Vuvuzelas: The difference between culture and imperialism can be subtle

Katie Price, a UK "celebrity" mostly famous for her, um, "large tracts of land", has a new perfume out.  It is called Besotted.  And it has been withdrawn from UK shelves for "ethical" reasons.

The fragrance is made in India by workers paid about 40 US cents an hour.  Minimum wages in the UK vary from $5.30 to $8.60 per hour so this difference has caused outrage.

Minimum wages in India are complex.  Each state has published daily rates for thousands of categories of workers.  Pragati Glass, the Gujarati-based producer, claims that they are meeting the daily minimum wage requirements for their class of workers ($3.05).  These wildly pedantic labour laws are one of the many things impeding Indian economic development, but it does not yet appear that Pragati is disobeying the law.

That has failed to satisfy Price’ distributors and so hundreds of Indians have lost their jobs as production has moved to the UK and France.

Is that sort of wage-differential discrimination cultural imperialism?

Let me make my question even more subtle.  The BBC has received hundreds of complaints about the mellifluous sounds of massed vuvuzelas playing during World Cup matches.  FIFA president, Sepp Blatter, has declared his support, "I don’t see banning the music traditions of fans in their own country. Would you want to see a ban on the fan traditions in your country?"

Which is well and good, but numerous fans from as diverse a range of countries as Brazil, the UK and Spain are worried that their enjoyment of singing national supporters’ songs is being drowned out in the deluge.  And more are worried that the new tradition will follow the fans home.  Sainsbury’s, a national UK retailer, has sold 22,000 vuvuzelas and has ordered another 25,000.

Companies are scrambling to bring out digital noise cancellation devices to combat the vuvuzela.

All very amusing for sport-mad South Africans.  In the controversy over the vuvuzela lie the embers of a global worry over cultural and economic diffusion.

The ascendancy of American entertainment upsets the French elite as much as it does Saudi Arabian traditionalists when local teens wish to swap their thobe or abaya for blue-jeans.  European horror of genetically-modified foods translates into a ban in Africa and concomitantly lower food production.

Fear of the foreign is sometimes expressed as fear of the foreigner.

Economics has dominated this tussle and poorer nations have lumped it as Europeans and Americans use cultural excuses to limit imports from other countries.  Now, however, with the world’s economy becoming more distributed it may not be long before it is India which refuses to import British wares as not coming up to Indian standards.

San Francisco has just imposed onerous radiation emissions labelling on mobile phone manufacturers.  This in the face of evidence that shows no causal link to cancer incidence amongst mobile phone users.  In the past, such a rule in the US would have resulted in similar labelling on all phones around the world.  These days the US is very small in comparison to global mobile phone sales and so is unlikely to influence behaviour elsewhere.

European and American consumers will find it difficult to demand that their local environmental standards be enforced in India or China which are starting to have their own more dominant local markets.  Carbon taxes come at a cost which rapidly developing nations with large populations of the impoverished and unemployed are unwilling to bear.  Similarly, European and American companies which have long had global footprints are finding themselves being outcompeted by chaotic upstarts.

This rebalancing of global power is going to make issues affecting us all harder to coordinate. In the vuvuzela is heard the clarion call of a cultural wave that will soon eclipse standing cultures.

Expect the future to be more chaotic, and louder.