THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Published in April 1999 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Copyright & #352; 1999 by Thomas L. Friedman. All rights reserved.

In the winter of 1995 I visited Hanoi. Every morning to get my exercise I would walk around the pagodas on Hoan Kiem Lake, in the heart of Hanoi, and every morning I would stop to visit a tiny Vietnamese woman crouched on the sidewalk with her bathroom scale. She was offering to weigh people for a small fee. And every morning I would pay her a dollar and weigh myself.

It wasn’t that I needed to know how much I weighed. I knew how much I weighed. (And my recollection is that her scale was not particularly accurate.) No, doing business with that lady was my contribution to the globalization of Vietnam. To me, her unspoken motto was: “Whatever you’ve got, no matter how big or small sell it, trade it, barter it, leverage it, rent it, but do something with it to turn a profit, improve your standard of living and get into the game.”

That lady and her scale embody a fundamental truth about globalization which too often gets lost in talk of elite money managers, hedge funds and high-speed microprocessors. And it is this: Globalization emerges from below, from street level, from people’s very souls and from their very deepest aspirations.

Yes, globalization is the product of the democratization of finance, technology and information, but what is driving all three of these is the basic human desire for a better life a life with more choices as to what to eat, what to wear, where to live, where to travel, how to work, what to read, what to write and what to learn. It starts with a lady in Hanoi, crouched on the sidewalk, offering up a bathroom scale as her ticket to the Fast World.

In central Hanoi today, every inch of sidewalk seems to be covered by someone selling something off a mat, out of a trunk or from the shelves of a storefront. Every inch of road is occupied by people who have traded their sandals for a bicycle, their bicycle for a motor scooter, their motor scooter for a Honda Civic, their Honda Civic for a Toyota Camry and, yes, even their Toyota Camry for the occasional Lexus.

A grassroots groundswell

Because we tend to think of globalization as something that countries connect to outside themselves, or something imposed from above and beyond, we tend to forget how much, at its heart, it is also a grassroots movement that emerges from within each of us.

This is why we always have to keep in mind that along with the backlash against the brutalities, pressures and challenges of globalization, there is a groundswell of people demanding the benefits of globalization. This groundswell is propelled by millions of workers who have been knocked around by globalization, but who nonetheless get up, dust themselves off and knock again on globalization’s door, demanding to get into the system. Because if they have half a chance, the turtles don’t want to be turtles, the left-behinds don’t want to remain behind and the know-nots want to know something more. They want to be lions or gazelles. They want to get a piece of the system, not to destroy it.

I happened to be in Rio de Janeiro when the Brazilian government privatized the state telephone company, Telebras. There was a big street protest in Rio against the privatization. What struck me most, though, was that the next day the Brazilian newspaper Globo carried an interview with one of the demonstrators, asking him why he had come. He answered that he came to the demonstration because “I thought I might get a job.” The poor guy wasn’t against privatization. He just wanted a share.

Indeed, for all the churning that global capitalism brings to a society, the spread of capitalism has raised living standards higher, faster and for more people than at any time in history. It has also brought more poor people into the middle classes more quickly than at any time in human history. So while the gap between rich and poor is getting wider as the winners in today’s globalization system really take off and separate themselves from everyone else the floor under the poor has been rising steadily in many parts of the world.

Improved standard of living

In other words, while relative poverty may be growing in many countries, absolute poverty is actually falling in many countries. According to the 1997 United Nations Human Development report, poverty has fallen more in the past 50 years than in the previous 500. Developing countries have progressed as fast in the past 30 years as the industrialized world did in the previous century.

Since 1960, infant mortality rates, malnutrition and illiteracy are all significantly down, while access to safe water is way up. In relatively short periods of time, countries that have been the most open to globalization, like Taiwan, Singapore, Israel, Chile and Sweden, have achieved standards of living comparable to those in America and Japan, while the ranks of the middle class in countries like Thailand, Brazil, India and Korea have swelled, due partly to globalization.

This is why, though the backlash against globalization is alive and well, the backlash is constantly being tempered by the groundswell for more globalization more people wanting into the system. You don’t need to be a political scientist to figure that out. All you have to do is walk down the street in practically any developing country.

You’ll meet Chanokphat Phitakwanokoon, a 40-year-old Thai-Chinese woman, who sells cigarettes and Bao Chinese dumplings from her little stand on Wireless Road in the heart of downtown Bangkok. I was staying at a hotel near there in December 1997, the week the government closed most of the country’s finance houses, and I asked the New York Times interpreter to accompany me on a walk to get some reactions from the street merchants. The first person I chatted with was Chanokphat. I began by asking her, “How’s business?”

“Off by 40 or 50 percent,” she said sullenly.

I asked her if she had ever heard of George Soros, the billionaire hedge fund manager who was then being blamed for speculating on the Asian currencies and triggering their collapse.

“No,” she said, shaking her head. She had never heard of Soros.

“Well, let me ask you this. Do you know what a stock market is?” I asked.

“Yes,” she answered without hesitation. “I own shares in Bangkok Bank and Asia Bank.”

“How in the world did you think of buying bank shares?” I asked.

“My relatives were all buying, so I bought too,” she answered. “I put them away in the bank. They are not worth much now.”

At that point, I looked down and noticed that she wasn’t wearing any shoes. Maybe she had shoes somewhere, but they weren’t on her feet. I couldn’t help thinking to myself, “She has no shoes, she has a fifth-grade education, but she owns bank stocks on the Thai stock exchange.” Some questions then occurred to me: What are her interests? Is she going to lead a march to burn down the IMF office that is imposing all these conditions on Thailand to reform its economy? Or, because she is now somehow part of the system, would she be prepared to work harder, save more and sacrifice more, even to the IMF, if it would help revive the Thai economy? Something tells me it’s the latter. That’s the groundswell at work.

