7     Beyond Borders

This world is small and experience has now proved it.

—Christopher Columbus, 1503

We cannot wait for governments to do it all. Globalization operates on Internet time.

—Kofi Annan

The history of globalization is the history of the world. It is not a phenomenon unique to any era, but a process that connects the centuries like the roads and shipping lanes that first made it possible to link peoples together. But to suggest that globalization has but one form or that it is a purely historical force that has not been shaped or helped along by self-interested parties would be naive. Indeed, narrow self-interest has, ironically, made globalization what it is today, and it will determine whether globalization continues to powerfully reshape the world order tomorrow.

“Globalization” has many definitions, of course. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz calls it “the removal of barriers to free trade and the closer integration of national economies.” Left-wing social scientists who clearly have an ax to grind dub it “the present worldwide drive toward [an] economic system dominated by supranational corporate trade and banking institutions that are not accountable to democratic processes or governments.” T. N. Harper, in “Empire, Diaspora, and the Languages of Globalism, 1850–1914” called it a “recolonization” of the developing world by the West, although you could easily find others who might say it is the reverse. For some it is progress. For others it is a tidal wave consuming cultures, homogenizing humankind in its churning vortices.

One aspect is undeniable: globalization weakens the power of the state. While it may also produce forces that trigger nationalistic backlashes, in the end it undercuts the state in several ways. It renders the borders by which states are defined less meaningful as traffic over, under, around, and through them becomes less controllable. It undercuts the national identity that knits together peoples and has formed the basis for political unions throughout time. How can one speak of “self-determination” without having a clear sense of what “self” means?

This breaking down of national identity is acutely felt among those private-sector multinational actors who take to the global stage and whose interests cease to align with those of any one country. These actors further use globalization to undercut the state; once corporations, for example, are truly global in their operations, they have the ability to “venue-shop” and play countries against one another to win better legal, regulatory, or tax treatment. They gain leverage by “floating above” nations.

The rise of transnational issues that is an inevitable by-product of globalization also undercuts the state in several important ways. One is that the rise of transnational threats and challenges makes it increasingly difficult for states to fulfill their obligations to their citizens under the commonly accepted understanding of what the social contract entails. If a state can’t control its borders or keep people safe or regulate economic activities, its value is diluted. Or, as Thomas Hobbes put it in Leviathan, “The obligations of subjects to the sovereign is understood to last as long, and no longer, than the power lasteth by which he is able to protect them.”

Given the need to find other mechanisms by which the social contract can be met, globalization has also created the need for supranational organizations. These have further weakened nation-states by assuming—even if only modestly—some sovereign prerogatives or roles. Going forward, it seems certain such usurpation is likely to continue (as indeed it should if our primary objective is to satisfy the needs of people rather than preserve the interests of local political elites). Because these institutions are weak by design, thanks to the reluctance of states to cede sovereignty, the result is that on transnational issues there is a void. This creates a space in which multinational actors can take advantage of the absence of regulations or the inability of regulators to effectively enforce rules that allows them to grow larger and more influential and to defeat constraints they might find at the national level.

But, as noted earlier, while over a prolonged period the trend toward greater integration and less meaningful borders is clear, there are countervailing forces, periodic backlashes, and divergent paths taken by different actors. For the purposes of this book, we are most interested in how globalization has been influenced by the rise of corporate power and how it has in turn affected the role of states and of private actors. In each of the chapters in this section of the book, we will consider a few examples that make it clear that commercial interests have played a central role not only in advancing the process but in ensuring that as it unfolded, it did so in a way that benefited them even if the results were not optimal for states. Further, we will examine how, over time, different approaches to globalization have emerged from societies with differing views of the relationship between private and public interests.

Hints from Early History

There is no denying that globalization has historically been driven in large part by technological innovation. That is in part what has given us the impression that what is happening today is so new and special. A handful of relatively recent technological innovations have made the knitting together of once distant and distinct societies visible, and the pace of the knitting seems breathtaking.

From the time the Internet was developed by the U.S. military in the late 1960s until the mid-1980s, the pace of its embrace was so slow that the countries to which it connected could be measured in the single digits. The World Wide Web was introduced only a year before Bill Clinton ran for president of the United States for the first time. During his first year in office the number of connected countries reached a hundred. Today, not only does every country in the world have Internet connectivity, but people now view it as a utility like gas and electricity. For example, in January 2011, when the Egyptian government cut off Internet access to the demonstrators in Tahrir Square and elsewhere across Egypt, the protesters cried out that their fundamental right to Internet access had been compromised.

The New York Times’s Thomas L. Friedman, passing through Tahrir Square, noted that almost everyone he encountered, even the poorest Egyptians, had a cell phone. These phones were also the cameras that recorded the events in the square. They were also the digital communications platforms that made the “Twitter revolution” possible. Cellular telephony had grown so rapidly around the world that, according to the World Bank, the hierarchy of need among the world’s poorest by 2010 had become: food, shelter, clothing, and a cell phone. The number of cell phone users in the world didn’t reach 100 million until the mid-1990s. It reached a billion in 2002. According to the United Nations, it is now nearly five billion, with almost two-thirds of people in developing countries owning cell phones. Almost two billion have Internet access.

But these are only the latest technological revolutions to accelerate the connection of peoples worldwide. During the mid-twentieth century, largely thanks to technologies developed to fight two world wars and then the cold war, transportation was revolutionized by aviation innovators, the development of radar and advanced navigation systems, and the creation of more powerful computers. Space technologies made global communication via satellite possible.

Before that wave, however, another had taken place during the nineteenth century. Advances in nautical technologies enabled a new era in global trade. Ice from frozen ponds in New England was shipped aboard clipper ships to Calcutta to prevent food from rotting in the heat of the Indian sun. Steamships replaced clippers and enhanced the safety of transoceanic voyages, cutting trips from weeks to days. The telegraph linked distant corners of nations and then continents. The pace of these changes must have seemed blisteringly fast back then as well. In the 1830s, the first working telegraphs dazzled by sending messages short distances—a kilometer in the early German demonstration of Gauss and Weber, thirteen miles in the first commercial demonstration in England, two miles in the 1838 instance of Samuel Morse’s telegraph in the United States. Less than twenty years later, a transatlantic cable worked for the first time. Less than thirty years later, there was a dependable communications link between the United States and Europe. Within a decade after that, Alexander Graham Bell spoke the words “Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you” into his experimental telephone.

In the same year that Morse invented his telegraph, the SS Great Western became the first steamship to ply the Atlantic on a regularly scheduled basis. A decade after Bell’s telephone, Karl Benz put the first automobiles into production in Germany using internal combustion technology that was also invented during this period of remarkable creativity and innovation—a period that led to a blossoming of global trade from 1870 through the beginning of the First World War that has been called by Friedman “Globalization 1.0.”

Such a characterization, however accurately it may capture the unprecedented growth in world trade that took place during that period, clearly does a disservice to the ages of empire and exploration that came before. Previously, technological breakthroughs, from the invention of oceangoing galleys to caravels, from road building to the sextant and the compass, all ushered in similarly profound accelerations in the ability to link together societies.

But in each case there had to be a reason to develop, perfect, and employ such technologies, to bring them to scale, to undertake the expense and risk of using them. More often than not it was the pursuit of economic advantage for either public or private actors. Sometimes this pursuit took the form of conquest. Perhaps more often it took the form of commerce. As we have seen, the two are often flip sides of the same coin.

The ambition to link societies, to gain access to distant resources and then to preserve that access and the benefits they bring, is what has shaped the expansion of nations, the formation of alliances, the spread of culture, the rationale for wars, and the rules that govern international behavior. In fact, the search for “more”—the fundamental human “grass is always greener” impulse—is what led the first humans to venture out of Africa, to walk across continents, to form new societies. It has shaped and reshaped societies, empires, the balance of power in the world, the flow of ideas, and the very character of eras as this book illustrates, from that of the Vikings to the Age of Exploration to the Thirty Years’ War to the current “Global Era.”

