Think Locally, Dress Globally
This is a routine flight to Beijing from the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator, and while the Gobi desert slips by below, up here American business is on the move. Two cashmere dealers based in the U.S. and an American suit maker based in Mongolia pick through their airline lunches. They're discussing the pricing of an order placed by Wal-Mart with a Mongolian cashmere company; and what kind of computer system for designing menswear might be bought in Beijing and brought back to help make suits in Ulan Bator, to ship to buyers in the U.S. The suit maker even has a prospective buyer coming down from Siberia to see if U.S.-designed Mongolian-made clothes might fit the Russian market.</br></br>Globalization has been with us one way or another for a long time. In brutal form, for example, when Genghis Khan's armies rode forth from Mongolia about 800 years ago to conquer the known world, and in a gentler manner later the same century when Marco Polo trekked the other direction from Venice to China. But today, between the advent of such technologies as the Internet and the end of such deadweight as Soviet rule, globalization is moving with a speed and agility that just a few years ago most modern world travelers scarcely imagined.</br></br>Between 1990-99, the real volume of world merchandise exports grew 72%. Especially significant is that merchandise exports of developing nations grew last year by 8.5%, more than twice the global average, according to the World Trade Organization. This suggests still larger trade leaps in the offing, as countries long self-exiled from world markets rearrange their institutions to become global players.</br></br>Though statistics tell the abstract story, they do not convey the energy with which enterprise is finding its way into places that for much of the past century had fallen off the commercial map. A recent trip to Mongolia from a small town in upstate New York offers at each step a chance to see the speed at which globalization is now seeking its level.</br></br>Start with a visit to almost any U.S. discount store to buy some traveling clothes. The labels amount to a roster of near-forgotten countries now waking up. Along with the by now standard nightgowns made in Costa Rica and blouses from Bangladesh, there are T-shirts from Swaziland, Burma and Cambodia. From the former Soviet state of Moldova -- how many American shoppers had heard of it 10 years ago? -- we see flower-print pajamas. From the former Soviet backlot of Turkmenistan, in Central Asia, come tank tops.