The McPeace Dividend
By Randall E. Stross
Every day, around the globe, 45 million McDonald's customers make the world a peaceful place. According, that is, to the "Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention." The theory requires a supersize helping of credulousness, but it does provide a noble purpose for a chain that has recently lost its way: Last year, sales fell in its existing restaurants, and earnings plunged 40 percent in the fourth quarter from the prior year, the fifth straight quarterly decline. Embarrassment compounded when Fidelity Investments, its largest shareholder, dumped more than a third of its holdings. Desperate for growth, CEO Jack Greenberg has embraced brand extension and is pushing royalty-earning McKids clothes at Wal-Mart.
According to the central tenet of the McDonald's school of diplomacy, the chain's current trou-bles could be bad news for all of us. What McDonald's is actually pushing, says author and columnist Thomas Friedman, is world peace, as no two countries have fought a war once McDonald's was present in both countries. He attributes the phenomenon to the growth of a peaceable middle class. "People in McDonald's countries didn't like to fight wars anymore," he writes, "they preferred to wait in line for burgers."
The theory was laid out in Friedman's The Lexus and the Olive Tree just as nato pounded Slobodan Milosevic's Yugoslavia from the air–a supposed impossibility, given the McDonald's in Belgrade as well as restaurants in all 19 nato countries. Ah, Friedman says later, it just proves his point. When nato shut down the power grids, Belgrade's residents "wanted McDonald's reopened." So they demanded, and got, an end to the war.
Ronald McDonald, take a bow. It may be only you who can organize the 1.3 billion Chinese in the People's Republic to demand that their government drop plans for forcibly reuniting Taiwan with the mainland. The Bush administration is sufficiently concerned about how amicably China is likely to settle the Taiwan "question" that it has placed China on the same short list of U.S. nuclear targets that includes Iraq and North Korea.
Megabunnage. One can't find an authentic quarter pounder in Baghdad or Pyongyang, but Taiwan got its first McDonald's in 1984 and China, in 1990. If conventional nuclear deterrence depends on megatonnage and delivery systems, how is unconventional nuclear deterrence, based on addiction to Big Macs, best measured? Is the cause of peace helped by the fact that Beijing's first McDonald's is the largest in the world and served 40,000 people its first day? On the other hand, is the cause hurt by recent findings that most Beijing customers regard McDonald's fare as snack, not meal, feeling less than full? Can the Golden Arches Theory apply even if the arches disappear (the Beijing municipal government has ordered removal of 30 golden arches as part of a pre-Olympics beautification campaign)?
And how many spicy chicken sandwiches–by far, McDonald's biggest seller in China–must be sold to the middle class in order to neutralize the offensive threat posed by the 2.5 million-member People's Liberation Army, the world's largest? Its commanders are rather touchy. In January, China staged war games in the East China Sea because Taiwan added "Taiwan" to its own passports. The next time, the episode may end differently. Several hundred short-range nuclear missiles will be deployed by 2005, all pointed in the same direction.
If the golden arches are to exert their pacifying power, they cannot be constantly attacked as invasive and exploitative. A McDonald's in the western city of Xian was bombed in December, killing two and injuring 27. McDonald's ceo Greenberg does his best to shrink the size of the target by describing this global corporation as a "decentralized entrepreneurial network"; each restaurant is merely "a local business with local people supplied by a local infrastructure." This just-hometown-folks characterization is reinforced in China by the company's hoisting China's national flag every morning in front of its main restaurant in the heart of Beijing–and inviting the People's Liberation Army (and Chinese reporters and photographers) to help on special occasions. This appears to be working nicely. In Beijing, nearly half of children under 12 identify McDonald's as a Chinese brand.
The Chinese government's willingness to let McDonald's take root and multiply–there are now 80 outlets in Beijing alone–is remarkable given its earlier ideological opposition. The way has been eased by something that, for want of a better term, would have to be described as racial pride: Businesses transplanted from the West are now managed by ethnic Chinese "with black hair and yellow skin," a Chinese writer pridefully noted. But whether the permitted invasion of McDonald's and kfc and Starbucks makes the slightest difference to China's military establishment remains unknown.
Asked what he thought of Friedman's Golden Arches conflict prevention theory, Greenberg once replied, "We hope he's never disproved." Then he added, "That's a prayer."
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