"The Modernizing Mob," which was carried in the December 17 issue of Newsweek (Asian edition) described how Japan's yakuza (gangsters) are trying to go international in response to the wave of globalization in the underworld. The image presented in the Japanese media is generally one of the yakuza struggling under pressure from Chinese and Russian gangsters, whose presence has been growing along with the increasing numbers of illegal immigrants to Japan.
As described in the Newsweek story, however, the reality is quite the opposite: The Japanese gangs and their foreign counterparts are working together successfully and keeping out of each other's turfs. The yakuza were actually pioneers in the internationalization of organized crime. In the 1960s they started operating in Southeast Asia, arranging sex tours and drug deals. Now their activities include close collaboration with the Russian mafia, bringing in illegally harvested seafood from Russian waters for sale at a big profit in Japan. They are also thought to be bringing women from Uzbekistan on charter flights to Japan for prostitution.
As they have become more modern and international, the article notes sharply, Japan's mobsters are becoming "increasingly contemptuous of old yakuza traditions, such as a strict ban on hurting women and children."
Time magazine, also in its December 17 issue (Asian edition), carried a piece titled "Chasing the Japanese Dream," introducing the growing ranks of young people who come from China to study, work as professionals, or start businesses in Japan. They face barriers, however, including stringent rules governing entry and immigration. The story also notes the ongoing problem of mistreatment of foreign workers who come to Japan under practical-training visas; too often, unscrupulous employers take advantage of them.
The two top US news magazines thus by coincidence came out on the same day with reports introducing different angles of internationalization in Japan. The picture they depict is of a Japan undergoing a somewhat twisted form of globalization. This view is supplemented by a story in the December 10 issue of Newsweek (Asian edition), "Why Apple Isn't Japanese," which describes the corporate culture that has prevented Japanese businesses from producing successful new products incorporating cutting-edge technology. This and the above two articles, read together, offer a picture of a Japan where, outside of the underworld, the process of coping with globalization is not going well.
A sharply contrasting picture is that of the United States, where many big multinationals have been tapping foreigners to become their chief executive officers, as described in "Globalization Comes to U.S. Executive Suite," International Herald Tribune, December 13 (Tokyo edition). Fifteen of the Fortune 100 companies now have foreign-born CEOs. The most recent addition is Vikgram Pandit, originally from India, who on December 11 became chief executive of Citigroup, the huge bank that is among the institutions shaken by the subprime mortgage crisis. Major US-based multinationals actively recruited non-Americans to handle their growing international operations in the 1970s and 1980s, and the members of this cohort have recently been reaching the age to assume CEO posts. The trend has also been boosted by the popularity of US business schools, which have attracted many students from overseas who have gone on to take management-track jobs at big companies in the United States. In Japan, Sony is now headed by a non-Japanese, Howard Stringer (a native of Wales and graduate of Oxford, who has spent most of his working life in the United States). But this is still the rare exception. Looking at the photographs of the foreign-born CEOs accompanying the IHT story, though, one is struck by the fact that almost all of them are from other English-speaking countries (such as Britain and Ireland) or countries where English has semiofficial status (such as India and Egypt).
"Workers of the world, unite!"
The globalization of employment is not limited to the executive offices of US firms. On December 12 the Washington Post carried a column by Harold Meyerson titled "Labor's Global Push" introducing the drive by labor unions to go international. Businesses have been globalizing, and now labor organizations are following suit. For example, the United Steelworkers union of the United States is now in merger negotiations with Britain's largest union, Unite; it has also cooperated with unions representing workers at Arcelor Mittal, the world's largest steelmaker, in persuading that company to allow the formation of a labor union at its Liberian mining operation and to establish global safety and health standards.It is certainly true that multinational corporations have tended to move their factories from countries with strict labor standards to places where the rules are looser, a trend that has led to the hollowing out of manufacturing in developed countries and the use of sweatshop labor in the developing world. Meyerson's column refers to a statement by United Steelworkers President Leo Gerard, who declares that setting global standards is as important today as setting national standards was 100 years ago at the beginning of the twentieth century. This is certainly true for safety and health standards. But it will hardly be possible to achieve uniform global standards for wages, since developing countries rely on low pay to provide them with a comparative advantage.
What is of particular interest in the column by Meyerson is his citation of two major problems relating to the globalization of the labor movement. One is how to get "communist" China, where workers are supposedly represented by a huge, government-controlled union, to allow the formation of real unions. Another is how to keep US-based multinationals from exporting the union-busting skills they have developed in the United States to their operations elsewhere around the world.
The AFL-CIO, America's national labor federation, recently hosted a meeting of a new group, the Council of Global Unions, in a suburb of Washington, bringing together union representatives from 64 countries to discuss the development of a global labor movement. The old communist slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" is now the non-ideological theme of unions in Western countries, including the AFL-CIO, which was formerly the bulwark of the anticommunist labor movement.