For our purposes we need to ask: Has something profound happened in that process that has now reset the terms by which global players interact, elevating private power, delimiting that of states, and forever changing the relationship between the two? And if so, can we better understand what has driven it so we can foresee where it may lead us and why?

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To find the first of the world’s “multinational” enterprises, we can go back to the Assyrians, the Romans, and the early caravan leaders who set out along the Silk Road. We can also look to the Vikings, the Catholic Church, or the Hanseatic League of traders that linked the mines of Dalarna to purchasers in London, Antwerp, Bruges, Berlin, Kraków, and perhaps as far away as Novgorod. But we can gain plenty of insight into what has changed and why by beginning again with the period roughly around 1848.

At that time, there were perhaps 1,500 to 2,500 enterprises that could be called “multinational” in the world. That is only a couple of times more than existed when the British East India Company was incorporated in 1600. While such estimates are rough and depend on a very loose definition of the term “multinational,” this much we know: the number probably did not double again until the middle of the twentieth century. In 1969, there may have been just over 7,000 such companies. By 2000, there were 63,000, with over 820,000 foreign subsidiaries. They employed almost 100 million people and perhaps directly supported as many as half a billion people. Add the local companies that were dependent on them for business and the number of people whose economic destiny was directly influenced by these entities, and the total number of people dependent on these multinationals may have been between one and two billion in 2000, a third of the world’s population. Current estimates for the number of multinationals are over eighty thousand. It is estimated that just the top three hundred companies control over a quarter of the earth’s productive capacity.

At the same time, the world has seen the number of countries grow from fifty-seven in 1900 to more than two hundred today. While the burgeoning of multinational corporations and the dramatic growth in the size and influence of the largest of them clearly enhances their influence, the proliferation of countries—much of it due to the end of colonialism and the breakup of empires—has the opposite effect, creating many very small, weak states that are independent in name only and linked to the fates and policies of larger neighbors or other actors, such as major resident corporations.

One of the key examples of how globalization has limited the role of the state is the degree to which economic activity has shifted from being contained within national borders to taking place outside them. While the revolutions of 1848 were churning, global exports equaled less than 5 percent of global economic output. By 2007, they accounted for over one-third of global GDP. That means more countries were dependent on each other and the corporate intermediaries controlling the flows between them for their well-being (and that does not take into account other vital global flows heavily influenced by corporations, from capital to information).

Controlling borders and levying tariffs on trade were important ways for sovereign states to exercise their authority. But, perhaps not surprisingly, as trade began to grow in importance and multinational actors began to wield ever greater influence, they began to use their economic and political leverage to reduce barriers that increased their costs and undercut their competitiveness. As a direct consequence, the rules of world trade and prevailing attitudes toward it on the part of political leaders began to change in ways that ultimately even more dramatically reduced the influence of countries over their own economic destinies.

The Pivot of 1848: Landed Gentry Give Way to Industrial Elites

From the beginning of time through the middle of the nineteenth century, the economic formula was fairly simple: land plus people equaled wealth. The land was the source of sustenance and shelter, and people were the engines that added value to what it produced and defended it. While this equation was in place, calculating global wealth and power was a straightforward task. Throughout this period, the two most populous countries were number one and number two in terms of their economic output. As noted earlier, until the Industrial Revolution built up a head of steam in the mid-1830s, China and India were the world’s economic leaders. The fact that they have not been for the past 180 years is actually an anomaly, and their rapid rise as they have harnessed the new fundamentals of wealth creation of the industrial and postindustrial eras—which turn on the availability of capital and technology to boost productivity and output—is not a new development so much as it is a return to the status quo.

Political and economic power during this initial period of human history—a period that might be referred to as the Age of Agroeconomies—were related to the control of land and people. For Swedish kings and later for the shareholders of Stora, it was access to the mines of Falun and then the country’s abundant forests. For English aristocrats like those across Europe, it was more often than not the control of farmland. Political divisions arose in the early eighteenth century as the parties of English country landowners—or of the likes of Jefferson in America—faced off against those who represented the rising economic centers associated with new forms of commerce and wealth creation. This fault line, representing the growing divisions between landed gentry and emerging capitalist elites, was particularly fraught with tension in the years immediately before 1848.

While the defeat of Napoleon marked one of the great triumphs in the history of the British Empire, it also produced a debt crisis of staggering proportions. England’s national debt soared to over £4 billion, 237 percent of the nation’s GDP. It was considerably larger (in relative terms) than the current debt of Japan, which is widely considered the most grossly overextended nation in the contemporary developed world at a time of widespread and grave debt problems. In order to help preserve the economy in that time of great stress, the British Parliament adopted the Corn Laws of 1815. Parliament, still dominated by the country’s landed class, once again embarked on a policy that served that group’s interests directly and transparently. The Corn Laws prohibited imports of grain when domestic prices fell below a certain level, keeping prices artificially high and keeping revenue from flowing out of the country at a time when every last farthing of hard currency was required at home.

By midcentury, though, as a consequence of a changing economic picture marked by the rising influence of the country’s urban industrial elites and following the deprivation associated with the famines of the 1840s, the protectionist policies that might have made political sense in the wake of Waterloo were encountering serious opposition. Reformers argued that the Corn Laws benefited agriculture at the expense of the manufacturers and the rest of British society and so, in the name of a freer and fairer economy, they sought to have the laws repealed. Unsurprisingly, they met vigorous opposition from the protectionist-minded champions of British agriculture (and landowners). The debate pitted the old England against the new and thereby provides a good illustration of how the forces of the old agrarian economy worldwide were giving way to the emerging industrial forces.

The man who had nominal responsibility for the deal that ultimately undid the protectionist laws and created one of the major early watersheds in the history of free trade was a leader of Britain’s Conservative Party, Prime Minister Robert Peel. He was by no means a natural ally of the forces of reform. Rather, he concluded that if he gave in to them on this one issue, it might placate them enough that they would not seek other, more threatening reforms. This was a strategy that ultimately won the endorsement of François Guizot, who, when entering England in exile after the 1848 debacle in France that resulted in his downfall, agreed that the move might have alleviated some of the grievances that had triggered unrest on the Continent. Ironically, this came from a man who in 1841 made the famous proclamation to the French people “enrichissez-vous,” or “enrich yourself”—through work and savings—to earn voting rights, and who expelled Karl Marx from Paris in 1845.

But Guizot was still in France and the revolutions of 1848 were as yet unimagined when the Corn Laws reform political battle was taking place. Manchester, England, was already, in those early years of the industrial revolution, the heart of the nation’s growing manufacturing economy. There, at the helm of one of the textile businesses that were the leading symbol of the new era, was a businessman with wide-ranging intellectual interests named Richard Cobden. While Peel ultimately marshaled enough of his party to bring down the Corn Laws, it was Cobden who was not only the force behind the push to reform, but also a model for business leaders and pro-business thinkers for two centuries to come, one whose thinking on the issue of trade and markets was to become the prototype for many of the theories today that are seen as central to modern Anglo-U.S. capitalism.

Cobden’s first work, England, Ireland and America by a Manchester Manufacturer, published in 1835, included reflections on a tour he made of North America and on several core themes with which he would later be closely identified including, notably, free trade. Bringing some of his thoughts to bear politically, for seven years Cobden led the Anti-Corn League—an alliance of those who felt protectionism was artificially pushing up food prices, harming the competitiveness of British industry, and provoking countermeasures abroad that made it harder to sell to the world the goods Cobden’s factory and others produced. He believed that, thanks to its lead in technology and productivity, Britain would be able to compete as an industrial power and win, if it were only given an opportunity to do so worldwide.

