If you thought rock music was dead as a force of rebellion, Slobodan Milosevic just proved you wrong: It just so happens that nowadays it's the "ethnic cleansers" who are kicking out the jams. This became clear last week when the Yugoslav government announced, after the first successful Serbian rock rallies in downtown Belgrade, that it would continue to inflict punishing salvos of Europop on its own people until the NATO offensive ended.

From the temperate precincts of NPR to the told-ya-so carousel of cable news, last week was the week the word "failure" came on strong in the round-the-clock coverage of the Kosovo war: the failure of American intelligence, the failure of aerial warfare, the failure of interventionism. But here's another one for you: the failure of American cultural imperialism.

After all, weren't we supposed to have turned the planet into Disney World by now? It's long been a near-universal truth for left, right and middle scribes, pessimists and idealists alike: An inexorable tide of consumer goods, trends and information, pushed by American business and media, has for decades been just about this close to turning Swedes and Senegalese alike into Illinois mall rats, imposing a Pax Americana of MTV-watching, advertising-numbed global citizenship through infusions of Sprite.

It's funny, however, what the detonation of actual weaponry does to put idle speculation about Mickey Mouse's iron glove into perspective. Yugoslavia, after all, has had a sizable dose of the black oil of American culture, from movies to TV to fast food, yet that didn't stop Milosevic -- "obsessed" with American culture, in the words of a 1995 New York Times Magazine cover story -- from aggrandizing himself, like some genocidal Bill Graham, with a Western-style protest concert. Political scientist Benjamin Barber has darkly outlined a world conflict between "Jihad" (regional fanaticism) and "McWorld" (global capitalism and the "infotainment telesector"). But in Milosevic's Yugoslavia, Jihad and McWorld seem to coincide just fine. As Steven Erlanger noted in his fine New York Times reportage, a kid in a Chicago Bulls cap danced on the wing of a downed American jet, while Belgrade anti-NATO protesters enjoyed the pop stylings of Ceca, the "Serbian Cher" and wife of paramilitary leader Arkan.

What gives? Clearly there are still precincts of the world where Quarter Pounders and the blood of one's rival ethnic group are two great tastes that taste great together. Remember the Golden Arches theory of international relations? In 1996 the New York Times' Thomas Friedman advanced the following dictum of Big Mac pacifism: "No two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other ... when (a country) has a middle class big enough to support a McDonald's, it becomes a McDonald's country, and people in McDonald's countries don't like to fight wars." Turns out, however, that there were numerous Belgrade Golden Arches that had scarcely finished unloading the shamrock shakes (or the local equivalent) when an armada from McDonald'sland itself began delivering super-sized orders of munitions, at which point the Serbian citizenry smashed up their Mickey D's along with the American cultural center (sparing, however, the Levi's store).

Now Friedman himself says that his theory was "tongue in cheek," a gambit he used to argue for the peacemaking power of economic development. But it's also true that Friedman has had something of a fixation on the man in the red afro as free-market and -society symbol, putting on his paper hat to serve such plugs as "if there are no rights for Wang Dan there will be none for Ronald McDonald" (and, just months later, "when there is no rule of law for Wang Dan there will be none for Microsoft, Mickey Mouse or Ronald McDonald"); "Bosnia needs big tanks, big roads and Big Macs."

Next page | Refining the theory: No countries with McRib's have ever gone to war!