Nike’s famous “Just Do It” campaign is an even more striking example. In one ad featuring the football player Barry Sanders, the following text appears:

The way the critics see it, such an ad is at best nothing other than a sales gimmick disguised as pop existentialism. Yet a large segment of the public responded positively to the campaign, sensing that it touched upon an added human value, one that went beyond pure market manipulation.

Another look at the text might reveal the reason for the ad’s appeal: There is not the slightest hint of the indolent apathy of the kind decried by Guy Debord and Herbert Marcuse. Just the opposite: It is a wake-up call, a manifesto encouraging the potential consumer to stand up for himself, and to make his dreams come true. Computer manufacturer Apple did something similar with its “Think Different” slogan. The company’s advertising campaign identified its target audience as “rebels” who do not follow rules and have no respect for the status quo; instead, “They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.”⁸¹ Like that of Nike, Apple’s marketing campaign sends an unambiguous message to consumers, entreating them to activism, individualism, even a rebellious, non-conformist attitude toward the world.

The emancipation of the consumer is obviously not a product of corporate altruism. The autonomy of the individual is not only consistent with the rules of the free market, but also a basic condition for its success. In recognizing this, the free-market culture achieves a remarkable openness. It undermines social hierarchies, asserting that even those who cannot afford a more glamorous and interesting life can nonetheless dream about it. As the Indian anthropologist Arjun Appadurai explains, “Imagination is now a social praxis… for many people in many societies, and in innumerable different variants, it has become the engine for the fashioning of public life.”⁸²

This may just be the secret of consumerism’s unique success. Whereas traditional cultures expend great effort in the reinforcement of predetermined hierarchies of status, ethnicity, color, religion, or gender, consumer culture is marked by its dynamism, by the fact that it encourages man to understand that he can, indeed, move freely between classes, places, and identities. This freedom need not be as real or imminent as the ad agencies would have us believe. But by convincing us that it is within reach, modern consumer culture nonetheless has achieved something unprecedented in human history. For a sense of freedom, even if it begins as an illusion, is nonetheless the precondition for its ultimate realization.

To be sure, such a profound transformation of conscience has its risks. Left unchecked, it can bring about personal alienation and societal disintegration. This may be the price of freedom, and for many, it is too high a price. Or perhaps it is merely the harbinger of a new and more stable social order. Either way, it is clear that the global spread of consumer culture does not produce a more submissive or obedient society, but a way of life based on freedom, the desire for change, and the willingness to seize opportunities.

 

Within just a few decades, global market forces have brought a dramatic change in the lives of billions of people. The emergence of a global middle class, the majority of which resides in developing countries, is perhaps the most outstanding achievement of economic globalization. This class is gradually acquiring for itself the consumer habits that were not long ago a Western luxury. But this change also has a no less important political dimension: The consumer in both Asia and the United States is today an active and critical individual who demands for himself the right to choose. Although the individual’s involvement in the public domain is, in many countries, still restricted, he has become increasingly accustomed to being the principal decision-maker in a growing number of areas in his life. The globalization of the consumer middle class is therefore a major step towards globalization of the democratic idea. It reinforces the principle of self-empowerment as a way of life.

If the middle class is the social engine of democracy, then the sovereign state continues to be its most appropriate platform. The stability of the democratic system hinges not only on the functioning of certain state institutions, like the legislature and the party system, but also on the existence of a perceived collective that defines the distinguishing characteristics of the citizenry and its borders. Thus philosophers like Jurgen Habermas or David Held may discuss the possibility of establishing a global representative democracy, but this vision is still a fantasy.⁸³ The Western experience of the last few hundred years proves that the nation state is indeed the best political framework for fulfilling the democratic idea.

