My Take | American democracy is a lot like Coke
- The corporate history of Coca-Cola is, in a sense, that of Pax Americana
“[Coca-Cola] is the opiate of the running dogs of revanchist capitalism.”
– Mao’s little red book
“Democracy is not Coca-Cola”, with the whole world having to drink from the US product, quipped Foreign Minister Wang Yi, explaining that all countries must follow a path of development that suits their own national conditions and the needs of their own people.
Wang is probably right. But since he is thinking of American democracy and the American empire, the story of the world’s most famous soft drink actually is intimately linked to both. In some sense, American democracy is or was Coca-Cola. At least Mao Zedong seemed to have thought so.
“Apparently some of our friends overseas have difficulty distinguishing between the United States and Coca-Cola. Perhaps we should not complain too much about this,” wrote a company executive in 1950 to a colleague, quoted in Mark Pendergrast’s 1993 For God, Country, and Coca-Cola: The Definitive History of the Great American Soft Drink and the Company That Makes It.
While Coca-Cola did not play the same nefarious and violent role that the United Fruit Company did in American foreign policy, the history of its international corporate success was part and parcel of the axis of the US military, government and business. This axis is the recurrent theme without which it is impossible to understand modern US history.