Globalization and nationalism
During the month under review, one major development on the international political scene was the victory of the coalition led by President Vladimir Putin in the elections for Russia's Duma (lower house). Putin has tapped First Deputy Premier Dmitry Medvedev to succeed him and apparently plans to continue ruling by becoming prime minister after his term as president ends this March. Another concerned Venezuela's President Hugo Ch_vez, who was aiming, like Putin, to create a setup to allow the perpetuation of his own rule. In Ch_vez's case this involved seeking approval of a referendum to amend the nation's constitution. But in contrast with Putin's success, Ch_vez's referendum failed.Though the outcomes were quite different, both of these developments involved background factors relating to globalization. Putin and Ch_vez have both strengthened their hold on power up to now thanks to the surge in oil prices. In this context, the column by Roger Cohen titled "The Limits of 21st-Century Revolutions" (International Herald Tribune, December 3) makes some interesting points about the ironies of the globalizing world. The United States under George W. Bush and Venezuela under Ch_vez are at loggerheads diplomatically, but trade between the two countries is going strong. Thanks to the high price of oil, Venezuela is earning $37 billion a year from its exports to the United States, a figure comparable to the value of France's US-bound exports. And it imports about $10 billion worth of goods from the United States. Ch_vez has been using the country's oil revenues to boost his regime with generous spending at home and has also been working to build an anti-US network internationally, moving to strengthen ties with Iran, Russia, and China.
The most recent surge in oil prices has been fueled by the inflow of speculative funds into the commodity markets following the subprime mortgage meltdown in the United States. In that sense, the woes of low-income American homeowners have ironically ended up assisting Venezuela's drive to build a band of anti-American forces. But another irony noted by Cohen in his column is that, even as President Ch_vez rails against the United States, even calling President Bush "the devil," Venezuelans are avidly watching NBA basketball and Major League baseball on their televisions. The US embassy is hard pressed keeping up with the demand for visas from Venezuelans wanting to visit the United States, and the shops are full of US brands.
The pattern by which Russia's President Putin has been able to achieve a "czar-like" hold on power thanks to the high price of oil is similar in some ways to what Ch_vez has accomplished. But Putin has not adopted the same sort of confrontational stance and cheap rhetoric that Ch_vez has directed toward the United States; instead he has taken a more strategic approach. This difference seems to have revealed itself in the contrasting results they have recently produced: Putin's landslide victory in the Duma election versus Ch_vez's defeat in the constitutional referendum.
Venezuela offers a good example of the inability of political leaders to overcome the economic realities of globalization. As Cohen puts it, "globalization breeds nationalism," as political leaders appeal to nationalist sentiment in an attempt to compensate for the limits on their power resulting from the globalization process. This observation applies to the United States as well.
Perspectives from Pakistan and Germany
In the previous column we examined the issue of the widening of disparities due to globalization; a piece that appeared in Dawn, a major English-language daily in Pakistan, by columnist Zafar Mehdi on December 3 addressed this issue from the perspective of an observer inside a developing country: Pakistan received $5.1 billion in foreign direct investment last year alone, and over the past seven years its economy has doubled in size. Per capita income has risen to $950 a year. But 90 million Pakistanis have disposable incomes of $450 or less, and one in four lives below the poverty line. The reality in the developing world is that many are unable to benefit from globalization.The December 12 issue of Die Zeit, a weekly German magazine, included an essay by Wilhelm Heitmeyer, a professor at the University of Bielefel, that offers an analysis of issues relating to globalization among people in a developed country. Heitmeyer discusses the subtle shift in ethical views that has been occurring in Germany while the economy has been recovering over the past year. Business has picked up, and unemployment has declined; as a result, people's negative attitudes toward the unemployed and foreign workers have also declined on the surface. But looking more closely, one sees the emergence of a tendency to apply the principles of the market economy to social life as a whole. According to Heitmeyer, the market-economy principles of utility and efficiency are being applied to social life, and other principles, such as empathy and care for one another, are being left by the wayside.
Japan too has been experiencing an economic recovery, attributed to the reforms implemented to cope with globalization; we should probably be on the lookout for negative social phenomena that may be occurring as a result.
Joseph Conrad's prophetic insight
December 3, 2007, marked the 150th anniversary of the birth of Joseph Conrad, an author who dealt piercingly with the issues of "modernization" (what we would now call globalization). An article about him by Jonathan Brown appeared in the British daily Independent that day, titled "Conrad, the Literary Outsider Ignored by His Adopted Country," calling attention to the importance of this Polish-born author's contributions to English-language literature. No other writer a century ago wrote with such depth about topics foretelling the dilemmas of people today, including the North-South problem (the issue of colonialism in his time) and terrorism.As Brown notes, Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness inspired Francis Coppola's film Apocalypse Now. In addition, although Brown does not mention it in his article, a recent book by critic Yuzo Tsubouchi points out that the influence of this work can also be seen in F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, of which the renowned Japanese writer Haruki Murakami has recently come out with a new translation, and in Murakami's early novels as well. It is probably fair to say that all these works speak about what people lose in the context of the relentless current of "modernization," as noted by Francis Fukuyama quoted in our previous issue. Conrad may be seen as an important writer who presaged the problems of globalization.