Yet today, these pretensions no longer seem so compelling. The severe economic crisis that gripped the region in 1997 revealed the weaknesses of the “Asiatic model,” and forced leaders to adopt political and economic reforms—including a few seismic shifts in the direction of Western democracy. In May 1998, Indonesian dictator Suharto was deposed after months of popular unrest, and his regime was replaced by a democratically elected government; in Thailand, virulent demonstrations by the middle class led to major reforms, including direct elections for the Senate and the creation of new agencies to wage war against corruption; and in South Korea and Taiwan, voters elected the opposition’s candidate for president for the first time in these countries’ history.⁸⁶ At the same time, Western ideas of political freedom and human rights even began to seep into countries that refused to slacken the authoritarian reins: In an article he wrote from a Malaysian prison, Anwar Ibrahim, former deputy to Prime Minister Mahathir and current opponent of the regime, writes that, “Reports are seeping through the prison walls into my cell that educated youths—graduates of local and Western universities, and even of theology from Cairo’s al-Azhar University—are congregating and discussing Kant’s What Is Enlightenment?, dissecting Popper’s Open Society and debating Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.”⁸⁷ It would appear that a process of gradual, yet significant, democratization has taken place in East Asia following closely on the heels of the region’s integration into the global economy; economic liberalization has been the handmaiden of political freedom.

We must be careful not to paint too rosy a picture. The global market economy is, after all, not without its blemishes; it certainly has its share of rapacity and moral imperviousness, and has been a catalyst for new problems concerning the environment, immigration, international crime, and terror. On balance, however, these have paled in comparison to the benefits that globalization has brought the world. Contrary to the popular criticism, the free transfer of capital and goods across international borders has not increased inequality but in fact reduced it; corporate giants and international financial institutions have not undermined the sovereignty of states, and are not likely to in the future; and the despised consumer culture has shown itself to be less a method for the subjugation of the masses than a means of their liberation, laying the foundations of freedom in places that have never had it. Globalization may not be the road to utopia, but on the long and difficult road of human history, it is a step in the right direction.

Assaf Sagiv is an Associate Editor of Azure. His last essay in Azure was “George Steiner’s Jewish Problem” (Azure15, Summer 2003).

 

1. This speech, written by Paddy Chayefsky, can be found at www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechnetwork4.html.

2. The campaign began with a local incident: On January 1, 1994, three thousand rebels from the Zapatista opposition movement (named after the famous Mexican revolutionary Emilio Zapata) took control of a number of villages in the Chiapas Strip in Mexico. The rebels, Indians of Mayan descent, were protesting the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement between Mexico, the United States, and Canada, because they feared—justifiably—that the consequences would be disastrous for their communities, which were already barely subsisting on their earnings from growing corn. Clad in ski masks and armed with Kalashnikov rifles, the Zapatistas declared their independence and attempted to secede from the federal government. The reaction of the authorities was swift and harsh: In an action that claimed scores of lives, the Mexican army retook the villages and forced the Zapatistas back into the rain forests.

The Zapatistas’ failed rebellion did not initially generate much international attention. Soon, however, the Indian rebels became a symbol of resistance to the policies of international trading mechanisms. Their local grievance was eventually joined by others from different regions in the world: French farmers led by José Bové protested the Americanization of the international food culture and the plan to genetically modify agricultural produce; trade unions in South Africa protested the government’s privatization policy and its cooperation with foreign investors; in Argentina, public opinion blamed the IMF for the country’s severe economic crisis—and these are just a handful of examples.

For a detailed description of the Zapatista rebellion, see John Ross, Rebellion from the Roots: Indian Uprising in Chiapas (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage, 1995).

3. The first show of force by the anti-globalization movement was on November 30, 1999 in Seattle, at the opening of the first conference of the International Free Trade Organization. Fifty thousand demonstrators, mostly students and union members, clashed with police and national guardsmen, effectively turning the city into an urban battlefield. The violence escalated even further in July 2001, when activists demonstrated at the meeting of the G8 leaders in Genoa. Among the three hundred thousand demonstrators was a violent group of anarchists, “The Black Block,” who incited the crowd and threw Molotov cocktails at the police; the latter used sticks, tear gas, and finally live ammunition in an effort to disperse the rioters. One demonstrator, an Italian student named Carlo Giuliani, was killed in the clash, and dozens of others were injured.

The incident in Genoa was the high point—or low point—in a long series of mass demonstrations instigated by the anti-globalization movement in the last four years, among which include: The thirty-thousand-strong demonstration in April 2000 at the annual meeting of the World Bank and the IMF in Washington; the siege in September 2000 of the World Bank and IMF meeting in Prague, which attracted twenty thousand demonstrators; the “Americas Summit” protest of April 2001, in which Quebec police confronted forty thousand demonstrators; and the March 2002 demonstration against the European Union summit in Barcelona, in which three hundred thousand demonstrators mobbed the city’s streets. Lately, however, the anti-globalists have joined forces with the protesters of the war in Iraq, a merger that spawned dozens of mass meetings in America, Europe, and Australia. Information on a variety of protests worldwide can be found on the “People’s Global Action” site, www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/en/index.html.