Cobden became a member of Parliament and almost immediately undertook an attack on Peel and his party, blaming them for the condition of British workers and demanding the repeal of the Corn Laws. While his initial speech was controversial for its harshness toward Peel in a period in which popular violence was a periodic threat in Great Britain (Peel’s personal secretary was gunned down in the street by a man who mistook him for the prime minister), Cobden recovered and marshaled the support of others across the British business community around a philosophy of free trade and government noninterference in markets that would later become known as laissez-faire. He drew on Adam Smith and especially David Ricardo, whose ideas on comparative advantage shaped Cobden’s thoughts on why British businesses could win if the government and other governments would only get out of the way.

Three years after that initial speech, in May 1846, Cobden’s arguments and the broad support he had marshaled prevailed and the first Corn Laws were repealed. Within a month, Peel, who had embraced the reforms in part as a political move but in part, he would later say, because of the persuasiveness of Cobden, was out of office. The final, total repeal of the Corn Laws took place two years later. But Cobden’s victory would have ramifications for many decades to come.

Reading Cobden’s arguments, one is struck by the parallels with the views of modern pro-market politicians. His ideas led to a tariff reform movement that took root and has been influential in England ever since. “We advocate nothing but what is agreeable to the highest behests of Christianity—to buy in the cheapest markets and sell in the dearest,” he said, using the language of higher justice so common in subsequent entreaties over the years.

In words even more similar to those of later followers who openly embraced his views, such as Margaret Thatcher, he wrote, “Peace will come to earth when the people have more to do with each other and governments less.” More apposite to the issue of international trade was his statement that “The great rule of conduct for us in regard to foreign nations is—in extending our commercial relations—to have with them as little political connection as possible.”

Cobden’s name ultimately came to be synonymous with free trade and laissez-faire policies in England, to the point that “Cobdenism” was considered a derisive expression by those who opposed his views and championed more government intervention in the marketplace. In the midst of the rise of British socialism, he was held up by the onetime Economist editor F. W. Hirst as the antithesis of Karl Marx. Hirst wrote of Cobden that he “believed in individual liberty and enterprise, in free markets, freedom of opinion and freedom of trade. [His] whole creed was anathema to Karl Marx.”

Drawing a further parallel between Marx and Cobden, Hirst, in the midst of the Second World War, said that the two

stand out before the civilized world as protagonists of our two systems of political economy, political thought and human society … when this war is over, we in Britain will certainly have to choose whether our Press and Parliament are to be free, whether we are to be a conscript nation, whether private property and savings will be secured or confiscated, whether we are to be imprisoned without trial, whether we are again to enjoy the right of buying and selling where and how we please—in short whether we are to be ruled as slaves by the bureaucracy of a Police State or as free men by our chosen representatives. This conflict will be symbolized and personified by Richard Cobden and Karl Marx.

The calamities predicted by Cobden’s opponents did not come to pass, and from 1849 to World War I, Britain’s growth was unprecedented. It might well be argued that this was due more to Cobden’s accurate analysis of Britain’s comparative advantages in the world marketplace throughout that period (during which time it was the world’s most influential and prosperous nation) than to the universal applicability of his underlying theories about the appropriate roles for government and nation. That is surely to be debated by those who are his intellectual lineal descendants today and by those who represent the rising chorus who argue that more open global trade periodically produces episodes of dislocation or moments in which competitors emerge who are unwilling to embrace truly free markets and thus distort them intolerably. What is undeniable is that as a result of this Manchester calico manufacturer’s efforts, Great Britain, the world’s undisputed superpower of the nineteenth century, unilaterally signaled a move to free-trade economics with the repeal of the Corn Laws. Other states followed suit in Europe and then in North America and worldwide, especially as they saw Britain prosper. Further, it is also clear that, through efforts like those of Cobden, the era of the primacy of agriculture and by extension of the aristocracy had come to an end in England and the era of the ascendancy of the industrial class had begun.

The Multinational Impulse: Playing the Field at Home and Abroad

If one way that business leaders could usher in the current era and its explosion of global commerce was through directly influencing public policymaking, another, naturally, was through devising the management structures and techniques that would in many ways make companies better suited to operating internationally than states, territory-bound as they are.

With the passing of the torch for global economic leadership from England to the United States at roughly the same time as the Corn Laws were repealed, American businessmen were readily accepting responsibility for driving the next waves of economic and political change. One of these was a flamboyant, philandering, reckless itinerant actor and sometime inventor named Isaac Singer. Singer, the son of German immigrants, had made a small fortune as the inventor of a rock-drilling technology and then squandered it supporting an acting company that spent five years touring with him and his mistress in leading roles. (He would ultimately father eighteen children by four women and become involved in a sordid public scandal featuring apparently accurate accusations of bigamy.)

When his time on the road performing theatrical favorites had taken too much of a toll on his bank account, Singer went to New York in an attempt to take a crack at marketing a new machine he had developed to produce signs. There he met George B. Zieber, who provided him with modest backing that initially amounted to $40 and an office space. It was Zieber and an explosion that destroyed Singer’s prototype sign-making machine that later persuaded Singer to move the business to Boston, where the backer felt the ambitious almost-forty-year-old designer might have a better chance of success.

The reception for this sign-making machine was not what he hoped for, but in the shop out of which Singer had been working, there had been a pretty robust trade in manufacturing the complex and unreliable sewing machines of the day. Singer saw an opportunity here and set to work trying to develop a more dependable alternative. Singer later recalled:

I worked on it day and night, sleeping but three or four hours out of twenty-four … The machine was complete in eleven days. About nine o’clock in the evening we got the parts together and tried it; it did not sew … Sick at heart, about midnight we started for our hotel. On the way, we sat down on a pile of boards and Zieber mentioned that the loose loops of thread were on the upper side of the cloth. It flashed upon me that we had forgotten to adjust the tension on the needle thread. We went back, adjusted the tension, tried the machine, sewed five stitches perfectly, and the thread snapped. But that was enough.

Given the importance of the textile trade worldwide, Singer was not alone in trying to solve the problem of producing a reliable sewing machine. But Singer’s design was sound, and, thanks to some clever lawyering that brought together a number of competing design patents into an ownership pool under the auspices of the Singer Company, the company soon became a dominant player.

One of Singer’s early ambitions was to explore international markets. Just four years after he founded his company in 1851, he made his first foray abroad, selling a patent to a French partner named Charles Callebaut. Singer’s relationship with his French partner was no more successful than his multiple romantic entanglements (and considerably less productive). Callebaut proved unreliable and uncooperative when Singer pressed him to adhere to business practices that were in the interests of the American company. His poor experience with Callebaut ultimately convinced Singer that the right way to conduct business was not through informal relationships but by a more direct approach—although not before his international aspirations had, by 1858, resulted in the establishment of independent franchise relationships responsible for growing sales in Europe and throughout the Americas. While within a few years of its establishment the company could be called a multinational, it lacked the systematic organization and operating procedures that could ensure its growth. It was suffering a problem common to other companies trying to test international markets in this era of burgeoning international trade.

The organizational model Singer used was becoming increasingly popular in the United States as transport and communications technologies enabled central control over national operations in a way that would have been difficult in the past. Within just over a decade of operations, Singer had fourteen branches operating across the United States, and he saw this as a system that he could also apply to his international operations. He sought to systematize foreign operations by establishing sales offices abroad. His approach may well have been an even bigger contribution than his sewing machine, even though his basic technological design is still widely employed today. He blazed a trail that would ultimately lead to the centralized, self-contained structure adopted by many modern multinationals.

