Economia China

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GLOBALIZATION AS McWORLD

Who invented globalization? The way you answer this question depends on how you think about globalization. If you think of globalization literally you might answer ‘‘Christopher Columbus’’ or someone else from the great era of (European) discovery. If you want to know who ‘‘invented’’ the world as a single geographic unit, all connected to the European center,there are several names you might give, but Columbus is as good as any of them. If you think of globalization as the idea of an economic process that unites and transforms the world, creating a single global system, the inventors’ names are Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. They said it all in The Communist Manifesto, first published in that great year of revolutions, 1848. The bourgeoisie, Marx andEngels wrote,
has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country. . . . In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we find new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and selfsufficiency, we have intercoursein every direction, universal interde121

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pendence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.1

Marx and Engelswere writing about capitalism, of course, but they were really describing globalization in this passage. Like many visions of globalization, theirs was rooted in technology. The bourgeoisie, which we may think of as the masters of globalization, ‘‘by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all nations, even the mostbarbarian, into civilization.’’2 Resistance is futile; globalization ‘‘compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In a word, it creates a world after its own image.’’3 Marx and Engels provide us with an analysis of the process of economic globalizationthat might have been written yesterday. Indeed, someone somewhere probably did write it yesterday, or something much like it, totally unaware of Marx’s prior claim to the idea. Marx wrote about globalization, but he didn’t call it that. The term globalization (or globalisation if you are British) seems to have come into use in the 1960s, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Many peoplecredit the Harvard political economist Raymond Vernon for inventing the concept, even if he did not actually coin the term. Vernon was famous for two things. The first was his path-breaking research on multinational corporations from the 1970s to the 1990s, which made him the ‘‘father of globalization,’’ according to Daniel Yergin.4 His second great achievement? The Peanut M&M, which he brought tomarket in the 1950s while working for the Mars candy company. There is one product that is so closely associated with globalization that it has become a symbol for the process that Columbus got started, Marx and Engels described, and Raymond Vernon studied. According to popular accounts, globalization was invented, more or less, by two brothers named Richard and Maurice when they opened a tinydrivethrough restaurant in Pasadena, California, in 1937 and named it after themselves. Surely you have heard of ‘‘Richard and Maurice’s’’? No? Of course not; why choose an awkward name like that when your last name is McDonald. Perhaps you’ve heard of that? In 1940 they opened a larger operation—600 square feet!—in San Bernadino.5
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Globalization as McWorld

The McDonald brothers did not...