4. Paul Kingsnorth, One No, Many Yeses: A Journey to the Heart of the Global Resistance Movement (London: Free Press, 2003), p. 64.

5. Noam Chomsky interviewed by Dimitriadis Epaminondas, July 3, 2002; www.chomsky.info/interviews/20020703.htm.

6. See David Goldblatt, David Held, Anthony McGrew, and Jonathan Perraton, Global Transformations: Politics, Economics, and Culture (Stanford: Stanford, 1999), p. 16.

7. Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture (London: Sage, 1992), p. 8.

8. Cf. Herbert Marshall McLuhan, The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man (Toronto: University of Toronto, 1962).

9. Ronen Shamir, who edited the special issue of the Israeli journal Theory and Criticism on the subject of globalization, states that, “For years, the ones who from the first insisted that there was nothing new under the sun joined the Sisyphean struggle against the unstoppable penetration of ‘globalization’ into everyday language and public discourse. The very ones who claimed that ‘globalization’ was nothing more than a new language to describe a more than fifty-year old imperialist and colonialist reality.” Ronen Shamir, “Introduction,” Theory and Criticism 23 (Autumn 2003), p. 8. [Hebrew]

10. George Soros, The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered, (New York: Public Affairs, 1998), p. 104.

11. Samir Amin, “Capitalism, Globalization, and Marxism,” in Anti-Globalization: A Critique of Contemporary Capitalism, ed. Efraim Davidi (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2003), p. 89. [Hebrew]

12. David Dollar, Aart Kraay, “Spreading the Wealth,” Foreign Affairs, (January/February 2002), pp. 120-133.

13. Xavier Sala-i-Martin, “The Disturbing ‘Rise’ of Global Income Inequality,” Working Paper 8904, April 2002, at http://papers.nber.org/papers/w8904.pdf.

14. In this context, economists distinguish between “absolute” and “relative” poverty. The term “absolute poverty” relates to a situation in which a person is denied the opportunity to meet his basic needs, such as food, clothing, and shelter. The term “relative poverty” generally denotes the level of buying power compared to the average income in a given market. The more relative the poverty index, the less it is affected by economic growth, because as the earnings of the poor increase, there is also an increase in the general standard of living. See Martin Ravallion, World Bank Policy Research Working Paper 3038, April 2003. http://econ.worldbank.org/files/26010_wps3038.pdf.

15. Sala-i-Martin, “The Disturbing ‘Rise.’”

16. Surjit Bhalla, Imagine There’s No Country: Poverty, Inequality and Growth in the Era of Globalization (Washington: Institute for International Economics, 2002). A summary of Bhalla’s research can be found at www.infochangeindia.org/bookandreportsst-jsp.34.

17. The difference between Bhalla’s findings and those of other economists can be attributed to two main reasons: First, Bhalla’s study focuses on individuals, not on countries. Thus, the dramatic growth of densely populated China and India more than compensates for the rise in the poverty level in African countries. Second, conventional poverty indices are largely based on research on households. Clearly, information amassed on the subject in the last few years did not make adequate allowances for increases in income levels—an error that Bhalla tries to correct. See Surjit Bhalla, Imagine There’s No Country.

18. John Micklethwait and Adrian Woolridge, A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden Promise of Globalization (London: Heinemann, 2000), pp. 260-261.

19. Jeffrey Sachs and Andrew Warner, “Economic Reform and the Process of Global Integration,” Brookings Papers on Economic Activity 1, 1995.

20. For a fascinating discussion of South Korea’s success story, see Philippe Legrain, Open World: The Truth About Globalization (London: Abacus, 2003), pp. 66-71.

21. These figures are taken from the CIA world factbook: www.cia.gov/publications/factbook/rankorder/2004rank.html.

22. Thomas L. Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (New York: Anchor, 2000), pp. x-xvi.

23. See Christopher Lockwood, “Cheer Up, Southeast Asia,” The Economist: The World in 2004 (special edition), p. 74.

24. See Thomas Larsson, “Asia’s Crisis of Corporatism,” in Global Fortune: The Stumble and Rise of World Capitalism, ed. Ian Vasquez (Washington: Cato Institute, 2000), pp. 125-158.

