GM Sinks Beneath Toyota

The news out of Detroit confirms it: for the first time since 1931 General Motors is not the world’s largest car maker. Toyota is. The change has been inevitable for some time and was greeted without much fanfare in most parts of the country. Couple that news with the recent report out of the UN that America had slipped from its perennial spot as the world’s most technologically advanced society [it dropped to 7th in 2006 behind some European countries after having been top for the last twenty-five years] and the picture gets more complex.

The emergence of a world economy and the last adoption of more liberal trade policies throughout the world has exposed America, for the first time in its history, to true world class competition. For so much of the last fifty years America has dominated industry after industry based not just on its ingenuity and hard work, but also on its strategic strengths: a huge domestic market to spread costs across, and an industrial base unaffected by World War II. The world has finally caught up and overtaken. The problem for America is to shake off its insularity and become part fo the world community.

Americans are far too ignorant and uncaring of what goes on around the world. A good example is last week’s Virginia Tech tragedy. It made the front pages of newspapers around the world. It engendered discussions about American culture and its gun laws. It was treated as if it were local news in some very exotic places. The lesson is that for most of the world news is local no matter where it is sourced. Globalization has been accepted both in terms of work and in terms of culture and politics far more deeply [that does not mean there is no resistance] elsewhere than here in America. Here people still have an insular view. They don’t travel anywhere near the amount other nationalities do. And they dwell far too much on the past: on tradition, on a variety of American myths, and on an “American is best” mentality that prevents them embracing anything other than a stylized and overly romanticized view of their “roots”. I find this insularity odd particularly because the vast of today’s Americans can trace their “Americanness” back only two or three generations. Perhaps their apparent rejection of the outside world is simply an attempt to continue to justify why their ancestors came here: it must be better here [or else why did we do it?], and so why would we care about the outside world? We know it sucks because we left it behind! America has reached out before: both World Wars, the reconstruction of post-war Europe, and its efforts during the Cold War. Maybe we need to re-interpret those as being shaped exclusively by self-interest and that the underlying truth is that America was and still is only concerned with itself.

None of this meant much while everyone else was as insular as America. But that seems to have changed. The world has moved on so much since 1945 and even since the 1980’s. Globalization, which was very much wrought by American technology and aggression, seems to have taken root more broadly and more deeply everywhere but here. Global tastes and styles count, not just American ones. Which is why GM can’t sell its American made cars anywhere else: no one wants them. And it is why Toyota has grown so much: it has a truly world view.

I read that some of the workers in Detroit said that they’d have to work harder so that GM could regain top spot. Hard work is not the issue: Americans are legendary for their effort. No. The issue is one of joining the world. Of taking part in worldwide things. Of shedding some of the inward view and adding an international flavor. It means getting out and about and realizing that for most of the world the “World Series” is a quaint little local tournament played only by Americans in America. It has nothing to do with the world. The relentless success and dominance of America since World War II was based upon a dearth of choice and competition. There was a “greyness” or lack of pizzazz everywhere else. Nowhere, except maybe for London in the 60’s, had the energy America had. That seems to have changed. Especially since 9/11. Now it is America that appears drab and lacking in energy. London is clearly re-emerging as the world’s premier financial center, taking jobs and business away from New York; France is still the epicenter of fashion; China looms as the center of gravity for production and with it the establishment of international standards; India has leapt ahead in technology servicing; Brazil leads us all in energy independence; and Germany remains dominant in high end engineering. Moreover all these places are becoming more interconnected while America looks on and broods about the problems that international entanglements bring to its independence of action. America is beginning to appear very outdated: the world has changed but America still clings to its glory years of the 1950’s.

The news from Detroit is just one small sign that the world has changed. Let’s hope America can react and become a constructive member of the world community rather than falling into the sullen isolation that gripped some of the declining world powers of the past.