Golden arches won’t stop conflict, but continued trade might
As countries become more inward looking and trading relationships weaken, the golden arches theory still rings true, writes Eliot Wilson.
December 1996: Boris Yeltsin was starting a second term as president of the Russian Federation, and Bill Clinton had just beaten Bob Dole to stay in the White House, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Thomas L. Friedman used his column in The New York Times to propose a light-hearted theory. Dubbing it the “Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention”, he put forward this maxim of international relations: “No two countries that both have a McDonald’s have ever fought a war against each other.”
It was 8 December and the Christmas season was getting underway, and Friedman admitted “I say all this tongue in cheek”. But his festive fancy hinted at a more fundamental observation: that once a country reached a certain level of economic development, it effectively had too much at stake to initiate a military conflict, and its integration into the global system would force it to find other ways to resolve international disputes.
There were some arguable cases for pedants to debate, but for a law that started as a witticism it was surprisingly durable. It held, more or less, until 2008, when Russia invaded Georgia, supposedly in support of separatists in South Ossetia, a breakaway fragment of 50,000 descendants of the mediaeval Alans recognised only by Russia. (The first McDonald’s in Moscow’s Pushkin Square opened in 1990, while the Golden Arches reached Tbilisi in 1999.) Vladimir Putin’s subsequent annexation of the Crimean peninsula dealt the theory another blow, as Ukraine had seen its first McDonald’s next to the Lukyanivka metro station in Kyiv in 1997.
Maybe Friedman’s idea was just a joke, and it does risk winding up as a quirky kind-of-true fact that now lies in history’s dustbin. But there is still something in the evolution of a prosperous democratic state which deters conflict.
First we need to remind ourselves just how recent a development democracy really is on a global scale. At the end of the Second World War, still very much within our living memory, there were only 12 democracies. Today, depending on the definition you prefer, there are 84 “free” countries in the world. But here is the context: there were only 99 sovereign states in 1945, while there are now 193 United Nations member states.
Psychologically, the idea of armed conflict between two democracies seems outlandish now.
Yet in Ukraine a brutal and prolonged conflict is nearing its third year. US intelligence estimates that 70,000 Ukrainian soldiers and 120,000 Russian military personnel have been killed since the conflict erupted in February 2022, along with more than 10,000 civilians. This is slaughter on an industrial scale, and it is not impossibly remote: Kherson, a city of 300,000 before the war which now has fewer than 50,000 shell-shocked inhabitants, is less than 500 miles from the hotels and tourist cafés of Istanbul.
Of course Vladimir Putin is an exception to all sorts of rules. Whether he is a psychopath or a brutal opportunist, leaders like him are not ten a penny. But we cannot just dismiss him and the bloody swathe he is leaving as bad luck. Perhaps we need to reframe Friedman’s law more as a lesson or a guiding principle: it is not that the golden arches theory has made armed conflict impossible, but it has shown us the factors which make it less and less likely.
We risk seeing those factors slip away, because we know instinctively what they are: economic ties, trading relationships, cultural links, interdependence. It is perhaps not exactly the existence of the golden arches themselves, but the fact the countries which have them are more likely to be economically similar, and thus be tied to one another in some trade relationship or another.
This kind of trading relationship is slowly slipping away as even the king of the golden arches – America – turns inwards and away from interconnected economic relationships.