Singer’s British operations were especially important to the company because two of his chief rivals were already active in Britain (William Thomas, an English company, and the American firm of Wheeler and Wilson). But his business was hamstrung because of its system of shipping fully assembled machines to Great Britain. Shipments often did not keep up with demand, and delays meant failures of cash flow. Nonetheless, his representatives in Britain, Germany, and Sweden were reporting great appetite for the product and lamenting their inability to depend on the company they were representing for timely delivery of sewing machines.

With this as a backdrop, Singer recalled his British manager, George B. Woodruff, and announced that he intended to help solve his problems by opening a plant in Britain. This was a bold stroke, unprecedented among U.S. manufacturers and carefully conceived to put pressure on local competitors and reduce manufacturing costs, which had skyrocketed in the United States after the end of the Civil War. Singer and his company’s directors had concluded that if they could move their production offshore, it would drastically cut shipping, storage, and related expenses. Singer recognized that in the industrial age, it was possible to successfully manage multiple business operations with perhaps even greater ease than he oversaw his “uptown” and “downtown” families in New York.

Singer also recognized that the multinational strategy would produce significant tax advantages, a fact that also motivated the company to expand further around the world. Between his overseas factories and closer company management of its international business networks, the company’s worldwide operations grew to the point that by 1874, more than half of its total sales came from outside the United States. Woodruff, Singer’s manager, understood the value of the company’s approach, writing in one of his letters to the home office, “We can never make our business solid except by branches at all great centres—and wherever we must work by local agents we must bind and tie up the affair within our own control and constant direction.”

By the 1880s, Singer’s name was recognized around the world. His company was the number-one manufacturer of sewing machines. Branches spread across Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Soon vice presidents were installed in each branch to ensure that “neither sickness, death, nor any other circumstances may interfere with the smooth workings of the business to any great extent.” The Singer Sewing Company grew in search of new markets and also to achieve economies of scale; this made Singer a first mover among modern multinationals. Within a few decades, other big U.S. companies such as Ford, Eastman Kodak, General Electric, and Gillette were emulating Singer’s management approaches as well as the company’s strategy of using international expansion to seek favorable tax treatment and lower material and labor costs while using their clout as direct investors to win political influence with governments far from their “home” market.

The Trusts Retrace Their Steps on a Bigger Stage

As was the case for Singer, for many multinationals, what is learned at home can be applied overseas. If this was true for the man whose company would be the harbinger of the modern multinational, it was even more true for the man whose brainchild would later become the archetype of the breed: John D. Rockefeller, founder of the Standard Oil Company.

It was said of Cobden that he had been a good businessman who could have been great if he had not been so interested in getting involved with politics and the great issues of his time. He was an idealist first and a businessman second. John D. Rockefeller, son of a snake oil salesman from upstate New York, was all business. But that did not mean he was not deeply involved in the politics of his day. Indeed, Rockefeller recognized that managing politicians was as important as his attentive, even obsessive, management of his refineries. Others saw the connection as well. In 1881, Henry Demarest Lloyd said, speaking of the way Rockefeller manipulated public policy to suit the interests of his firm: “Standard has done everything with the Pennsylvania legislature, except refine it.” Rockefeller’s articulated mantra was “competition is a sin,” a business view that could not contrast more clearly with the views of either Smith or Ricardo, economists who saw competition as a fundamental strength of the capitalist system. Rockefeller sought every possible advantage, including domination of the North American market for petroleum products that was so complete that to say it was not a monopoly is mere pedantry. Thus we see among emerging competing views of capitalism the divergence of perspectives between the theorists of the marketplace and those who seek to make their fortunes in it.

Standard Oil of Ohio was established in 1870. By 1878, one of Standard’s executives noted that Standard would account for 33 million barrels of America’s 36-million-barrel refining capacity. In 1895, Standard’s buying arm declared that from then on, it would unilaterally decide the price of American crude. By the end of the nineteenth century, Standard oversaw more than 80 percent of all U.S. oil refining and one-quarter of petroleum production.

Standard had achieved this status because Rockefeller took advantage of two parallel trends in post–Civil War America, trends that echo those of the current global era. He noted that state economies were being rapidly integrated, thanks to technologies such as railroads and the telegraph. And he recognized that there was a legal void in the regulation of interstate commerce in this new environment, an opportunity to play state laws against one another for his own corporate advantage and to act with impunity when federal laws were not strong enough to push back at his anticompetitive practices. Cobden had preached the ideal of free markets; Rockefeller was illustrating what happens when those markets are too free, when government’s role is too small or ineffective.

Admittedly, some state governments had tried to take on Standard. But time after time, Rockefeller demonstrated that a state’s “coercive power” can be offset by the “persuasive power” of good lawyers or campaign contributions, or the distribution of other emoluments, or the ability to “venue-shop,” playing legislatures and courts against one another until he found the deal he wanted or avoided a legal outcome he sought to skirt. In so doing, he blazed the trail not only for U.S. corporations but for the approaches used today by global companies vying with national governments.

Part of Rockefeller’s strategy involved his and his colleagues’ essentially putting the lie to the whole idea of “coercive power” by refusing to be coerced. They would avoid court appearances and testimony whenever they could. When they had to testify, they said nothing (JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER IMITATES A CLAM, read one headline) or they lied (“The art of forgetting is possessed by Mr. Rockefeller in its highest degree,” wrote another observer.) When an Ohio court found against Rockefeller, he simply dissolved operations in that state and reorganized as a combination of twenty companies known as the Standard Oil Interests, theoretically separate but all operated out of the same location at 26 Broadway in New York, then subsequently run as a holding company organized in New Jersey after state legislators there were persuaded to pass legislation allowing one corporation to hold stock in another. The American system of government and law did not control Standard Oil. It sometimes inconvenienced it, but typically, the law was bent to the needs of the company.

The success of Rockefeller and other early trusts, including Andrew Carnegie’s U.S. Steel and the National Biscuit Company, bred imitators seeking the organizational formula that would enable them to reap the greatest profits and operate with the fewest constraints. After the Standard Trust was established in 1882, hundreds of trusts were created, reaching a total of three hundred with capitalization exceeding $7 billion by the early years of the twentieth century—a number over a dozen times greater than U.S. federal spending in 1900. The size and influence of the trusts had grown so great that by that year’s presidential elections, the issue of how to control them had become one of the top campaign concerns.

What is said during a campaign and what is actually done are often two different things, and that was true in this instance as well. The newly elected president, McKinley, had talked tough about dealing with the trusts but brought only three antitrust suits. When McKinley was assassinated by a self-professed anarchist, he was replaced by his vice president, the former New York governor and war hero Theodore Roosevelt. Even before Roosevelt took office, the business community worried about how he might deal with the trusts and reached out to him with a message of concern: “there is a feeling in financial circles here that in case you become President you may change matters so as to upset the confidence … of the business world.”

Roosevelt was pro-business at heart and believed that big corporations were a vital engine of economic progress. He was especially at ease with those of his class and background who were discreet in their exercise of power. Rockefeller was an outsider of dubious breeding and odious methods (his obvious contempt for the efforts to contain him bred considerable ill will). To Roosevelt, he was an example of capitalism gone wrong. Because Standard had reportedly bought federal officials in the past, Roosevelt signaled that he was going to play by different rules by returning $100,000 in campaign donations made to him by Standard executives. Roosevelt also pushed for congressional reform and new laws that gave him more power to rein in the most abusive trusts, but the grip of the business titans on the members of the House and Senate was sufficient to block legislation, even though it would likely have been very popular with the public.

Roosevelt was therefore forced to use an 1890 piece of legislation called the Sherman Antitrust Act as a hammer with which to beat back the trust leaders. Roosevelt began by going after J. P. Morgan (for more on him, see the next chapter) and winning. This energized the president, and as soon as he won reelection he used the same tools to go after Standard.