25. This theory was proposed in an article published in 1994 in Foreign Affairs,and has since become a classic: Terry Collingsworth, J. William Gould, and Pharis J. Harvey, “Labor and Free Trade: Time for a Global New Deal,” Foreign Affairs 77:1 (1994), pp. 8-13.

26. Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: St. Martin, 2002), pp. 195-229.

27. Klein, No Logo, p. 486.

28. Klein, No Logo, p. 334.

29. See Stephanie Luo, “Necessary Evil? An Economic Analysis of the Impact of Sweatshops in Developing Asia,” Journal of Trade and Environment (Winter 2000/2001), at www.standford.edu/class/e297c//new/trade_environment/sweatshops/sluo.htm.

30. Linda Lim, “My Factory Visits in Southeast Asia and UM Code and Monitoring,” in Memo to University of Michigan Chair of the Standing Committee on Labor Standards and Human Rights, September 6, 2000, at www.fordschool.umich.edu/rsie/acit/Documents/LimNotes00.pdf.

31. Quoted in Allen R. Myerson, “In Principle, a Case for More ‘Sweatshops,’” New York Times, June 22, 1997.

32. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, trans. Samuel Moore (London: Penguin, 1967), p. 102.

33. See Pierre Bourdieu, “The Myth of ‘Globalization’ and the European Welfare State,” in Acts of Resistance: Against the New Myths of Our Time, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Polity, 1998), pp. 32-33.

34. Zygmunt Bauman, Globalization: The Human Consequences (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 95.

35. Naomi Klein, “Rebels in Search of Rules,” New York Times, December 2, 1999.

36. See Patrick Buchanan, The Great Betrayal (London: Little, Brown, 1998).

37. Patrick Buchanan, The Death of the West (New York: Dunne, 2002), p. 229.

38. Said at a meeting arranged by Time magazine with another prominent opponent of globalization, Ralph Nader. Transcript can be found at http://time.com/time/community/transcripts/1999/112899buchanan-nader.html.

39. “Poll: Trust in Corporations Waning,” USA Today, July 16, 2002, www.usatoday.com/money/2002.07-15-trust-poll_x.htm.

40. On this matter, see data of “Transnational Corporations and Export Competitiveness”: www.bigpicturesmallworld.com/Global%20Inc%202/pgs/intro.html.

41. See also a summary of the data from the same report in the UN journal www.un.org/Pubs/chronicle/2003/webArticles/031803_wir.html.

42. See “EU Blocks GE/Honeywell Deal,” BBC News, July 3, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/1420398.stm.

43. “EMI, Time to Scrap Music Tie,” CNN Money, October 5, 2000, http://money.cnn.com/2000/10/05/deals/emi.

44. See Stephen Labaton, “The World Gets Tough on Fixing Prices,” New York Times, June 3, 2001.

45. Legrain, Open World, p. 142.

46. This is also the title of David Korten’s best-selling book, When Corporations Rule the World (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1995).

47. The drug trade is a striking exception. The Colombian drug cartels prosper even in the most anarchic conditions, and have private armies of mercenaries to protect their interests. One might argue with the definition of these bodies as “corporations,” but it is difficult to deny the fact that they are global business empires.

48. See the WTO’s Internet site: www.wto.org.

49. Quoted in “The WTO’s Slow Motion Coup Against Democracy: An Interview with Lori Wallach,” Multinational Monitor (October/November 1999). See also: www.thirdworldtraveler.com/WTO_MAI/WTO_SlowMotionCoup.html.

50. Quoted in Legrain, Open World, p. 175.

51. www.wto.org.english/thewto_e/whatis-e/tif_e/utw_chap2_e.pdf.

52. On this subject see the report prepared by the South Center, an inter-governmental organization of developing countries: www.southcentre.org/publications/trade/trade-04.html. For additional material on the trade dispute between the U.S. and Costa Rica, see: Helene Cooper “WTO Says U.S. Quotas on Underwear Imported from Costa Rica Are Unfair,” Wall Street Journal, November 11, 1996. For details of the trade dispute between Ecuador and the EU: www.ccsindia.org/people_pjs_dispute.htm. Regarding the WTO’s ruling on cotton and sugar subsidies, see the New York Times, September 9, 2004.

