The Lexus and the Olive Tree by Thomas L. Friedman

Author:Thomas L. Friedman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

12

The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention

Every once in a while when I am traveling abroad, I need to indulge in a burger and a bag of McDonald’s french fries. For all I know, I have eaten McDonald’s burgers and fries in more countries in the world than anyone, and I can testify that they all really do taste the same. But as I Quarter-Poundered my way around the world in recent years, I began to notice something intriguing. I don’t know when the insight struck me. It was a bolt out of the blue that must have hit somewhere between the McDonald’s in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the McDonald’s in Tahrir Square in Cairo and the McDonald’s off Zion Square in Jerusalem. And it was this:

No two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s.

I’m not kidding. It was uncanny. Look at the Middle East: Israel had a kosher McDonald’s, Saudi Arabia had McDonald’s, which closed five times a day for Muslim prayer, Egypt had McDonald’s and both Lebanon and Jordan had become McDonald’s countries. None of them have had a war since the Golden Arches went in. Where is the big threat of war in the Middle East today? Israel-Syria, Israel-Iran and Israel-Iraq. Which three Middle East countries don’t have McDonald’s? Syria, Iran and Iraq.

I was intrigued enough by my own thesis to call McDonald’s headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, and report it to them. They were intrigued enough by it to invite me to test it out on some of their international executives at Hamburger University, McDonald’s in-house research and training facility. The McDonald’s folks ran my model past all their international experts and confirmed that they, too, couldn’t find an exception. I feared the exception would be the Falklands war, but Argentina didn’t get its first McDonald’s until 1986, four years after that war with Great Britain. (Civil wars and border skirmishes don’t count: McDonald’s in Moscow, El Salvador and Nicaragua served burgers to both sides in their respective civil wars.)

Armed with this data, I offered up “The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention,” which stipulated that when a country reached the level of economic development where it had a middle class big enough to support a McDonald’s network, it became a McDonald’s country. And people in McDonald’s countries didn’t like to fight wars anymore, they preferred to wait in line for burgers.

Others have made similar observations during previous long periods of peace and commerce—using somewhat more conventional metaphors. The French philosopher Montesquieu wrote in the eighteenth century that international trade had created an international “Grand Republic,” which was uniting all merchants and trading nations across boundaries, which would surely lock in a more peaceful world. In The Spirit of the Laws he wrote that “two nations who traffic with each other become reciprocally dependent; for if one has an interest in buying, the other has an interest in selling; and thus their union is founded on their mutual necessities.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.