You’ll meet two Australian friends of mine, social scientists Anne and Gerrard Henderson. The Hendersons stopped by to see me one day in Washington and told me about their daughter, who was attending university in Australia: “Johanna is twenty-one years old,” explained Gerrard. “One day she and the girl she was sharing a flat with got a letter from the Australian phone company, Telstra, announcing that one-third of the company was being privatized and every householder who had a Telstra phone was entitled to buy a batch of shares. She called us and asked if she should do it and we said yes.

“So she took up the offer. She has very little money it was three Australian dollars a share and she bought three hundred shares. She hasn’t even started to earn a salary yet. She might be a librarian, or a teacher or a good hardworking wage earner, but she is the only one in the family who took up the Telstra offer. The workers in Telstra bought up about 90 percent of the shares offered, and they have become less militant since. People just understand that this sort of thing is important. There is no alternative, unless you want to go backward. Ten years ago my daughter would have gone with the flow against globalization, but a few shares of Telstra, which was all she could afford, has suddenly made her interested in what happens in Wall Street because that affects her now.” That’s the groundswell at work.

Why not American Express?

You’ll meet Teera Phutrakul, who heads one of the biggest mutual funds in Thailand. I went to interview him one afternoon in Bangkok about whether there would be a backlash in Thailand against Western and American bankers who might try to move in and buy up Thai banks and businesses, now that their currency was so cheap and many firms were flat on their backs.

Teera thought for a moment and then answered by telling me a story: A few weeks earlier, a friend of his had had his wallet stolen. In his wallet he had credit cards from four banks: American Express and three Thai banks. Right away he called American Express and the three Thai banks and reported his missing credit cards. American Express asked him if he wanted a new card sent over by motor scooter the same day. He still had not heard from the three Thai banks.

“So,” said Teera, “ask yourself this: ‘Will my friend really care if those three Thai banks are now bought up by Citibank and have their standards brought up to the same level as American Express?'” Will he feel a sense of nationalist outrage? Maybe, but it probably won’t last long if those Thai banks start re-employing people and if they suddenly start to run as efficiently and profitably as Citibank and American Express. That’s the groundswell at work.

This groundswell not only is pulsating with momentum because so many people want into the system; it is also thriving because the system itself gives those brutalized by it a greater ability to tell people about their pain or get organized to do something about it. Thanks to the Internet, for instance, it is no longer just the few big media conglomerates who talk to the many. It is now the many who can talk to the many.

I learned this from Chandra Muzaffar, president of a Malaysian human rights organization called International Movement for a Just World. I went to see this gentle Malaysian Muslim at his barren office in a suburb of Kuala Lumpur. I went for the express purpose of hearing him blast globalization in the name of the left-outs and left-behinds, for whom his organization is such a strong advocate. But I got a subtler, more interesting message from him.

“I think that globalization is not just a rerun of colonialism,” said Muzaffar. “People who argue that have got it wrong. It is more complex than that. Look around. As a result of globalization, there are elements of culture from the dominated peoples that are now penetrating the north. The favorite food of Brits eating out is not fish and chips today, but curry. It is no longer even exotic for them. But I am not just talking about curry.

“Even at the level of ideas, there is a certain degree of interest in different religions now. So while you have this dominant force (Americanization), you also have a subordinate flow the other way People operate at different levels. At one level they can be angry about injustices being done to their society from Americanization and then talk about it over McDonald’s with their kids who are studying in the States.”

That’s the groundswell meeting the backlash.

Silence speaks volumes

In some ways what all these stories remind us of is that while globalization can produce an enormous sense of alienation, as power keeps moving up to more and more abstract levels that are difficult to touch and affect or even see, it can also do the opposite. It can push down to the local level and to individuals more power and resources than ever before.

All these stories also help to explain why the backlash against globalization so far, and I emphasize the words “so far,” has not garnered enough critical mass anywhere yet to really disrupt this new system. Look at Southeast Asia. Sometimes the news is in the noise in what is being shouted on the streets and painted on the walls in graffiti. But sometimes the news is actually in the silence in what isn’t being said. The greatest wisdom you can acquire as a reporter is understanding the difference between the two, and knowing when the silence is speaking volumes.

I feel that the most important news story from Asia in 1998 was the relative silence with which the lower and middle classes in Thailand, Korea, Malaysia and even Indonesia accepted the verdict of the global markets that their countries had fundamental software and operating system problems and were ready to accept the punishment and are now trying to make the necessary adjustments.

How long this will last is impossible to predict, but it keeps confounding all those who have been predicting globalization’s imminent demise. After every global economic disturbance, some pundit writes that it all goes to show globalization is “finished,” the system is breaking down and it’s just a jungle out there.

Globalization is forever being buried by people who don’t understand the first thing about it, and who have never spoken to the likes of Teera or Chanokphat, the Hendersons’ daughter, let alone to a little old lady with a scale in Hanoi. When all of them give up trying to be in the Fast World, and when all of them declare that they would rather go back to their old, closed, regulated systems, and give up trying for a better lifestyle for them or their kids then I will acknowledge that globalization is “finished” and that the backlash has won.

Until then, let me share a little secret I’ve learned from talking to all these folks: With all due respect to revolutionary theorists, the “wretched of the earth” want to go to Disney World not to the barricades. They want the Magic Kingdom, not “Les Miserables.” And if you construct an economic and political system that gives them half a sense that with hard work and sacrifice they will get to Disney World and get to enjoy the Magic Kingdom, most of them will stick with the game for far, far longer than you would ever expect.

Thomas L. Friedman, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, is a columnist for The New York Times. This is an excerpt from his best-selling book “The Lexus and the Olive Tree.”