Among the reasons public opinion had turned even more strongly in the young president’s favor were the tireless efforts of journalists to reveal the excesses of companies such as Standard. The signature work of these efforts was The History of the Standard Oil Company, which was published in book form the same month that Roosevelt won reelection. In the book, the author, Ida Tarbell, pointedly attacked Rockefeller for co-opting the legal system within which he was supposed to be operating: “Mr. Rockefeller has systematically played with loaded dice, and it is doubtful if there has been a time since 1872 when he has run a race with a competitor and started fair.”

Bristling at Standard’s success in systematically and effectively undermining all federal legislation targeting it or impinging on the freedoms from which it so richly profited, Roosevelt was outraged but unsurprised when, as he undertook his case against Standard, the company sent its chief director, John Archbold, to Washington to try to persuade the president that further action was unnecessary, that in fact Standard was openly complying with all the government requests that had come its way. Roosevelt was unimpressed, and he directed his Justice Department to forge ahead with its action against the oil behemoth. The legal proceedings were as gargantuan as their target, involving 444 witnesses, 1,371 exhibits, and almost 15,000 pages of transcripts. At issue was whether Standard was a monopoly, and the government argued:

We believe that the defendants have acquired a monopoly by means of a combination of the principal manufacturing concerns through a holding company; that they have, by reason of the very size of the combination, been able to maintain this monopoly through unfair methods of competition, discriminatory freight rates, and other means set forth in the proofs. If this act did not mean this kind of monopoly, we doubt if there is such a thing in this country.

Finally, in May 1911, the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Edward Douglass White, slowly and almost inaudibly read out the decision that temporarily rocked the business world. The decision turned on what would come to be known as the “rule of reason,” which held that an individual’s or a corporation’s actions in restraint of trade would be considered a violation of the Sherman Act if such actions were unreasonable and against the public interest. Wrote White:

The main cause which led to the legislation was the thought that it was required by economic conditions of the times, that is, the vast accumulation of wealth in the hands of corporations and individuals, the enormous development of corporate organization, the facility for combination which such organizations afforded, the fact that the facility was being used, and that the combinations known as trusts were being multiplied, and the widespread impression that their power had been and would be exerted to oppress individuals and injure the public generally.

It seemed the state had gained the upper hand. Standard was dissolved. Rockefeller’s empire appeared to be dead and defeated. The parent company was broken into seven new companies: Standard Oil of New Jersey, Standard Oil of New York, Standard Oil of California, Standard Oil of Ohio, Standard Oil of Indiana, Continental Oil, and Atlantic. However, suffice it to say that if the goals were to contain the influence of these organizations, or to dissuade companies from seeking the advantages associated with awesome size, or to persuade them not to seek to pressure government officials, not a single one of those goals was met. In this respect, the episode presages other subsequent “victories” of government over private power such as the reforms introduced in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008–2009 to reduce the influence of banks that were “too big to fail”—reforms that were so ineffective that within just two years there were more such megabanks than there had been at the time of the crisis.

Standard Oil of New Jersey became Exxon. Standard Oil of New York became Mobil, which later merged again with Exxon to become what was and has since been at or near the top of the list of the world’s largest corporations. The California company became Chevron, the ninth-largest company in the world in 2010. Standard Oil of Ohio became an important part of BP, the fourth-largest company in the world in 2010. The Indiana company became Amoco, also now part of BP. Continental is now ConocoPhillips, today the third-largest energy company in the United States and the fifth-largest refiner in the world. Atlantic became ARCO, now part of Sunoco, the seventy-eighth-largest company in America. The total sales of the successor companies was, in 2010, over $615 billion. To put this in perspective, the GDP of the world’s seventeenth-largest country, according to the World Bank, was roughly the same. While it is important to note that such illustrations are meant purely to give a sense of size and are fraught with problems (notably the fact that GDP and annual sales are apples and oranges as statistical indicators go), it is also worth noting that ExxonMobil alone has sales roughly equivalent to the GDP of Sweden.

More important from the point of view of this chapter, in breaking up Standard Oil, the U.S. government set in motion forces that would dramatically alter the global economic landscape and would do so using tactics to influence public policy worldwide that would hark back to the techniques employed by Rockefeller in America’s state legislatures of the nineteenth century, and in some cases would make them look positively quaint by comparison.

The Myth of National Allegiance: Krueger, IG Farben, IBM, and GM

As private companies grew globally, they behaved in ways that were dramatically different from early state-sponsored enterprises whose existence was clearly predicated on advancing the needs of the state. While this issue has come into focus with ever greater clarity in the first years of the twenty-first century, it is not a new one. From the earliest days of the modern multinational companies like Singer, these companies were acting not in the interest of their home nation—whether that be job creation or generating tax revenue or stimulating investment—but in the narrow nationality-free interests of their shareholders. Indeed, the fulsome rhetoric of politicians, union chiefs, and pundits aside, that is the legal obligation of every corporation, and it should come as no surprise that the easier it has become for companies to seek new markets and more favorable economics around the world, the more rapidly they have done so.

In fact, early in the twenty-first century the move toward globalization had become so pronounced that the majority of the revenues of the Standard and Poor’s 500, America’s top companies, came from overseas. Their interests and prospects had begun to lie outside the United States. When it suited them to pose as U.S. companies, they would. They would even go to comic extremes to do so. When I was a senior official in the U.S. Commerce Department during the 1990s, I recall perverse displays of “patriotism” by international companies seeking the support of the U.S. administration to help them win international contracts, U.S. government advocacy, or financing for their deals. In one such case, two airplane manufacturers—Gulfstream and Bombardier—were eager for U.S. help. Gulfstream, based in Georgia, argued that it deserved the support of the U.S. government because it was headquartered domestically and Bombardier was headquartered in Montreal. Bombardier responded that a greater percentage of its components were manufactured in the United States than was the case for the nominally U.S. firm.

These issues posed, and continue to pose, a real dilemma for U.S. policymakers. For example, both Siemens and Toyota employ tens of thousands of U.S. citizens. Are they U.S. companies? Their profits are repatriated to Germany and Japan, but they are helping Americans in many cases much more than U.S. competitors based here. Further, their shareholders often include large U.S. institutional and individual investors. Lines are blurred, but the vocabulary and outlook have not changed much from the mid-to-early twentieth century, when it was still possible for a man like the General Motors chief executive and future U.S. defense secretary Charles “Engine Charlie” Wilson to say: “What’s good for GM is good for America.” Even before Wilson had uttered those words, the lie was being put to the concept underlying it. Not only did global companies have interests that lay outside the countries in which they were born, they often pursued those interests in ways that were either in conflict with the official national policies of their homelands or otherwise directly contrary to their national interests.

For example, General Motors has throughout its history periodically sought favor in the United States by emphasizing that it was part of the war machine that helped America to victory in the two world wars. But GM played an important role in supporting the German war effort as well. In 1929, GM bought Adam Opel AG, a German auto manufacturer well known at the time for its reliable cars and modern production techniques and facilities. By the late 1930s, it had transformed much of the business into an armaments producer for the German military, currying favor and seeking every possible means of winning significant contracts. From producing trucks to building bombers, GM’s Opel was clearly not good for America.

GM was not alone in seeking a cozy relationship with even the most odious foreign leaders such as Hitler. IBM provided direct assistance to the German government in supporting the operations of the Nazi’s extermination and slave labor programs. In his IBM and the Holocaust, Edwin Black writes: “The head office in New York had a complete understanding of everything that was going on in the Third Reich with its machines … that their machines were in concentration camps generally, and they knew that Jews were being exterminated.” IBM was not merely providing technology, either. It was manning the equipment, and it continued to do so until the United States declared war in 1941.

