Recipes for disaster: burger diplomacy
4 min read
Politicians making a meal of it. This week: the Golden Arches Theory
The observation was simple, but one that might contain a profound truth: no two countries with a branch of McDonalds had ever gone to war with each other.
The writer Thomas L Friedman, who first noticed this phenomenon back in 1996, had been worried he’d missed an example. Might there have been golden arches in Buenos Aires when Argentina seized the Falkland Islands? No, the chain didn’t open in the country until four years after the conflict.
Friedman’s argument was always tongue-in-cheek, but there was a serious theory underneath it: once a country had reached the point where it could sustain a market in McNuggets, it would have a population wealthy and comfortable enough that they wouldn’t support a government that took them into wars of aggression. With the burger giant spreading to more countries, the implication was that one day we might see world peace delivered simply through the medium of Happy Meals.
Thinking about it now, it’s a slice of 90s nostalgia as vivid as an Oasis concert or a Tony Blair speech about education, a reminder of how optimistic that decade felt: the Berlin Wall was down, Nelson Mandela had gone from jail to government, football might even be coming home (to one part of the UK, anyway). A couple of years before Friedman set out his idea, Pulp Fiction had opened with a long riff about the differences between McDonald’s in France and the US. Thanks to the metric system, Americans learned, in Paris a quarter pounder was called a royale with cheese. Although “a Big Mac’s a Big Mac, but they call it le Big-Mac”.
Sadly, the Golden Arches Theory, as it became known, was doomed. In 1999, Nato bombed Belgrade. In response, locals attacked their branch of McDonald’s, possibly having failed to understand the mechanism by which its presence was supposed to keep them out of a war with the US.
Friedman argued that the short duration of that conflict made it an exception that proved the rule: Serbians didn’t want war, they wanted fries and cheeseburgers (and other things that came with the capitalist post-Soviet order). Unfortunately, more challenges were on the way. Israel’s retaliation against Hamas in 2023, and its subsequent attack on Lebanon, put a strain on the relationships between McDonald’s franchises in the Middle East.
A McDonald’s wasn’t necessarily a sign that a society was getting rich enough to be peaceful
But the final failure of the theory came in the very place where it had arguably first taken root. The 1990s had begun with the grand opening of a McDonald’s in Moscow. Tens of thousands queued to get it. It was a news story around the world, with the BBC interviewing a man who ate half a burger and took the other half home for his wife. This was the West winning. And McDonald’s was a Russian hit: by 2022, there were more than 800 branches in the country, employing 62,000 people.
The company’s presence survived a couple of breaches of the Golden Arches Theory: Georgia had a McDonald’s nearly a decade before the 2008 Russo-Georgian War, as did Ukraine when the Crimea was annexed. But the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine was the final straw. McDonald’s closed and then sold up its stake in Russia.
Even in the 90s, Friedman had acknowledged that getting a McDonald’s wasn’t necessarily a sign that a society was getting rich enough to be peaceful. After all, a big part of the chain’s appeal is that the food is cheap. But he’d still hoped that a world of quick, abundant food would be more appealing to people than war. It turned out that the forces that drive people to attack their neighbours were stronger.
