No peace even after a Big Mac meal

McDonald’s decision to leave Russia permanently after more than 30 years recalls in ironic magnitude the fast food giant’s decision to open its first restaurant in Moscow in 1990, in a symbolic thaw in the Cold War that occurred even before the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991.

Now, in the wake of the war in Ukraine, another home of McDonald’s, the American gastronomic icon’s departure from Russia highlights the questionable assertion made by the American journalist Thomas Friedman in what he called the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention. (Those are the arches of the McDonald’s logo.)

According to Friedman, no two countries that both possessed McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each had got its McDonald’s. That is because McDonald’s operates only in countries that possess a middle class which is prosperous and extensive enough to support its franchises.

A “McDonald’s country” is not interested in fighting wars any more but is keen on maximising its economic prospects peacefully within globalisation. Extrapolating from the McDonald’s theory of peace, no two countries that sported the Golden Arches would go to war, it was argued. The Big Mac apparently had achieved the advent of the perpetual peace only dreamed of by pre-McDonaldian philosophers such as Immanuel Kant.

Friedman’s theory, propounded in 1996, was on shaky grounds by 1999, when Nato’s air war on rump Yugoslavia pitted the McDonald’s outlets of Belgrade against those of the countries of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Now, the hasty departure of McDonald’s from Russia points out painfully that McDonald’s countries can and do go to war. So much for economic integration as a guarantor of peace achieved over burgers and fries.

Incidentally, I am not castigating McDonald’s for the state of world affairs. It serves good fast food. So for Friedman: He is always interesting because he is always intelligent. Who else but he could have come up with a global peace theory centred on an everyday hamburger?

However, it is necessary to unpack the McDonald’s peace theory. Its fatal flaw, as I see it, is to make prosperity the cause rather than the consequence of peace. That causality does not hold because it is politics and not economics that orders the world. Economics follows where politics leads. Politics can lead to either peace or war. The market follows dutifully.

Politics derives its meaning from the Greek idea of politiká, or affairs of cities, which consists of activities associated with taking decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of resources or status. International politics conveys these contested power relations beyond the ambit of the nation-state.

Economics, by contrast, derives its name from oeconomy, or the art of supervising the material and moral resources of a household to uphold good order.

Clearly, the household can exist only within the city/nation-state, and not the other way around. When the citizens of politiká are at peace, they can prosper as workers of oeconomy. But when the structures of politiká, whether domestic or international, fall apart through civil strife or international war, the inhabitants of oeconomy are dispersed into the wilderness of the Greek anarchos, the fate of having no ruler. Oeconomy cannot function until the rules of politiká have been restored.

These are cardinal ideas which the onset of post-classical centuries has not diminished, let alone demolished. A McDonald’s kitchen is no more (or less) than a modern outsourced version of the ancient Greek kitchen as a separate part of the house, a layout that was copied in ancient Rome. When the home disappeared because of war, so did the kitchen. It could not have been otherwise. Prosperity did not underpin peace: Peace made prosperity possible.

That logic has returned to haunt the McDonald’s theory of peace. The great illusion of Western thinking in the fallen wake of the Nazi and Soviet challenges was to believe that once countries became more prosperous, they would become more democratic, and the more democratic they became, the less warlike they would become.

That teleological triumphalism has been disproved because it ignores the visceral reality of power and status that drive conflict both within and among nations.  Politiká is ineradicable because it answers fundamental questions of human identity: the needs for personal and social recognition, protection and preservation. Those material needs are mediated by the higher-level needs of power and status. The market brings food to the political table: It is not that table.

Without a stable state protecting the market, the market would disappear. The McDonald’s at Bukit Merah exists only partially because of the global market. Immediately, it operates because Singapore is at peace within and without. 

Having said all this, this fan of McDonald’s and Thomas Friedman would add that their common theory of gastronomic peace deserves another chance.

Hope refuses to leave even a dismal horizon. McDonald’s has said it would sell all its sites in Russia to a local buyer and would begin the process of “de-arching” the restaurants, which would involve removing its name, branding and menu. However, it would retain its trademarks in Russia.

Good. Who knows? Years down the road, McDonald’s might reappear in a Russia released from the self-inflicted nightmare of its cruel war on Ukraine.

Friedman could then write an epilogue to his theory in the light of a Russia that creates a new relationship between nuclear peace and the simple act of eating a Big Mac.

The writer is a Singapore-based journalist. He can be reached at asad@sph.com.sg