In his blunt and thought-provoking book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, Canadian law professor and unabashed corporate critic Joel Bakan discusses the IBM case in depth. Echoing Black, who asserted that IBM was not supporting evil but was rather operating in a completely values-free, allegiance-free way, Bakan writes: “Corporations have no capacity to value political systems, fascist or democratic, for reasons of principle or ideology. The only legitimate question for a corporation is whether or not a political system serves or impedes its self-interested purposes.”

Bakan concludes that companies are “singularly self-interested and unable to feel genuine concern for others in any context.” He bases his assertion that they are pathological on this observation. But another way to look at it is to note that these are, after all, only “artificial persons.” Corporations are simply what society requires and enables them to be. The real problem is not in the nature of corporations, it is in the nature of the relationship between those who can redefine corporate roles—that is, governments—and the companies themselves. If the public increasingly finds it difficult to impose its will on companies grown ever more independent by virtue of changes in the law, by virtue of operating globally and beyond the reach of national powers, and by virtue of their size and influence, then it is in the public-private relationship that the problem lies.

Sometimes, however, the pathologies within the public-private relationship result not from its breakdown but from ugly collaborations, particularly when governments with dark objectives work together with companies without scruples, without the ability to refuse unsavory requests. One of the most notorious cases of this also occurred during the World War II era when I. G. Farben, the pharmaceutical giant, compromised decades of work providing the world with lifesaving health innovations when it agreed to work with the Nazi regime to make the chemicals used for the mass extermination of concentration camp prisoners. This is not an isolated instance, though. Regularly in this global era, self-interested companies cross borders, and when it is combined with the need to co-opt or bend state power to their needs, the pursuit of enhancing shareholder value leads them to enter into troubling alliances and relationships that are difficult to defend. To choose but one recent example, a report from New Economy Information Services found that

The democratic countries in the developing world are losing ground to more authoritarian countries when it comes to competing for U.S. trade and investment dollars … This finding raises the question whether foreign purchasing and investment decisions by U.S. corporations may be inadvertently undermining the chances of survival of fragile democracies.

Despite the revealing misuse of the term “U.S. trade and investment dollars” to refer to stateless corporate resources, the report that includes this statement accurately cites many reasons why U.S.-based corporations often prefer to invest in nondemocracies: lower worker wages, looser environmental regulations, bans on labor unions, and the fact that dictators often are strong leaders who make rapid decisions in a very value-free environment. Dictators are easy to cut deals with, even if doing so regularly runs afoul of U.S. foreign policy goals.

Even if corporations are not themselves pathological, it sometimes happens that their leaders may be. This phenomenon too has intersected with the evolution of globalization in troubling ways. Ivan Kreuger was the heir to a small, struggling Swedish match factory. But Ivan was ambitious and an adherent of the Rockefeller view that competition of any kind is not the soul of capitalism but the enemy of business. So Kreuger set about seeking every possible advantage for his enterprise. He began by merging his United Swedish Match Factories with the Vulcan Group, another Swedish match maker, thereby creating a monopoly in his home country. He then followed the model followed by aspiring multinationals pioneered by Singer, “pushing exports, building factories abroad [and] forming alliances with competitors.” He had a special appetite for monopolies and he found a path to forging them that broke new, if unsavory, ground for companies seeking to turn economic leverage into special favors from governments.

In the wake of World War I, many European nations were under heavy financial burdens. Kreuger saw this as an opportunity. In exchange for providing loans, he could secure monopoly status for his company in individual nations. He started with a loan to Poland for $6 million and followed with one to France for $75 million. He would issue bonds in his company and use the capital to buy market domination in country after country, culminating in a 1929 loan to Germany for $125 million.

On its face, the strategy was just multinational business as usual. The problem was that Kreuger was raising money by promising rich returns to investors of as high as 25 percent, but the countries were paying him a fraction of that. To stay ahead of the game, he issued new bonds and shares internationally in such countries as the United States. Eventually he branched out of monopolies in matches and grew to be the third-richest man in the world by using his access to capital to purchase monopolies in a wide variety of basic industries, often abetted by the know-how he gained from banks in which he bought shares or to whom he directed significant business.

He became the number-one private lender to the countries of Europe during the twenties and stayed ahead of the game by riding that decade’s investment boom, translating a huge appetite for securities into cash to cover his operations. He was also very discreet. This was not because of some old-school sensibility about business appearances. It was better described by the economist John Kenneth Galbraith, who recalled that Kreuger’s “great aversion to divulging information, especially if accurate, had kept even his most intimate acquaintances in ignorance of the greatest fraud in history.”

Kreuger was not focused on profits, nor was he just illustrating the ease with which corporations could use the power of persuasion to trump national governments’ powers of coercion. He was a criminal. But he was so successful that even U.S. president Herbert Hoover sought his advice on international trade. A BBC story written decades later illustrates how he operated (and laid the groundwork for future fraudsters such as Bernard Madoff):

Kreuger’s financial methods were becoming increasingly devious. He had always sailed close to the edge of legitimacy; keeping liabilities “off balance sheet,” establishing a network of more than 200 firms that bamboozled auditors and bankers, and inventing non-voting shares. He also conjured up “options,” derivatives, and stashed cash away in secret subsidiaries in Liechtenstein and Switzerland.

As was the case for Madoff, when the depression came, Kreuger’s Ponzi scheme came undone. He had floated $200 million in loans that were coming due, but the markets were no longer eager to provide him with new cash. Pressure grew from creditors. Then, on a chilly day in Paris in the early spring of 1932, the fifty-two-year-old Kreuger got up, got dressed, wrote three letters, lay down on his bed, undid his waistcoat, and shot himself through the heart.

Thirty-six years later, his story—the greatest scandal of an era fraught with them—intersected with the story at the heart of our book when Stora bought Swedish Match. It was not a marriage made in heaven, and within just a couple of years the conservative businessmen at Stora discovered that they could not digest the businesses that survived Kreuger’s misdeeds. Just as hard to digest is the fact that Kreuger’s multinational misdeeds remain shocking while the support of IBM, GM, and I. G. Farben plus many other still-familiar corporations for Hitler’s genocidal conquest of Europe is shrugged off as “business as usual”—which in fact it was.

Free Trade Redux: Kodak, NAFTA, and the WTO

The years after World War II saw “history’s most sweeping reorganization of the international order” as the victorious United States, along with its European allies and now-defeated and occupied former enemies, built a constellation of new global institutions, most of which still exist today. U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt’s fifth cousin, sought to lock the formerly warring countries of Europe into “an open multilateral economic order managed through new institutional mechanisms.” Europeans, in need of American financial and security support, readily agreed.

The reluctance to embrace the creation of international institutions that had produced such a chilly welcome for Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations after World War I was replaced with a recognition that the world required supranational mechanisms as never before in order to address global threats and broadly shared needs. A new layer of governance was seen as necessary, but it was deliberately built to be weak, not to pose a threat to national sovereignty. The Allies built protections into it to ensure the consolidation of their victory—from ensuring American and European domination of international financial institutions to granting veto powers to the five great allied powers in the UN Security Council. Elsewhere, institutions required consensus or complex ratification procedures to take any meaningful action. Nonetheless, the recognition that the new era required new structures further challenged the traditional role of the state. Signing international treaties and joining international organizations, from the UN to the World Bank to the International Criminal Court to the GATT (and later the WTO) to the International Labor Organization to regional development and security organizations, had the effect of constraining national governments. The complications extend to corporations as well, but the implications are not what they might seem at first glance.

When Standard Oil of New Jersey made agreements to do business in Iraq after World War I, the company had to worry about two sources of law: the United States and British-controlled Iraq. Now when Exxon does business in a foreign country such as Malaysia, it not only has to worry about making sure its activities comply with American and Malaysian law, it also has to consider international human rights treaties for which it can be found liable in American courts under the Alien Tort Claims Act, relevant WTO provisions under which any country whose trade privileges are being infringed can bring a complaint and seek binding enforcement, regulations on global public health, the law of the sea, international labor agreements, or violations of any investment treaties signed by the United States or Malaysia.