53. The altercation in Cancun was caused by the demand made by a number of highly influential members of the WTO, foremost among them the U.S. and the EU, to discuss topics already agreed upon at the first ministerial meeting in Singapore in 1996: Regulating matters affecting investment policy, ensuring conditions of economic competition, and transparency of government operations. In opposition to this, other members, mainly from the developing nations, insisted on discussing the American and European protectionist farming policies that were costing them dearly. The Cancun round of talks produced two organized blocs within the WTO: The “G20,” including, among others, Brazil, China, and India; and the “G90” that included the African countries. These blocs were intended as a buffer to the enormous power of the rich “G8” countries, and as a means of forcing them to consider the interests of the developing countries. For further information on the discussions at the Cancun meeting and its results, see www.tips.org.za/research/papers/getpaper.asp?id=702; www.isil.org/resources/fnn/2003summer/african-on-wto-talks; www.cafod.org.uk/archive/policy/cafod_Cancun_Analysis.pdf.

54. See Brink Lindsey, Against the Dead Hand: The Uncertain Struggle for Global Capitalism (New York: John Wiley, 2002), p. 262.

55. The World Bank is actually a combination of five bodies: The International Bank for Reconstruction and Developmentt (IBRD), the International Development Agency (IDA), the International Financial Corporation (IFC), the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), and the International Center for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).

56. The data can be found on the IMF’s Internet site: www.imf.org/external/np/exr/facts/glance.htm.

57. The data are taken from the World Bank’s Internet site: http://web.worldbank.org/wbsite/external/extaboutus/o,,contebtMDK:20040558~menuPK:34559~pagePK:34542~piPK:36600~theSitePK:29708,00.html.

58 .See Joseph Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (London: Penguin, 2002); Sever Plotzker, “Stiglitz: It Will Be Difficult for Israel to Grow,” Yediot
Aharonot, April 2, 2002.

59.Stiglitz, Globalization, p. 248.

60. Stiglitz, Globalization, pp. 138-141.

61. Andrei Illarionov, “Russia’s Potemkin Capitalism,” in Global Fortune, p. 209. It is doubtful if the example of Russia is sufficient to substantiate Stiglitz’s recommendations. It has already been noted that gradual reform was taking place in Russia as early as 1985, but the experiment failed in the face of fierce bureaucratic opposition. The strategy of gradual change also had unfortunate results in the Ukraine, Byelorussia, and other republics that were once part of the ussr. However, the Baltic States, most notably Estonia, preferred to move more rapidly in the transition to a market economy and achieved better economic results. The economist Anders Aslund, former adviser to Soviet governments, recently published comprehensive research refuting Stiglitz’s conclusions: He proves that rapid liberalization of the market and drastic democratization of the political system substantially improve the economic performance of countries during and after transition. When this process fails, as it did in Russia, for example, the neo-liberal economic model is not at fault, but rather the cumbersome and corrupt mechanisms charged with applying it. See Anders Aslund, Building Capitalism: The Transformations of the Former Soviet Bloc (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2002).

63. There is even room to doubt the validity of arguments that see the “lawless” competitive dynamic of globalization as instrumental to the demise of the social-democratic welfare state. Geoffrey Garret of Yale University’s department of political science analyzed data on more than 100 countries accumulated between 1985-1995 and discovered that increased exposure to international market forces did not usually reduce government expenditure. In truth, in the last half century, the most remarkable expansion in the size of government actually occurred in those countries with an open economy, like Sweden or Austria. It would appear, then, that the decline of the Western welfare state should not be attributed to the international market economy, but to internal political developments. If the social-democratic vision does fade, it will not be as a result of globalization but of the disabusement of voters in democratic countries with the notion that the welfare bureaucracy provides some kind of solution to social problems and economic inequality. See Geoffrey Garret, “Trade, Capital Mobility, and Government Spending Around the World,” Working Paper, Department of Political Science, Yale University, 1999; Paul Pierson, Dismantling the Welfare State? Reagan, Thatcher, and the Politics of Retrenchment (New York: Cambridge, 1996), pp. 1-9.

64. See John Helliwell, How Much Do National Borders Matter? (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution, 1998).

