The world, it seemed, was getting flatter and flatter. Or was it spikier? In any case, oil was cheap, and the global economy was a time-crunching, electron-beeping, carbon-smoking, border-integrating network of trade and finance. The Berlin Wall came tumbling down and the world wide web connected the Central Asias and Romanias to the North Americas and Japans. Seafood crossed the Atlantic once to be packaged and again to be sold, all with little thought to the world’s climate systems. A table bought in Toronto was the same as a table bought in Miami, because they both came from the same factory near Shanghai.
And then oil became more expensive.
Harvard’s Dani Rodrik speculated last month in Emirates Business 24|7 about what high oil prices mean for globalization. Global trade, he said, is unsupported by any institutions of governance strong enough to make it resilient against new threats — peak oil, financial crises, and climate change. He explained: “There is no global anti-trust authority, no global lender of last resort, no global regulator, no global safety nets, and, of course, no global democracy.” Rodrik warned, to the disappointment of a reader expecting a more provocative conclusion, that the unequivocal success of globalization can no longer be taken for granted.
Mais, bien sûr! Of course.
The urbain, goat-cheese-eating Jean Baudrillards among us have long been fed up with the utter sameness of what industrialization and globalization have brought us. Those tables made in China, it seems, are all the same. What would it take to cultivate more diversity and local talent in the global industries of design? Larry Rohter’s more recent article in The New York Times hints at the potential for energy prices to favor craftsmanship closer to home.
Until recently, standard practice in the furniture industry was to ship American timber from ports like Norfolk, Baltimore and Charleston to China, where oak and cherry would be milled into sofas, beds, tables, cabinets and chairs, which were then shipped back to the United States.
But with transportation costs rising, more wood is now going to traditional domestic furniture-making centers in North Carolina and Virginia, where the industry had all but been wiped out. While the opening of the American Ikea plant, in Danville, Va., a traditional furniture-producing center hit hard by the outsourcing of production to Asia, is perhaps most emblematic of such changes, other manufacturers are also shifting some production back to the United States.
Among them is Craftmaster Furniture, a company founded in North Carolina but now Chinese-owned. And at an industry fair in April, La-Z-Boy announced a new line that will begin production in North Carolina this month.
The questions Mr. Rohter are asking pertain to where production happens, not what is produced. But will all of this new furniture made in the U.S. convey any sense of local flavor? Or will they still be made according to the strict specifications of a culturally homogenized global economy?
Photo by Allen