A logical assumption might be that such a web of interlocking and overlapping legal obligations would be a great burden to international corporations and a real constraint. While the regulations are a burden and require hiring armies of lawyers and compliance officers, the reality is rather different than it was during, say, the era of trust-busters and tough enforcement of national laws. International law is a patchwork quilt of disaggregated institutions and legal regimes that do not and cannot coordinate their attempted regulation of corporations. This situation enables companies to systematically analyze the legal playing field and use their resources to devise strategies by which they regularly score victories that make them considerably freer to operate on the global stage than they were when they were limited to activity within the ambit of a single sovereign.

Furthermore, there is a host of areas in which the need for international laws or regulations has been stifled or has undermined the concerted efforts of organizations. The failure of international efforts to create a binding international agreement on climate change resulted from many factors including, notably, differences between developed and developing countries over how to share the costs associated with producing cleaner energy. But another important force to impede, dilute, or direct climate policies was an effective alliance between private actors who did not wish to undertake the additional expenses associated with the more efficient, cleaner production of energy. This group was actively led by oil and gas companies, as well as the coal industry, spending more than $1 billion on lobbying during the last decade to impede approval of component steps of the agreement including the Kyoto Protocol, which, although ratified by 192 countries worldwide, was never ratified in the United States thanks to the power of corporate special interests in Congress.

Another area in which strong regulation has been regularly and effectively blocked, again by an alliance of corporations and states that have sought to maintain their own sovereign autonomy (often with the cajoling support of very powerful corporate interests), is the global financial services sector. But in areas such as the environment or financial services, the result has been that corporate actors have taken advantage of a more relaxed global regulatory and legal environment than they would find in many advanced economies, and the advanced economies in turn have been compromised because they face the choice of enforcing their laws and seeing investment flows directed to less demanding regions of the world, or not enforcing them and seeing their prerogatives as sovereigns diluted.

Similarly, the existence of international regulatory regimes is also regularly used by corporations to pressure countries into creating an atmosphere more favorable to their businesses. As we have seen, this atmosphere can alternatively be more open or more protectionist depending on the companies’ narrow corporate interests, as is the case with Chevron to General Motors to raw materials producers everywhere. Likewise, countries use these international regulatory regimes to pry open foreign markets or defend their own markets based on political factors, which typically means economic pressure back home. In this way, the organizations created to advance the free trade ideals of Smith, Ricardo, and Cobden have become party to the creation of an international trading system that is both driving globalization and at the same time is now so convoluted and compromised by players seeking to manipulate it that it may be facing its greatest challenges in the years ahead.

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The modern global trading system was born in 1947 as part of that era’s blossoming of weak international institutions. It was known at the time as the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), the name itself an illustration of the fact that in area after area, global governance ambitions had to be compromised to produce progress. The original idea had been to create an International Trade Organization, but when that entity did not get off the ground, the treaty that had been created to lay the foundations for it took its place. Periodically, the signatories to the GATT would meet with the purpose of reducing barriers to trade. While creating such a system has clear economic merits, it must also be acknowledged that by negotiating away the ability to impose tariffs at their borders, states are giving up an important element of sovereign control. That’s not just a philosophical issue, either. When, as is increasingly happening today, important states choose to trade unfairly by subsidizing national players or creating nontariff barriers to trade and others are legally obligated to remain open, it can create imbalances and tension.

In the “Uruguay Round” of GATT negotiations, which took place from 1986 to 1994, the 123 signatory nations reflected on the importance of being able to address such tensions by finally agreeing, half a century after the idea was proposed, to create a World Trade Organization. The WTO enables countries who feel their trading rights have been violated or “nullified or impaired” by another country’s actions to seek redress, first through confidential consultations, then before a panel of experts that can make binding rulings in favor of one or the other of the parties, then before a larger appellate body that has the final say in such matters—unless states choose to simply ignore the rulings, an option that, for example, the United States has retained since the WTO’s founding.

Theoretically, this is a process among sovereign states. However, in practice, corporations and corporate lawyers drive the process in most cases. To choose but one example from hundreds, on December 5, 1997, the WTO announced the resolution of a case between the United States and Japan regarding American accusations of Japanese protectionism in the photographic film industry. The headline in the next day’s New York Times was KODAK IS LOSER IN TRADE RULING ON FUJI DISPUTE. Despite the theory underlying the WTO—and its rules that even prohibit private actors like NGOs or corporations from filing amicus curiae briefs to support particular sides in a case—it has increasingly become a forum for private special interests pleading their cases behind the veil of nation-states’ sovereignty (even though, as we have seen, multinational companies tend to have national allegiance only when it suits them).

The Kodak-Fuji case had its origins in the fact that when Kodak hired George Fisher as its chairman in 1993, he had come from Motorola, where he had effectively lobbied the U.S. government to pressure Japan to liberalize their phone markets. As someone who worked on trade issues in the U.S. government at the time, I well remember Fisher as a smart, affable, and understated but effective chief executive who was as comfortable in Washington as any senator or cabinet member. Frustrated that Kodak had only a 10-percent market share in the Japanese film market, much lower than it enjoyed in similar markets elsewhere in the world, Fisher lobbied the U.S. government to step in and act on his behalf. When that did not produce the desired results, Fisher did what any corporate CEO would do: he hired a very big, high-priced law firm full of former senior U.S. government officials—in this case, Dewey Ballantine, whose trade practice led by former deputy U.S. trade representative Alan Wolf—to develop a petition under Section 301 of U.S. trade law requesting that Wolf’s old agency, the trade representative’s office, pursue a case against the Japanese.

Fuji responded with its own lawyers and a 585-page brief it presented to the USTR defending its position titled “Rewriting U.S. History.” Despite the fact that any international case would ultimately be between governments, it was Fuji that lobbied USTR Mickey Kantor in its ultimately unsuccessful attempts to forestall a confrontation in the WTO. When the case did go to the WTO, both companies stayed actively involved, providing their governments with thousands of pages of legal documents at a cost of millions and millions of dollars to each. At every stage of the legal process, from the initial filing through the consultations, panelist selection, submissions to the panel, and response to the panel’s questions, Kodak’s and Fuji’s teams were effectively driving and subsidizing their “national” efforts. Ultimately, after the WTO found for the Japanese, Kodak kept up the heat by pushing the Commerce Department, where I had worked, to monitor the Japanese film market and make periodic reports pushing for their interests. Fuji continued its work on the other side of the Pacific, seeking to “defend” its home market.

The fact that virtually simultaneously with the announcement of the WTO decision, Kodak announced it was cutting fourteen thousand jobs in the United States and moving many to lower-cost labor environments such as its factory in Guadalajara, Mexico, was not seen as an impediment to the U.S. government’s support of Kodak in the WTO case. The company was using the country but felt no obligation in return, nor did the officials of the U.S. government carefully weigh the theoretical economic merits of free trade with the clearly painful dislocations associated with globalization and the opening of vast new cheap labor markets to corporations, many of which were once seen as “U.S.” enterprises. Kodak’s industry has seen great upheaval as a consequence of the burgeoning of digital photography. But whereas the company once supported eighty thousand jobs, the vast majority of them in the United States, today it employs only about twenty thousand people, of whom half are located outside the United States. Once part of the bedrock of its headquarters city, Rochester, New York, Kodak is now yet another global actor without any true national identity, that nonetheless continues to seek to use the U.S. government wherever possible to advance its interests.