65. See Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson, Globalization in Question (Cambridge: Polity, 1996).

66. The following data may shed some light on the extent of international popularity of these brand names: The MTV network broadcasts to 340 million homes in 140 countries; McDonalds controls more than 30,000 restaurants in 119 countries and serves an average of 47 million customers every day; Coca-Cola sells soft drinks in more than 200 countries. These figures are taken from the companies’ Internet sites: http://groups.msn.com/MTV/mtv.msnw; www.mcdonalds.com/corp.html; www2.coca.cola.com/ourcompany/aroundworld.html.

67. Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983), paragraph 21.

68. Herbert Marcuse, The One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon, 1964), p. 12.

69. Jurgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation (Cambridge: Polity, 2001), p. 75.

70. Culturally speaking, globalization is frequently thought of as “Americanization”; even its most ardent supporters agree with this unreservedly. Thomas L. Friedman, for example, states that, “With the end of the Cold War, globalization is globalizing Anglo-American-style capitalism and the Golden Straitjacket. It is globalizing American culture and cultural icons. It is globalizing the best of America and the worst of America. It is globalizing the American Revolution and it is globalizing the American gas station.” Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree, p. 380.

71. Kalle Lasn, Culture Jam (New York: Quill, 2000), p. xvi.

72. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (Oxford: Oxford, 1999), p. 243.

73. See Robert W. Cox, “A Perspective on Globalization,” in Globalization: Critical Reflections, ed. James H. Mittelman (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1996), p. 27.

74. See Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” in Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996), pp. 27-47.

75. Clifford Geertz, “The World in Pieces: Culture and Politics at the End of the Century,” in Focaal: Tijdschrift voor Antropologie 32 (1998), pp. 107-108. [Dutch]

76. Penetrating insights into capitalism’s revolutionary dynamic can already be discerned in Karl Marx. See, for example, Karl Marx, “Outlines of the Critique of Political Economy,” in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Collected Works, trans. James G. Colbert (New York: Telos, 1994), vol. 28, p. 203.

77. Gilles Lipovetsky, Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton: Princeton, 1994), p. 148.

78. Lipovetsky, Empire of Fashion,p. 247.

79. Lipovetsky, Empire of Fashion,p. 10.

80. The full text of the advertisement can be found at www.sacramen-tosirens.com/ssnews/media/2003/2003_07_7.htm.

81. www.apple.com/thinkdifferent.

82. Quoted by Ulrich Beck, Brave New World: Model of a Civil Society, trans. Patrick Camiller (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), p. 157.

83 .See Habermas, Postnational Constellation, pp. 107-112, and Cosmopolitan Democracy: An Agenda for a New World Order, eds. Daniele Archibugi and David Held (Cambridge: Polity, 1995).

84. In his book The Clash of Civilizations,Samuel P. Huntington devotes considerable space to a discussion of the differences between the Western democratic system and the authoritarian Confucian one. According to Huntington, “At the broadest level the Confucian ethos pervading many Asian societies stressed the values of authority, hierarchy, the subordination of individual rights and interests, the importance of consensus, the avoidance of confrontation, ‘saving face,’ and, in general, the supremacy of the state over society and of society over the individual. In addition, Asians tended to think of the evolution of their societies in terms of centuries and millennia and to give priority to maximizing long-term gains. These attitudes contrasted with the primacy in American beliefs of liberty, equality, democracy, and individualism, and the American propensity to distrust government, oppose authority, promote checks and balances, encourage competition, sanctify human rights, and to forget the past, ignore the future, and focus on maximizing immediate gains. The sources of conflict are in fundamental differences in society and culture.” The Clash of Civilizations (New York: Touchstone, 1996), p. 225.

85. The popular television series From Carcur to Singapore, broadcast on Israel’s Channel 2 in July 2004, was an extended paean to the wonders of the Singaporean system. The presenter, Haim Hecht, stressed again and again the difference between the perfect functioning of Asian “democtatorship” and the inadequate performance of Israeli “madcapocracy.”

86. For a detailed review of the democratization processes in Asiatic countries, it is worth looking at the updated reports of Freedom House. See www.freedomhouse.org/research/index.htm.

87. Anwar Ibrahim, “A Passion for Freedom,” in The Economist: The World in 2004, p. 77.