Will Multinational Corporations Evolve into Responsible Nations?

Countries are evolving, even if at different rates, in attempts to understand and to cooperate with their international neighbors. However, businesses within countries are less dimensional, focusing on profit and growth, predictable but self absorbed by their need to survive.

It has taken the world thousands of years to reach the limited point of understanding that we have today, and yet, even within single countries we have socioeconomic conflict. Therefore, we are not soon for a one world government. Nation states continue to be our best hope for growth of freedom and human equality while securing safety from aggression. In the midst of this evolution, we now have to contend with international conflict brought about by the growth of multinational corporations.

Multinational corporations are industrial states without geographies. Unlike countries that are structured to evolve, to regenerate, to rid themselves slowly through the generations of their historical chains of prejudice, MNCs have no such design. They are like great white sharks, modern dinosaurs roaming the earth in search of prey, learning daily to conquer new environments, yet evolving only in becoming more effective at besting their competitors.

So into the League of Nations, rising are the most immature yet most financially powerful of entrants. They are slowly divesting national allegiances while gaining others in their minimal dimensional quest. Whether net gainers or losers in the process, nation states must deal with MNC immaturities while continuing to provide the economic infrastructure that best supports their citizens through businesses, whether domestic or MNC, that being capitalism. It continues to be the one option that most aligns the motivations of man’s self interest with business and is the mode of business that will provide the world its greatest economic advancement.

In the thirty years I have been in business, I have seen the remnants of American social disarray that MNCs have left in their wake as they advance East. I am disappointed by the implications for America and for the rest of the world of multinationals growing unrestrained. Their motives no longer fully aligned with those of their host nations, nation states can no longer be the conscious, even if poor alternatives, of their MNCs.

I advocate America appealing to MNCs’ minimal dimensions by removing disincentives that inhibit collaboration. I also advocate removing the ease by which we allow MNCs to diminish America’s future. I also think that eventually nation states will have to collectively manage the era of the rise of MNCs if we are to transition from a predetermined obsolescence consumer competition for the limited resources we have left to a long lived asset conservation economy of economic cooperation between nations.