Creative Destruction: How Globalization Is Changing the World's Cultures

Chapter 1
TRADE BETWEEN CULTURES
Haitian music has a strong presence in French Guiana, Dominica, Martinique, Guadeloupe, and St. Lucia--the smaller Caribbean markets. Many Antillean musicians have resented the Haitian success, even though they derived many musical ideas from the Haitian style of compas (pronounced "comb-pa"). The founder of Kassav, the leading Antillean group in the funky style of zouk, stated: "It's this Haitian imperialism [i.e., the popularity of the groups] that we were rising against when we began Kassav." Governments responded with protective measures to limit the number of Haitian bands in the country. Ironically, Antillean zouk now has penetrated Haiti. Haitian musicians resent the foreign style, although like their Antillean counterparts they do not hesitate to draw on its musical innovations. Haiti's compas style was originally a modified version of Cuban dance music and Dominican merengue.1
The Canadian government discouraged the American book-superstore Borders from entering the Canadian market, out of fear that it would not carry enough Canadian literature. Canadians subsidize their domestic cinema and mandate domestic musical content for a percentage of radio time, which leads to extra airplay for successful Canadian pop stars like Celine Dion and Barenaked Ladies. Americans take pride in the global success of their entertainment industry, but Canadian writer Margaret Atwood coined the phrase "the Great Star-Spangled Them" to express her opposition to NAFTA.
The French spend approximately $3 billion a year on cultural matters, and employ twelve thousand cultural bureaucrats, trying to nourish and preserve their vision of a uniquely French culture.2 They have led a world movement to insist that culture is exempt from free trade agreements. Along these lines, Spain, South Korea, and Brazil place binding domestic content requirements on their cinemas; France and Spain do the same for television. Until recently India did not allow the import of Coca-Cola.
Trade is an emotionally charged issue for several reasons, but most of all because it shapes our sense of cultural self. More than ever before, we are aware that not everyone likes how international trade and globalization are altering today's cultures. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, on America were directed first at the World Trade Center, a noted icon of global commerce.
Harvard philosopher Robert Nozick, in his Anarchy, State, and Utopia, argued that market society offered a cultural utopia based on freedom of choice. He portrayed a hypothetical libertarian world where individuals would freely choose their lifestyles, their mores, and their culture, so long as they did not impinge on the rights of others to make the same choices. Such a vision has held great appeal for many, but it has skirted the empirical question of how much choice actually is available in the market, or would be available in a more libertarian society.
Numerous commentators, from across the traditional political spectrum, have argued that markets destroy culture and diversity. Benjamin Barber claimed that the modern world is caught between Jihad, a "bloody politics of identity," and McWorld, "a bloodless economics of profit," represented by the spread of McDonald's and American popular culture. John Gray, an English conservative, has argued that global free trade is ruining the world's polities, economies, and cultures. His book is entitled False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism. Jeremy Tunstall defined the "cultural imperialism thesis" as the view that "authentic, traditional and local culture in many parts of the world is being battered out of existence by the indiscriminate dumping of large quantities of slick commercial and media products, mainly from the United States." Fredric Jameson writes: "The standardization of world culture, with local popular or traditional forms driven out or dumbed down to make way for American television, American music, food, clothes and films, has been seen by many as the very heart of globalization."3
Alexis de Tocqueville, the nineteenth-century French author of Democracy in America, provided foundations for many modern critics of commercialism. Tocqueville is not typically considered an economic thinker, but in fact his book is permeated with a deep and original economics of culture; he provides the most serious nineteenth-century attempt to revise Adam Smith. He sought, for instance, to disprove the Scottish Enlightenment dictum that an increase in the size of the market leads to more diversity. For Tocqueville, market growth serves as a magnet, pulling creators towards mass production and away from serving niches.