conditions into it."
The Seattle Round of 1999 was informally billed as WTO's "development round" and was intended to "close the gap between poor countries and the rich" (Flanigan C1). The talks did not exactly collapse, but they were eclipsed by a public-opinion coalition of environmental and trade-union activists, as well as "repeated descriptions in Seattle of developing countries as employers of slave or child labor, low-wage exploiters of their own citizens and tools of corporate greed" (Flanigan C1).
It might seem that ethical concerns associated with globalization could be disposed of quickly by identifying the claims of the have-not nations and redressing their grievances. But matters are far from straightforward. Consider Barber's analysis of the encounter between McWorld, or the milieu of Western corporate hegemony over culture and economy, on one side and Jihad, the name given to any of a variety of narrow, fervent, and/or aggressive parochialisms driven by religious, ethnic, or political attachments on the other. The real casualties of conflicting ideas may be democracy and social justice, to which both McWorld and Jihad are either indifferent or hostile (Barber 295, et passim).
Even so, Barber observes that the dominant trend is toward globalization of economic and industrial forces, and it is now a commonplace that American industry has exported entire factories to the developing world, closing American factories and depriving U.S. workers of high-paying union jobs. Developing countries have only too eagerly taken up international brands, from McDonald's and Coca-Cola to Disney movies and Nikes.
Jihad stands not so much in stark opposition as in subtle counterpoint to McWorld and is itself a dialectical response
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