The behavior is common. We used to see it in government regularly. I remember, for example, being actively lobbied for U.S. government support by the Caterpillar tractor company to help it win access to the Three Gorges Dam, a major project in China. When the U.S. government declined to provide it with the support it sought, Caterpillar simply slipped off the U.S. flag in which it had draped itself and sought preferential export treatment from European countries where it had operations. I remember visiting a Caterpillar factory in Indonesia, getting the big welcome, being offered bowls of local cashews, taking a tour of the plant, and then asking how much of the equipment they were assembling and selling in Indonesia came from the United States. The plant official with whom I was walking smiled and said, “Only the stencils for the Caterpillar logos. Most everything else is made right here in Asia.”

Gaming the system is what companies do. They shape it through lobbying, influence it through their lawyers, and use it in much the same way that sailors passing through a port treat the local girls they will never see again. They even dress themselves up prettily in national uniforms, but their motives are purely personal in nature. In addition to the WTO, thousands of bilateral investment treaties exist that have been created in abundance, despite the degree to which they clearly cut away even more of the sovereign prerogatives once enjoyed by states. Companies with clever lawyers can use the WTO or these agreements to structure their approaches so that if they don’t get the judgments or support they want from one government or multilateral entity, they can press forward in multiple forums in the hopes of getting the desired outcome.

Out of the Ashes of Europe: The EU and Stora

After 1945, Stora Kopparberg integrated itself into the world economy. Forestry had continued to become one of its most important lines of business for the same reason it was so important to Sweden: forests cover 60 percent of the country. But the industry is heavily dependent on foreign markets. It is also fiercely competitive worldwide, a fact that only grew more pronounced as more and more forest products from distant corners of the globe were made available and affected international pricing and demand. To cope with the competition, the company purchased one of Sweden’s leading cardboard producers, and in 1962, it made a bold venture overseas, literally retracing the initial international route of the Vikings to establish a forest products plant in Nova Scotia.

The company would later receive criticism from Canadians who sued because they objected to Stora’s spraying of local forests with dioxin, a poisonous herbicide. For Stora, this raised for the first but not the last time the important issue of what social obligations international companies have to local populations and to what degree they assume responsibility for meeting the terms of the social contract from governments whose rights they have assumed or whose influence they have superseded.

Gradually during the 1970s, Stora reduced its increasingly uncompetitive exposure to the steel business and focused more and more on forests. The result was that the company grew steadily throughout the next decade. By 1988, a journalist noted that Stora, this ancient enterprise about which so few people have heard a thing or given a thought, “owns forests half the size of Belgium, produces enough liquid-packaging board to make two milk cartons for every person in the world and makes newsprint for Sweden’s newspapers and some of Europe’s other largest dailies.” To offer another such analogy, today Stora either owns, manages, or leases land in Europe, Asia, and South America that is equivalent in acreage to Qatar.

In the late 1980s, by the time of the Swedish Match deal, Stora had clearly embarked on another chapter in its long, twisting story. Its acquisition of Kreuger’s old firm, although ultimately not the game changer it was thought it might become, was at the time the largest cash and securities deal in Sweden’s history. The country, sensing the importance of international markets to its business, was also working like other Swedish firms to position itself to be competitive in the unifying markets of the European Union.

Bo Beggren, Stora’s president at the time of the Swedish Match deal, stated: “We have been a fairly quiet, silent company over the years but [recently] we have embarked on an aggressive expansion. We were searching for something new to develop, and Swedish Match, with its international organization, was an obvious partner.” Beggren further underscored the company’s new course during a “coming-out” party in 1988, hosted to celebrate the seven hundredth anniversary of Bishop Peter of Vasteras’s deal for his shares in the old mining company. The event was held at the bottom of the mine’s Great Pit.

Beggren used the occasion both to celebrate and to lobby Swedish officials who attended the bash to set aside protectionism and embrace the changes that entering the European Union would bring—a ceding of national sovereignty that would have been virtually impossible for Gustav Vasa to comprehend. “The ability of the old mine to survive continues to amaze,” stated Beggren to the 6,500 guests gathered below the cliffs that were once so rich with copper. He celebrated the company’s long life in his remarks, then turned to the issue of the moment. “Our future lies in European integration,” he asserted. “We should be open for new changes and new worlds.”

Typically neutral, Sweden’s political leadership had long attempted to steer clear of Europe’s Common Market, steadfastly maintaining its ability to compete as an independent actor. But with the creation of the European Union looming just four years away, Sweden’s business leaders argued that remaining outside the world’s largest market would put them at too great a disadvantage. Arguing that the new Stora was now “too big to be ignored” in Europe, Beggren went on to say that, for the well-being of the Swedish nation, the country would have to join the European Union to avoid isolation.

The moment was symbolic of the several larger global trends driving the latest and most transformative era of globalization. Within six years, Sweden would join the European Union. At the same time, the country began to relax economic regulations that had been in place since the most interventionist era that had made the country notorious as a resolute capital of the Eurosocialist welfare state ethos. There was a sense that in the era of Reagan, Thatcher, Greenspan, and globalization, Anglo-American capitalist values were transforming the world, business was permanently and irreversibly claiming “the commanding heights” from government, and global competition demanded that nations cede sovereignty, dial back regulations, give up control of their borders, and do so for the competitive good of their people (and of course “their” corporations).

It should be noted, though, that even as Sweden was swept up in the regionalization-globalization tsunami that seemed to be leading all nations to harmonization around a free-market ideal that had its roots in Anglo-U.S. capitalism, there were still key differences. A former Swedish finance minister described these to me in a Stockholm restaurant not far from the offices of the Swedish government. Par Nuder, a Social Democrat who is not only a seasoned participant in the Swedish political scene but also a sharp-eyed and thoughtful analyst of international economic trends, cited one seemingly paradoxical way in which a country with a tradition that is a classic example of what might be described in the United States as “big government” attitudes had a competitive edge in the global era.

“We have,” said Nuder, “at the center of everything we do here a very strong social compact. Government and labor and business have always seen it as essential to collaborate. That means that when there are the kind of competitive dislocations that globalization causes, there are programs to support and retrain those who might lose their jobs. And everyone in the country knows this. So we have never feared globalization the way so many in America do because in the United States there is really no social safety net. Here, there is confidence that the system will take care of people long enough to adapt to change.”

Nuder illustrated his point by citing the case of the crises that impacted auto manufacturers worldwide. He noted that “free-market” America had to step in and temporarily nationalize General Motors in order to avoid catastrophic job losses but that “socialist” Sweden did not intervene with Saab in the same way because it knew the workers were already taken care of. “We have,” he said, “a greater freedom to embrace globalization without fear”—something he noted as ironic given Sweden’s small size and the fact that America, which so many around the world saw as the primary driver and beneficiary of globalization, was experiencing a serious antiglobalization backlash in the wake of the financial crises and high unemployment of 2008–2009.

When asked about this phenomenon, the former United States trade representative Charlene Barshefsky nodded, paused for a moment, then said, “I think that’s an interesting point. I think we have underestimated the dislocations associated with globalization and have yet to do enough to compensate for them among the members of our workforce. And until we do, there will remain great political pushback on trade issues.”

Ten years after the great shareholder party in the old copper pit in Falun that was once the heart of a fiercely independent region, Stora took the natural next step in its evolution, once again keeping it in step with the changing times. It merged with the Finnish forest products and packaging giant Enso to form Stora Enso Oyj.

Immediately, the new company became a global force to be reckoned with in its industry. At the same time, the company whose history was so inextricably bound up with that of Sweden moved its headquarters to Finland. Today, it runs its international operations out of London. The Swedish government that gave life to the company and was also sustained by it at the time of the nation’s greatest triumphs and struggles had acceded to its pressure to join the European Union to maintain national competitiveness, and then it could only watch as the onetime proprietors of the Great Copper Mountain pulled up stakes and moved their headquarters abroad, assuming their role as the latest entry into the ranks of the Global Era’s stateless supercitizens.