Consumption for free speech?

Johan Norberg writes on his blog:

About one hundred Swedish companies have been threatened on Islamist websites in the last few days. Jihadist websites call for Muslims to boycott companies like IKEA, H&M, Ericsson and Electrolux, and in several cases to attack them. This is evil times two. They attack people who have nothing to do with what they are fighting against, and they do it because they want to put pressure on the Swedish government to stop artists like Lars Vilks from mocking religion.

This has dangerous potential. When the Danish Mohammed cartoons were published Danish companies like Arla were hurt by boycotts. This probably didn´t have an effect on the Danish government, but it did on other countries´ governments. They could see that if they forcefully defended freedom of speech their companies would also be hurt. And since politicians often care more about industry interests than about democratic principles they started to appease opponents of free speech.

So what do we do to save our liberties from Jihadists and unprincipled politicians? It´s easy. The opponents of freedom and democracy are fewer than the supporters and their purchasing power is smaller. The only thing that makes them influential is that they act in unison. But we can do that too.

Why don´t we decide to try to buy goods from companies that find themselves in the middle of free speech conflicts like this? If we, thousands of bloggers and writers and our readers do that, the effect of every boycott will be diminished. Spread the word now, around the world, that we are buying Swedish if we need beer, food, furniture or phones this week. And then, if Canadian or Georgian companies are the next targets, we´ll buy Canadian and Georgian goods next.

I don’t buy it that the greatest effect of the boycott was on other countries considering whether to support us or not. The greatest effect was and is on politicians in Denmark and Sweden. The smaller the country, the greater political impact a boycott will have. It’s not the other way around. Also, it’s not as if these countries can just boycott whichever firms they like. It’s cheap and unproblematic to boycott a few select firms from small countries, but it is both hard and expensive to boycott multinationals.

Also, whether or not a boycott is worth the trouble depends on the results you get. To state this another way, if, say, Syria chooses to boycott IKEA, and she achieves her goals (or rather, the goals the government had set up), the boycott might from her point of view have been a good investment. If Sweden doesn’t budge on the other hand, and Germany openly states her support, Syria is forced, in order to remain consistent, to also boycott German firms. But now France follows in Germany’s footsteps. And Holland. What happens now? What happens is that Syria ends up with most of the costs of the boycott, without getting any results. The boycott is bad for IKEA. But Syria is far worse off than Sweden is, she suddenly misses a whole lot of goods she does not produce on her own. To state this point another way: It is stupid if foreign politicians assume that their support will be expensive. The more states supports Sweden, the less it will cost them. However, that’s not the whole story – by supporting Sweden other countries also avoid ending up in the same situation later on – it is very dangerous to consider inaction a free lunch.

The crucial first step is that some other government goes out openly to state her support to Sweden. Once the first step is taken, the following ones will be much easier. Johan is right in that what is very, very important here is that no country stand alone when facing this threat. This was what was particularly horrible last year – the fact that nobody seemed to be on “our” side, while a lot of people seemed to be on “the other” side. Whether or not Arla was losing money down there or not would not matter much if there had been a “united stance” in Europe – but such a thing never really materialized, and in the event one thinks it did, it happened far too late, after all the fun was over. In short, I think Norberg might be overestimating the importance of economics here, and underestimating other factors. If a lot of people would simply speak out, if there was a broad consensus in society that we do not of course give into stupid religious demands that do not belong in the 21st century, then a limited backlash in the export figures wouldn’t matter all that much, as the political costs of giving in to the demands would be far too high for the politicians to even consider this option.

That said, of course the idea of “consumption for free speech” isn’t bad at all. There isn’t a “broad consensus” anywhere, and it’s not coming around anytime soon. Trading with Swedish producers could at a time like this be considered a very concrete act of solidarity that would counteract the effects of a boycott – so do buy Swedish!

I must add a word of caution though – I still think we might all be better off, if some of the time, energy and money devoted to selecting Swedish products would instead be spent on convincing people that having religious freedom doesn’t mean that no one is allowed to criticize your religion. A lot of people seem to have great difficulties understanding that it simply doesn’t work like that, and before they get this, freedom of speech is in danger no matter how much butter Arla sells to the ME.

…

Incidentally, if you haven’t already seen the dog/prophet, here it/he is: