitjacket, countries in the olive-tree world will not be able to join the Lexus world. In describing the Golden Straitjacket, he pretty much sums up today’s neo-liberal economic orthodoxy: in order to fit into it, a country needs to privatize state-owned enterprises, maintain low inflation, reduce the size of government bureaucracy, balance the budget (if not running a surplus), liberalize trade, deregulate foreign investment, deregulate capital markets, make the currency convertible, reduce corruption and privatize pensions.[2] According to him, this is the only path to success in the new global economy. His Straitjacket is the only gear suitable for the harsh but exhilarating game of globalization. Friedman is categorical: ‘Unfortunately, this Golden Straitjacket is pretty much “one-size fits all” … It is not always pretty or gentle or comfortable. But it’s here and it’s the only model on the rack this historical season.’[3]
However, the fact is that, had the Japanese government followed the free-trade economists back in the early 1960s, there would have been no Lexus. Toyota today would, at best, be a junior partner to some western car manufacturer, or worse, have been wiped out. The same would have been true for the entire Japanese economy. Had the country donned Friedman’s Golden Straitjacket early on, Japan would have remained the third-rate industrial power that it was in the 1960s, with its income level on a par with Chile, Argentina and South Africa[4] – it was then a country whose prime minister was insultingly dismissed as ‘a transistor-radio salesman’ by the French president, Charles De Gaulle.[5] In other words, had they followed Friedman’s advice, the Japanese would now not be exporting the Lexus but still be fighting over who owns which mulberry tree.
Our Toyota story suggests that there is something spectacularly jarring in the fable of globalization promoted by Thomas Friedman and his colleagues. In order to tell you what it is exactly, I need to tell you what I call the ‘official history of globalization’ and discuss its limitations.
According to this history, globalization has progressed over the last three centuries in the following way:[6] Britain adopted free-market and free-trade policies in the 18th century, well ahead of other countries. By the middle of the 19th century, the superiority of these policies became so obvious, thanks to Britain’s spectacular economic success, that other countries started liberalizing their trade and deregulating their domestic economies. This liberal world order, perfected around 1870 under British hegemony, was based on:
Unfortunately, things started to go wrong after the First World War. In response to the ensuing instability of the world economy, countries unwisely began to erect trade barriers again. In 1930, the US abandoned free trade and enacted the infamous Smoot-Hawley tariff. Countries like Germany and Japan abandoned liberal policies and erected high trade barriers and created cartels, which were intimately associated with their fascism and external aggression. The world free trade system finally ended in 1932, when Britain, hitherto the champion of free trade, succumbed to temptation and itself re-introduced tariffs. The resulting contraction and instability in the world economy, and then, finally, the Second World War, destroyed the last remnants of the first liberal world order.
After the Second World War, the world economy was re-organized on a more liberal line, this time under American hegemony. In particular, some significant progress was made in trade liberalization among the rich countries through the early GATT (General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs) talks. But protectionism and state intervention still persisted in most developing countries and, needless to say, in the communist countries.
Fortunately, illiberal policies have been largely abandoned across the world since the 1980s following the rise of neo-liberalism. By the late 1970s, the failures of so-called import substitution industrialization (ISI) in developing countries – based on protection, subsidies and regulation – had become too obvious to ignore.* The economic ‘miracle’ in East Asia, which was already practising free trade and welcoming foreign investment, was a wake-up call for the other developing countries.After the 1982 Third World debt crisis, many developing countries abandoned interventionism and protectionism, and embraced neo- liberalism. The crowning glory of this trend towards global integration was the fall of communism in 1989.
These national policy changes were made all the more necessary by the unprecedented acceleration in the development of transport and communications technologies. With these developments, the possibilities of entering mutually beneficial economic arrangements with partners in faraway countries – through international trade and investment – increased dramatically. This has made openness an even more crucial determinant of a country’s prosperity than before.
Reflecting the deepening global economic integration, the global governance system has recently been strengthened.Most importantly, in 1995 the GATT was upgraded to the WTO (World Trade Organisation), a powerful agency pushing for liberalization not just in trade but also in other areas, like foreign investment regulation and intellectual property rights. The WTO now forms the core of the global economic governance system, together with the IMF (International Monetary Fund) – in charge of access to short-term finance – and the World Bank – in charge of longer-term investments.
The result of all these developments, according to the official history, is a globalized world economy comparable in its liberality and potential for prosperity only to the earlier ‘golden age’ of liberalism (1870–1913). Renato Ruggiero, the first director-general of the WTO, solemnly declared that, as a consequence of this new world order, we now have ‘the potential for eradicating global poverty in the early part of the next [21st] century – a Utopian notion even a few decades ago, but a real possibility today.’[7]
This version of the history of globalization is widely accepted. It is supposed to be the route map for policy makers in steering their countries towards prosperity. Unfortunately, it paints a fundamentally misleading picture, distorting our understanding of where we have come from, where we are now and where we may be heading for. Let’s see how.
On 30 June 1997, Hong Kong was officially handed back to China by its last British governor, Christopher Patten. Many British commentators fretted about the fate of Hong Kong’s democracy under the Chinese Communist Party, although democratic elections in Hong Kong had only been permitted as late as 1994, 152 years after the start of British rule and only three years before the planned hand-over. But no one seems to remember how Hong Kong came to be a British possession in the first place.
Hong Kong became a British colony after the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, the result of the Opium War. This was a particularly shameful episode, even by the standards of 19th-century imperialism. The growing British taste for tea had created a huge trade deficit with China. In a desperate attempt to plug the gap, Britain started exporting opium produced in India to China. The mere detail that selling opium was illegal in China could not possibly be allowed to obstruct the noble cause of balancing the books. When a Chinese official seized an illicit cargo of opium in 1841, the British government used it as an excuse to fix the problem once and for all by declaring war. China was heavily defeated in the war and forced to sign the Treaty of Nanking, which made China ‘lease’ Hong Kong to Britain and give up its right to set its own tariffs.
So there it was – the self-proclaimed leader of the ‘liberal’ world declaring war on another country because the latter was getting in the way of its illegal trade in narcotics. The truth is that the free movement of goods, people, and money that developed under British hegemony between 1870 and 1913 – the first episode of globalization – was made possible, in large part, by military might, rather than market forces. Apart from Britain itself, the practitioners of free trade during this period were mostly weaker countries that had been forced into, rather than had voluntarily adopted, it as a result of colonial rule or ‘unequal treaties’ (like the Nanking Treaty), which, among other things, deprived them of the right to set tariffs and imposed externally determined low, flat-rate tariffs (3–5%) on them.[8]
