[1] by Wynton Kelly Stone Guess
There may not be a recognizable nation left as it becomes yet another node in someone else’s game of Liquid war
As a 26 year old, much of my short life has been spent living in or near major international cosmopolitan hubs such as New York City, where I grew up outside of, and London, where I have resided for the past five years. With the time I have spent around these two cities (15 years all together) and the amount of travelling I have been afforded living in Europe and having friends across the continent, I have begun to notice the increasing homogeneity among major cities. The same kinds of businesses and services are cropping up all over, which to me have made the most foreign of places feel oddly familiar. I have been encountering New York City wherever I travel with the same coffee shops and services that would characterize a now gentrified Brooklyn.
As I prepare for my next big move to Portugal, this question surrounding increasing homogeneity has been one that has come up time and time again. Portugal is a country I have had the pleasure to get to know over the past four years thanks to my Portuguese friends who have not only have been teaching me the language, but have shown me the country as they knew it growing up. In the time I have visited, a major concern that comes up has been the pressure that Portuguese culture has come under in the past decade as the country quickly became a darling of American and British media outlets promoting tourism and property investment. The country and many countries like have subsequently been inundated with tourists and foreign capital that have seen it as their own personal paradise.
In the short term, this boom of tourism has lead to a great amount of prosperity and revenue for Portugal, but it has also come at a great cost. As cities like Lisbon and Porto have come to rely more on tourism, the infrastructure and economy of the cities have come to cater more and more to the tourist industry instead of the residents and communities of those cities. Entire neighborhoods are being transformed into yet another gentrified Brooklyn.
While mass tourism seems like a major issue within itself, I will argue that it is not the core issue that afflicts cities, but a symptom and tool of a much larger structural problem that goes back to globalization coupled with the logic of markets, and the global consumer culture that arises as a result.
I will begin with an anecdotal observation my father made recently in a conversation surrounding personal principles and integrity. For many, integrity shifts based upon wants and needs. One might not steal when it comes to something that is clearly defined as a "want" but when in matters of life and death, one might in order to feed themselves or their loved ones. A large part of one's moral compass comes from the ability to distinguish the often grey area between wants and needs. Times of crises only make this distinction even more difficult.
This reasoning extends beyond the personal though when dealing with the welfare of a city or nation, and trying to balance the many and often contradictory interests that make up the so-called "will of the people". The geopolitical has to be reconciled with the national, and community needs. The 2008 financial crisis and the recession that followed brought a massive amount of pressure on the global economy and put many nations in an existential crisis of economic survival. Countries across the world responded in different ways, but one kind of response that was seen, especially in Europe, was an opening up of the country to foreign investment. In the case of Portugal, this was done through the relaxing of housing legislation that tended to favor tenants in city centers, and then courting of foreign investments through tax breaks and visa schemes such as the golden visa. In all, this amounted to creating a more business friendly environment in a time where many tech companies such as Airbnb and Uber were becoming popular in Europe. This laid the infrastructure for a nascent tourist industry that skyrocketed across the country.
If one is to look at this purely through the lens of national interests, this course of action did a lot to revive the stagnating economy and rescue it from reaching a fate similar to that of Greece. But on the level of the communities, this course of action turned out to be destabilizing and has lead to displacement of people who had lived in the same communities for decades. Whether intentional or not, the nation was willing to put its national and international interests ahead of that of its people, cities, and culture. It simply put itself up for sale to the highest bidder.
But if you zoom out further, and look at this issue from a geopolitical level, it becomes easier to see why this kind of solution is almost inevitable. Geopolitics today is defined by a frenzied competition between and within international blocs, nations, cities, corporations, and national and international elites with the volatility of capitalist system at the heart. Each attempts to utilize whatever is at their disposal in order to gain an upper hand. Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar calls this multileveled competition Liquid War.
Globalization is the main driver of competition in this war as each player seeks to optimize their profits in a system where capital and finance are fluid across borders. This makes any national situation quite precarious, when there is the risk of capital flight at almost every decision making corner. For the larger countries such as the United States, who have an inordinate amount of influence over the levers of the international system, their goal is complete domination. This would mean free reign for its elites and corporations globally, as the whole world is reduced to a market rigged for profit. These panoply of corporations range from the insidious, such as arms manufacturers, to the mundane and innocuous realm of Starbucks and McDonalds. This corporate domination creates an infectious bland global culture that plays on our inner desires and caters to the lowest common denominator in its quest for universal appeal, and maximum profits.
In the face of this kind of pressure, smaller competitors have a choice to either resist or submit. Countries that choose to resist the marketization of their country in the end have it imposed upon them either through economic warfare, as we see currently with Iran and Venezuela, or they have it enforced through the barrel of the gun, as were the fates of Iraq and Libya.
But countries that choose to compete and accept the embrace of American market forces, do not simply roll over and submit. Implementation, whether wholehearted or reluctant, always meets resistance. One of the first lines of defense against this homogenization through commerce, is the culture and cultural heritage. Culture provides a point of unity that can be rallied around as a node of resistance. It is the bottom line consensus that binds a society together. This is one of the reasons why culture is one of the first things to come under attack when a country opens itself up to globalized market forces. Global consumer culture binds itself around culture, breaks it down and atomizes it, making it more digestible to consumers. The constituent parts are rendered “for everyone” as it is reduced to another artifact, curiosity, or hobby that anyone can and should partake in.
When faced with participation in the game of Liquid War, Portugal had little choice but to play. Having to compete within the European Union, where other nations have been playing for decades, and the bloc has been competing since its creation, the choice felt more as an inevitability. In this light, one can see Portugal’s government not as betraying its people for the sake of economic competition, but another nation under siege by the forces and logic of the market. Mass tourism then becomes a consequence and even weapon of these powers that render a singular culture docile as it integrates into the amorphous blob of consumer culture.
If choices concerning national interests for countries like Portugal seem more as inevitabilities, is resistance to totalization completely futile? If you only have the ability to think within the rules and logic of Liquid War, then yes. Whether we are fully cognizant or not, the logic of business and markets completely dominates our thought processes. In a world where we are inclined to become our own personal brand through social media, we ourselves are urged to participate in the game as our own mini corporation, where the whole world is reduced to competition, and our logic is filtered through the lens of the financial.
In order to truly begin to combat issues such as mass tourism and the evisceration of culture, it does not begin with thinking about policy. There needs to be deep thinking about the way that we think and the impulses that lead us to our decisions. We cannot fall victim to a thought process that values immediate gratification, and fast fixes over long term strategic thinking. There needs to be a dialogue that clearly defines wants and needs and what line we as a society are not willing to cross.
I want to end with a final anecdote that comes from cooking, that I believe is relevant in understanding how a resistance can be fostered. When cooking meat and vegetables, one always has to be careful not to overcook them as the proteins in meat are heat sensitive, and plants cell walls break down when exposed to heat. In both cases heat has the upper hand, making it easy to overcook them and destroy their physical integrity. But with mushrooms the cell walls are made of a substance called chitin which is similarly heat sensitive, but forms an interconnected network that gives the mushroom structure and helps its cells stay intact when exposed to heat.
Right now our communities are more like the isolated cell walls of a plant that easily dissolve when exposed to heat. If a resistance is to begin, the health of our communities must be addressed. We cannot continue to forsake our cities, our communities, our people in the interests of the nation. There may not be a recognizable nation left as it becomes yet another node in someone else’s game of Liquid war.
[1] musician and composer from EUA, researcher, currently doing phd at FCSH NOVA Lisboa in contemporary history with the subject of hip-hop and globalization.
Essay for Mural Sonoro webmagazine
Tiago Angeja photog.